Pollen VC Expands Credit Access For Game Developers

Mobile game developers will have more access to credit under a new plan by FinTech Pollen VC, a press release says.

Game developers will now be able to borrow up to four times what their games make every month in revenue.

The access to capital comes from a revolving credit facility, which lets developers boost their marketing without relying on loans based on actual revenue. And they won’t have to raise additional investment.

Pollen VC’s services work to help game developers with the process of scaling. The finance, along with venture capital, acts as a non-dilutive complimentary funding source.

Businesses using the service have to have at least one app live on Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store, and make between $20,000 and $5 million in revenue every month. And they have to have at least three months’ worth of transaction history in a bank account.

Pollen VC’s model, according to the release, is based on a developer’s accounts along with an estimate of the value remaining in their player base and overall lifetime value. And the company has recently seen a new focus as its revenue flows model has seen success around live performances.

According to Pollen VC CEO Martin Macmillan, the developer revenue isn’t just something that happens at the point of download. Instead, revenue-based lending models tend to work better for the types of businesses which are more static and where one can predict what will happen, including enterprise and SaaS.

The influencer economy hasn’t always been easy to parse, and PYMNTS quotes Xsolla head of game developer payment services Konstantin Andryushchenko, who said the company has now begun looking at influencer payment friction through the new Influencer Payouts tool. He said some of the more common problems involve scaling thousands of content creators and also dealing with legal issues without hiring new staff.

This also comes as the industry has been seeing a more complex tech demand to help work more programmatically with game design as well as the economy, he said.