Tacter - The Vertical Gaming Community. (Part 3 - 2024)
We see the Vertical Gaming Community Concept as the $1 billion opportunity within the gaming industry. Here's our progress from the first year and our future plans.
Tacter (October 2020), is nearly four years old, yet it seems like just yesterday when we quit our jobs to embark on this crazy adventure.
Starting as a duo, we developed a mobile application to help gamers win more at their favorite games. Fast-forward: we secured a 275K€ Pre-Seed Round (KFund, 4Founders, Lanai), the team expanded to six people, downloads surpassed the 1 million mark, and the revenues reached +$150K Annual Run Rate.
It was time to scale up! To keep growing, we should expand into more games. Our solution was a custom-made companion app for each game; every app was a job from scratch. We expanded from Teamfight Tactics to League of Legends, and we secured a 3.42M€ Seed Round (Moonfire, PlayVentures, KFund, Possible Ventures) to continue our expansion into playable Web3 games like Axie Infinity or Gods Unchained, simultaneously secured contracts for future expansions to upcoming ones like Illuvium or Metasoccer.
We had work to do. We needed to invest many resources into each app, only to encounter a sudden downturn in the web3 gaming market. Games like Axie Infinity, where we used to grow double digits, lost 90% of their player base in less than three months. The upcoming games we were preparing shut down or announced delays, and our expansion to more traditional games was failing due to a lack of focus. Uh oh, big problems ahead!
We were miserably failing to scale our idea because of poor strategic decisions, sudden market changes, and a challenging-to-scale product concept.
We needed to gain perspective. Historically, the only company in the gaming companion niche with outstanding results is Overwolf (2010). Their solution was to pivot from building companions to building tools (SDK, mods, monetization tools, etc.) for gaming companion creators. Simple but brilliant. As a reference, they paid 201 Million dollars to In-Game Creators in 2023.
Based on that idea, we examined our product to identify where the value relied: our users were not paying for the custom-made utility tools but for the high-quality, specific content about the game.
🤔 What if we scale content instead of utility?
That simple question sparked the evolution of our gaming companion idea into the vertical gaming community concept we've dedicated the past year to developing. tacter.com was born.
If you want more details about the Vertical Gaming Community Concept, I have already published two pieces on the topic. This can be considered the third part of the series:
Part 1 - Tacter - The Vertical Gaming Community. (March 2023)
Part 2 - Tacter - The Vertical Gaming Community. (June 2023)
Tacter - The Vertical Gaming Community. Part 3
Tacter is a gaming content platform that serves the top three gaming market stakeholders: Players, Content Creators, and Game Studios.
Tacter empowers players to make the most out of their favorite games, content creators to earn a side income through their passion, and game studios to bridge the gap with their most passionate players.
🗓️ Tacter.com is almost one year old (May 2023), and in the last ten months, we have gone from zero to….
📈 +1M Total Visits per month.
👥 +200K Unique Users per month.
👤 +80 Gaming Content Creators per month.
💸 +9.000€ Paid-Out to Gaming Content Creators to date.
💫 That’s a 10-month run!
🔮 Let me show you what the next FIVE YEARS WILL LOOK LIKE.
📝 Tacter for Gaming Content Creators.
Tacter empowers gaming content creators to make money through their passion.
For Gaming Content Creators, Tacter is a place to create and share gaming content, nurture your community, and grow your brand within the game ecosystem. It is a mix of a tool and a social network — similar to LinkedIn’s market positioning.
Create and Share Content.
The content includes In-Depth Guides (example1 or example2) and (soon™️) quick-to-digest posts and conversations similar to Twitter or Reddit.
Creating and sharing content on Tacter is simpler than anywhere else, thanks to our integration with games powered by our Custom Modules. This enables creators to share things they won’t or can’t share elsewhere.
Creators are using Tacter in three different ways:
They enrich and complement their video content strategy, usually on YouTube and Twitch, to grow faster on all platforms.
