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Gismart has signed a multigame crossplatform partnership with Snap to make games for Snapchat. And Gismart is kicking it off with the launch of Crazy Run, a new game on Snap’s social platform.
The game from the London-based Gismart, a mobile publisher and developer with 800 million downloads, has debuted globally across Snapchat’s platforms on both iOS and Android.
The game is the second one that Gismart has released on Snapchat. The parent firm Snap said last year that more than 100 million people had played games on its platform between April 2019 and June 2020.
Gismart and Snap have a partnership in which Gismart will release games on Snapchat and integrate Bitmoji into them, starting with Perfect Expert 3D. In Crazy Run, players can play as their Bitmoji avatars in a real-time competitive multiplayer game.
The game had a soft launch in February, and Gismart doubled the retention rate by adding the friend-matching feature. With that, players can match with their friends before matching with other Snapchatters. The game has already reached seven million players.
As an early adopter of Bitmoji for Games, Gismart is introducing Bitmoji avatars in the hypercasual title Perfect Expert 3D. With Bitmoji for Games, game developers can personalize the player experience by bringing Bitmoji avatars to mobile, PC and console games. During testing, the integration boosted Day 1 retention by 20%, and ad impressions per daily active user by 60%.
Gismart’s Perfect Expert 3D is a home building simulation game that arms players with the ultimate set of tools to find solutions to common home maintenance problems and handle chores. The game has already powered 314 million game sessions across other platforms and it generates three million daily game sessions on average.
Gismart was one of Snap’s earliest partners, as it launched its first game Color Galaxy on Snapchat in Summer 2019. Since its global release in January 2020, the game attracted 41 million unique players, who spent more than 15,500 million hours in the game. The total number of game sessions is more than 132 million.
Snap’s Pedro Rodrigues said in an interview that Snapchat has 265 million daily users, and a sizable percentage of them are playing games. He said those games are monetized through advertising. Rodrigues said the games generate a lot of plays because players find they can enjoy games with random people as well as friends.
“The challenge is making a game for a social platform, with playing with friends in mind from the get-go,” Rodrigues said.
Lana Meisak, the vice president of business development and marketing at Gismart, said in an interview that the company has joined Snap’s early partner circle in integrating its technology. She the company is discussing more opportunities for using Bitmoji for Games with third-party brands.
“We were just interested to explore the new platform,” Meisak said. “When we approached Snap, we presented our project Color Galaxy. We launched it in 2018 and it was downloaded 45 million times. So we were very pleased. Now we are committed to more projects with Snap Games.”
Gismart has 380 people in London, Kyiv, Beijing, and Minsk. Meisak about 20 people are working on Snap-related games at Gismart. That number is about double what the original team size was. Snap has more than 25 games on the platform.
“We prefer building multiple games with a developer like Gismart,” Rodrigues said.
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