Playhaven Acquires Staq.io To Beef Up Gaming Analytics

Playhaven, a startup that helps mobile game developers monetize their player bases, acquired a small three-person startup called Staq.io to beef up their analytics offerings.

The company, which had came out of the TechStars incubator program, had built an analytics product that helps game developers understand how to retain and monetize engaged players.

“We quickly saw we had a shared vision of for the long-term,” said Playhaven CEO Andy Yang. “We help developers maximize their players’ lifetime value from two very different angles. They come from the real-time analytics side by giving insight and we’re coming from the other angle, with a great toolset that allows our developers to take action.”

All three employees of the company are joining Playhaven, which found its footing after a couple different pivots. It’s now a platform that helps game developers swap in and out promotions that help them hold on to all different types of players. They let game developers optimize promotions to players, whether they are the “whales” that are heavy spenders to players that don’t spend anything and monetize better through advertising.

It took many tries for this company to find product-market fit with earlier incarnations of the company focusing on building player communities for games.

But now that they have found the right product-market fit, the company’s network has grown 400 percent year-over-year and now tracks 10 billion in-game events and touches about 135 million unique users per month through partners like Benchmark Capital-backed Natural Motion, Namco Bandai and Glu Mobile.

After raising $8 million more from GGV Capital last fall, the company has been staffing up by poaching COO Charles Yim from Google Admob and a head of European operations from Angry Birds-maker Rovio.

There are plenty of other service providers in the mobile apps and mobile gaming industry that have started from the analytics end, so it makes sense that Playhaven would fill this gap more thoroughly. Flurry parlayed a big reach in mobile analytics into a rich media and video advertising network while other companies like Apsalar have focused on doing behavioral targeting using a deep bench of analytics expertise.