They build an exclusive content strategy to improve their monetization on all platforms.
They publish on Tacter to expand their audience, tapping into SEO and the growing Tacter community.
Monetize your Audience.
Creators use Tacter to create an additional source of revenue in already two (and soon three) different ways:
Advertising Revenue.
In Tacter, you get paid for contributing. We run ads and share a percentage of the revenue directly with the creators in a performance-based way: the more engagement you generate, the more advertising revenue you make — similar to the YouTube Partner Program or Twitter Revenue Sharing.
Revenue-sharing with users is a fundamental principle we advocate for in the platforms of the future, and we've incorporated it into Tacter from the ground up.
As a creator, you can run advertising without managing it; Tacter does it for you, allowing you to focus on your passion: creating the best content.
💰 This represents the initial layer of our business model: advertising.
Revenue by Paid Subscribers.
In Tacter, creators can share exclusive content with their paid members, regardless of the platform they’re paying from. This empowers creators to implement a multi-platform freemium content strategy, with the ultimate goal of boosting paid subscribers across all their channels.
Let me illustrate the concept:
Fans often pay their favorite creator a Twitch Subscription, a YouTube Membership, a Patreon Subscription, or (soon™️) a Tacter Subscription.
Most likely, the fan will pay only one subscription to support the creator.
Due to most platforms’ business models, creators are forced to move their subscribers from one platform to the other, increasing friction for their fans.
To avoid doing this, Tacter seamlessly integrates with the platforms where creators’ subscribers already are (and are paying) so that those subscribers can access exclusive content posted on Tacter without having to pay twice.
👉🏼 Fans who already pay the creator a subscription ON OTHER PLATFORMS can access the creator’s Tacter exclusive content.
👉🏼 By offering Tacter-exclusive content as a perk to their paid subscribers on ANY other platform they use, creators can increase their overall number of paid subscribers and revenue.
Unlike other platforms in the gaming sector, such as Patreon, YouTube, OnlyFans, or Twitch, Tacter incentivizes fan patronage regardless of the platform, totally aligning incentives with the creators.
Tacter does not need to force creators to bring all their fans’ subscriptions because our model is not fee-based but fixed-subscription-based. We offer creators a simple, predictable, and flat monthly subscription to use these (and many more) capabilities—similar to the Behiiv model approach in the newsletters market.
💰 Tacter is a tool for creators to continue growing on all platforms, and they pay us for this service. This is the second layer of our business model: Creator Subscriptions.
Creator Shops (soon™️)
For established creators, the ability to directly sell products to their audience presents a potent revenue stream, spanning from digital offerings like courses, coaching, or emotes to physical merchandise.
You can fulfill this need using generalist services like Shopify, Gumroad, or your custom website. Nonetheless, this entails setting everything up yourself and redirecting your audience from their habitual platforms. Several gaming-related companies are already exploring this use case:
Discord has just announced Discord Shops for servers.
Patreon is announcing Patreon Shop for Creators.
Metafy is doing it the other way around, being initially a marketplace for coaching and now expanding into becoming a full-attention platform.
At Tacter, this opportunity is on our radar for imminent action. It resonates with our vision of empowering gaming creators to monetize better. Integrating a shop directly tied to your existing content and community is a perfect fit.
💰 It not only unlocks a new revenue stream for creators but also serves as the third layer of our business model.
Nurture your Community.
Creators' power relies on their community. However, there is still no simple way to manage it. A Discord server is the usual tool for gaming creators to manage their community. Sadly, as often as having a Discord server is to have an abandoned Discord server.
For creators, setting up a proper Discord server integrated with your other platforms is not easy, and maintaining engagement over time is almost impossible. You even need people to help you!
For fans, Discord is a mess. As soon as you join more than five different servers, you cannot properly attend to any of them. There is too much noise.
Tacter is building Communities (soon™️) for this: a simpler approach than Discord for creators to build, grow, and nurture their community automatically integrated with their other platforms and a built-in monetization engine as explained above.
