LocalizeDirect Raises USD 1.1m to Launch Game Dev CMS Gridly

游戏本地化公司LocalizeDirect筹集110万美元推出游戏开发内容管理系统Gridly

2020-08-06 20:30 slator

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One of the (few) beneficiaries to emerge so far in the Covid economy has been the video game industry, buoyed by increased demand from gamers in lockdown around the world. For example, London-listed game services provider Keywords Studios reported a 13% rise in revenues for the first half of 2020. A new case in point is Sweden-based LocalizeDirect, which announced on July 23, 2020 that it raised USD 1.1m. LocalizeDirect will use the funds primarily to launch Gridly, a “collaborative headless CMS for multilingual game projects,” as well as to expand the company’s revenue growth via increased service capabilities, sales, and marketing. (Headless refers to a back-end-only CMS, where content is provided as data over an API; as opposed to having content attached to, say, some particular web page output.) Fundraising during the Covid-19 outbreak was “a roller coaster emotionally,” CEO Christoffer Nilsson explained to Slator. “We had gone through due diligence and had a shared view of the agreement and valuation. Then Corona hit and introduced so much uncertainty.” However, LocalizeDirect went on to have its best month ever during the pandemic. “Being able to show strong results and growth helped put the new investors’ fears to rest, and we closed the funding round at the understanding we had initially before the pandemic,” Nilsson said. He added that they also plan to expand their offerings horizontally into LQA (localization quality assurance) and audio. Nilsson, who started one of Sweden’s first game development companies in the early 1990s, founded LocalizeDirect in 2009 with Mattias Wennerholm and Michael Souto: “Mattias worked with me as development director. Michael had spent 10 years as executive producer at Eidos, now Square Enix, when he joined LocalizeDirect.” According to Nilsson, LocalizeDirect has been growing around 40% each year. “We could have self-funded it at a slower pace, but we felt that Gridly time-to-market was vital,” he said. LocalizeDirect’s latest investment was funded by Entreprenörinvest, owned by The IKEA Family Foundation and a number of Swedish venture capital firms and private individuals, including Innovum Invest. Former investors also participated in the new round. Jan Andersson, a board member of both Entreprenörinvest and Innovum Invest, was the point person for the deal. As a new member of LocalizeDirect’s Board of Directors, Andersson will advise the company on scaling to the next level. “Jan had previously founded and exited a large software company in our region, so he had been on our radar for quite a while,” Nilsson said, noting that discussions with Andersson started about a year ago. Designed for “anyone who creates, edits, enriches, translates, proofreads, or publishes any content inside a game,” Nilsson said Gridly allows game developers and other contributors, including external vendors and contractors, to streamline the development pipeline. Gridly users can quickly search, filter, add, and update millions of data entries, trying out the changes in a sandbox environment before committing to them. Since the source text can be changed at any time, the system also tracks the status of each translation and any necessary updates. A full audit trail records all data changes, and allows users to revert to a prior version as needed. “Initially, we have a strong focus on the data management side, such as version control and user access rights, but we do plan to build integrations to popular TMS and other tools,” Nilsson said. “When reliance on hardware disappears, games and the worlds inside them will grow bigger and so will the production teams and the complexity involved to manage it all.”
目前,世界各地因疫情居家隔离的游戏玩家对电游需求增加,提振了电游产业,使得电游产业一跃成为疫情经济下为数不多的受益者之一。 例如,于伦敦上市的游戏服务提供商Keywords Studios报告称,该公司在2020年上半年的营收增长了13%。 还有一个好的例证,总部位于瑞典的游戏本地化公司LocalizeDirect于2020年7月23号宣布共筹资110万美元。 这笔资金主要用于推出Gridly,这是一款“多语言游戏项目协作无头内容管理系统”,同时通过提高服务能力、提升销售额以及扩大市场营销来扩宽公司收入的增长渠道。 (“无头”指的是仅后端操作的内容管理系统,其内容通过应用程序接口作为数据提供,而不是将内容附加到某些特定的输出网页。) 新冠病毒爆发期间的筹资是“一次惊险刺激的过山车”,首席执行官克里斯托弗·尼尔森向Slator公司解释道, “我们已经做好了一切准备,对协议和评估方案也达成了一致。 但后来疫情爆发,带来了太多的不确定性。“ 然而,LocalizeDirect公司在疫情期间却一如既往实现了有史以来的最高营收额。 尼尔森说:“公司能够显示出强劲的业绩和增长幅度,消除了新投资者的顾虑,我们按照疫情爆发前达成的共识结束了此次融资。” 他补充说他们还计划将产品横向扩展到LQA(本地化质量保证)和音频领域。 尼尔森在20世纪90年代初创办了瑞典首批游戏开发公司之一,2009年他与马蒂亚斯·威勒福斯、迈克尔·索托共同创建了LocalizeDirect公司。尼尔森说:“马蒂亚斯担任开发总监,同我并肩作战。 迈克尔加入我们时,已经在英国著名游戏公司Eidos(现为Square Enix)担任了10年的执行制片人。” 据尼尔森称,LocalizeDirect公司每年营收增长约40%。 他说:“我们本可以以较慢的速度自筹资金,但我们认为对Gridly来说,严格的上市时间至关重要。” LocalizeDirect的最新投资是由宜家家居基金会旗下的EntreprenörInvest以及包括Innovum Invest在内的多家瑞典风险投资公司和私人投资提供。 往年的投资者也参与了新一轮的投资。 EntreprenörInvest和Innovum Invest公司的董事会成员简•安德森是这笔交易的负责人。 作为LocalizeDirect董事会的新成员,安德森将为该公司向更高级别的扩展计划建言献策。 尼尔森说:“简之前就在我们地区创建了一家大型软件公司,只不过后来退出了市场,所以我们已经关注他很长一段时间了。”他指出,大约一年前开始和简·安德森进行交流讨论。 尼尔森说,Gridly是为“每一个创造、编辑、丰富、翻译、校对或发布游戏内容的人”设计的,它能够让游戏开发者和其他包括外部供应商和承包商在内的贡献者自由地简化开发流程。 Gridly用户可以快速搜索,过滤,添加和更新数以百万计的数据条目,提交先在沙箱环境中尝试更改。 鉴于源文本可以随时更改,系统还追踪每条翻译的状态以及任何必要的更新。 完整的审计追踪会记录所有数据更改,并允许用户根据需要恢复到以前的版本。 尼尔森说:“我们最初将重点放在数据管理方面,如版本控制和用户访问权限,但我们确实计划与现如今流行的传输测试器和其他工具进行集成。” “一旦对硬件的依赖消失,游戏和游戏中的世界将变得更大,制作团队也会变得更强大,管理这些游戏所涉及的复杂性也会变得更大。”

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