CloudFeather Games lands $1.25M in seed funds for game dev tools

CloudFeather Games is announcing its $1.25M seed funding round, led by Lumikai. Venture Highway is also a participating investor. Angel investors like OYO’s Maninder Gulati and Nazara Technologies’ Manish Agrawal are also participating.

Romi Chandra and Yash Chandra incorporated CloudFeather Games as a company back in October 2020. Before 2020 Romi led an engineering team on a poker focused startup which built India’s first poker network. Those years of experience led him to where he is now; building a toolkit based around monetization. 

“Romi and Yash have pioneered massive scale system architectures for RMG platforms serving tens of millions of users,” said Lumikai’s Justin Shriram Keeling, in a statement to GamesBeat. “Leveraging their unique technical expertise in this space, they’re building a suite of competitive tools for any game developer to supercharge community retention and monetisation, while also providing innovative and fun new experiences for gamers.”

But instead of reaching towards ad revenue or in-app purchases CloudFeather Games is targeting the competitive spirit of individual gamers.

So what does it do?

The SDK’s unique selling point is that it’s built around players offering bounties to other players. A player can set a bounty on a target and offer actual money as a reward for other players to try and beat it. If someone signs up for the bounty and beats the set score, they get paid.

“Casual games do not have meaningful monetization avenues outside of Ads and IAPs. Given this, there is room for disruption by providing a novel monetization avenue which supercharges game engagement, without developers needing to re-design their existing game economies,” said CloudFeather Games boss Romi Chandra. “Our first suite of features includes an innovative Bounty Hunting SDK which “democratizes fame” for game communities, allowing anyone to create custom bounties around their in-game achievements for the community to beat. We’re excited to work with gaming leaders Lumikai and a curated group of strategic partner investors to bring Cloudfeather solutions to developers around the globe.”

The Web3 developer’s SDK is specifically aimed towards game developers, and has been in full development since January 2022.  CloudFeather Games is planning to use the seed money to make key hires across business development, product and tech departments. It’s also scaling up developer outreach programs for both domestic and global game studios.

Bounties aren’t a new concept, but it’s mostly honor system

There’s a lot of bounties in communities like speedrunners. Honestly, they tend to crop up anywhere that can develop competitive communities, but speedrunning is rife with bounties. A fair number of them center on glitch hunting, but there’s quite a number based on high scores, or beating world record times.

On websites like Speedrun Bounties it’s all done through payment systems like Google Pay. Proof comes through other reputable websites like Speedrun.com which validate records, but sometimes fakes slip through.

I mean, it works. But what if it was that much smoother? What if funding, validating and paying out bounties could all happen within the platform? What if a developer could integrate it into a game quickly and seamlessly?

That’s the question CloudFeather Games is trying to answer. In India it looks like the company found a pretty good answer; over 50% of the real money gaming industry runs CloudFeather tech.