💰 Communities will be free for everyone to use. However, advanced capabilities will be included in some of the Tacter Creator Plans, increasing the value of the Creator Subscriptions and finishing the core offering of Tacter for Creators.
🌐 At this stage:
Tacter does everything Patreon does for gaming, just better: it is easier to create gaming content, there is no take-rate fee on fan subscriptions, it is integrated with YouTube and Twitch, and it has a built-in monetization system, communities, and shops.
Tacter also replaces Discord for some use cases, such as community management.
🎮 Tacter for Players.
Tacter empowers players to make the most out of their favorite games through content, communities, and tooling.
For Gaming Consumers, the subset of the total population of players who consume content of their favorite games in addition to playing them (For Reference: +70% in Alpha Generation), Tacter is a place to hang out daily to talk about your favorite games — similar to your daily usage of Discord or Reddit.
Several Tacter for Creators features, such as high-quality content, communities, and direct engagement with favorite creators and peers, also cater to players. Moreover, vertically Tacter integrates with games, simplifying onboarding for new players, enhancing progression for engaged players, and elevating status for the most devoted players.
Tacter Player Identity.
The games you play and the ranking you have reached are two of the more important status symbols in gaming.
As a player, you want to mirror those above you to keep improving and laugh at your friend when he’s stuck at a certain level or in a losing strike. Status Communication is a foundational aspect of community dynamics, and Tacter will (soon™️) integrate it natively with Player Identity.
As a player on Tacter, you (soon™️) have a built-in tracker in your profile. This will allow you to showcase your rank and the games you play, attaching that status to your community actions and content.
This is a known need in the market, barely covered by the existing services. Each game has hundreds of community-led / passion projects to allow players to track their performance, and some of them, like Porofessor for League of Legends, have been sold for $54M.
There have been attempts to bundle this use case into a single product across various games, exemplified by the PS Network Profile or the somewhat overlooked Steam profile. However, in our view, the most effective product for this purpose currently is The Tracker Network: a group of websites integrated with Xbox, Steam, PSNetwork, and hundreds of other games to offer their 10M users the ability to track their performance.
What all of those products lack, but Tacter has by default, is the attached community of players, games, creators, and content. The Player Identity is the utility layer that makes the community and the content shine! It is the old playbook of come for the tool, stay for the network.
Tacter Game Tooling.
Along with player identity comes the desire of players to improve and progress in their favorite game. In gaming, two utility products usually cover this: guides and analytics.
Tacter covers both needs with the existing platform described so far:
On the one hand, Tacter attracts game experts by providing utility and incentives aligned with enhanced monetization, community management, and content sharing. They create the UGC content to help players onboard, improve, and excel at any game. Check some real examples: example1 or example2.
On the other hand, by leveraging the Player Identity capability, Tacter gains access to extensive player data, including the match history and performance statistics of millions of players. This will (soon™️) allow us to offer player statistical guidance (usually known as META Analytics) that perfectly complements users’ creation of top-tier content.
💰 As mentioned, Tacter is free for everyone, and we monetize free players via advertising. This will allow Tacter to get the scale needed for the Vertical Community Concept to develop.
Once big enough, we will complement our business model for players with direct purchases and consumer subscriptions.
Tacter will allow players to purchase and earn status cosmetics and utility power-ups in their favorite communities. Similar to other big communities in our space like:
This not only applies to the Tacter platform but also extends to partnerships with creators (e.g., your favorite creator emotes) and game studios, as demonstrated by Hoyoverse (Genshin Impact, Honkai, etc.) with their community product, Hoyolabs selling comments overlays and other badges, or, Discord partnering with games, like Valorant, to sell overlays and badges.
🛠️ Tacter for Game Studios: The “Community as a Platform”
Tacter empowers game studios to find new players and bridge the gap with their most beloved fans.
A platform like the one described above will attract massive attention from millions of high-quality players and gaming content creators, making it the perfect place for Game Studios to be present, distribute their games, and bridge the gap with their most beloved players.
Traditionally, the winners of the gaming market regarding distribution have been the platform publishers or “stores as a platform“ companies, led by Steam (the +5 billion dollars per year behemoth), and competition from the EPIG Game Store (EGS).
There's also a newer approach: “games as a platform,“ popularized by Roblox and embraced by EPIC with Fortnite and Fortnite Creative.
However, we believe there's a third approach better suited to the challenge: “community as a platform,” perfectly embodied by the Vertical Gaming Community concept.
Game studios face unprecedented competition in today's gaming landscape, contending with “forever games” boasting decades of community development, such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, Counter-Strike, Clash of Clans, etc. (For reference, 61% of total hours played during 2023 were on +6 years old games, according to this NewZoo’s report)
It is not a fair competition anymore. These games offer vast player bases, content, and supportive communities, setting a high standard for new releases: a great game is not enough anymore. Players now expect robust community tools and experiences alongside compelling gameplay. This is evidenced by successful titles like Clash Royale or Brawl Stars by Supercell and Teamfight Tactics or Valorant by RIOT, which leverages existing franchises to attract dedicated player bases across multiple genres.
Studios must meet elevated player expectations and navigate a highly competitive environment dominated by established franchises. In this scenario, you have two real options to compete:
Simultaneously, build your game and community tooling with your resources, like Hoyoverse (Genshin Impact, Honkai, etc.) is doing with Hoyolab—setting the bar for community-led initiatives and creating a place for fans to hang out.
Partner with Tacter to co-create the essential tools your players and creators demand, raising the standard for community-driven initiatives that will surpass your player’s expectations.
For Game Studios, Tacter is a managed or unmanaged point of contact with your most beloved players and creators, completely integrated with your game and with extended capabilities for the game studio.
As a Game Studio, your game will be present on Tacter, and you can decide if you manage it yourself or delegate the management to the Tacter community (similar to a Reddit or a Discord Server)
When a game studio claims their listing, they gain access to a range of options: from basic community management tools for engaging with devoted fans, to advanced features enabling direct integration with Tacter (player identity, analytics tools, integrated shop, boosting incentives for creators, advertise to new players, etc) Similar to what Hoyoverse is building with their own resources: Hoyolab, but as a service for other game studios.
💰 Claiming and managing your game listing as a game studio is a premium capability, creating a new layer of our business model: Game Studio Subscriptions.
We’re building the “Community as a Platform” opposite to the “Store as a Platform” that gaming storefronts like Steam, EPIC Store, or Microsoft Store traditionally exploit.
In today’s competitive environment, you will not be able to be a simple store anymore, but a shopping mall: a place that mixes social-like places with shops like Tacter wants to do.
Steam, the best positioned to take on this opportunity, does not seem to care, as you can judge by visiting a Steam community, which is like traveling back to the ADSL times.
Discord seems to understand the opportunity and is taking action with one of its latest moves (Discord Quests to help Game Developers). Still, their focus is split between gaming and non-gaming initiatives.
EPIC is a different beast; it tried to compete with Steam with another “store as a platform,” the EPIC Game Store. However, it seems to be pivoting resources more into “game as a platform” using Fortnite Creative, similar to what Roblox is doing.
This is the perfect mix for an underdog like Tacter to take the lead.
🌐 Summary
In summary, we are building the platform described above in the next five years to empower the top three gaming market stakeholders: Players, Content Creators, and Game Studios.
Empower players to make the most out of their favorite games.
Empower content creators to earn a side income through their passion.
Empower game studios to bridge the gap with their most passionate players.
We are set to disrupt the gaming platforms every gamer utilizes today, integrating with some, replacing others, and boldly competing with the industry giants.
Thank you for reading until the end. If you want to join this journey, do not hesitate to email us at marcos@tacter.com.
Marcos.