Wargraphs, a one-man-band gaming startup with no outside funding, has sold for up to $54 million. The company, which is behind a popular companion app for League of Legends called Porofessor, helps players track and improve their playing stats.
The acquisition by MOBA Networks, a Swedish company that buys, grows, and runs online gaming communities, is worth up to €50 million ($54 million), half up front and half based on meeting certain earnings and growth targets.
Wargraphs currently builds analytics for Legends of Runeterra and Teamfight Tactics, but its League of Legends business has been by far its most successful. The Porofessor app has had 10 million downloads on Overwolf, where it was built, and more than 1. 25 million daily active users when combined with traffic from its own website.
The company, which has been around for 10 years, has consistently been profitable, generating €12. 3 million in revenue in its last fiscal year. This acquisition underscores an interesting trend in the current startup landscape.
After a particularly bullish decade, during which startups raised vast sums of money at dizzying valuations, often (let’s be honest, *often*) with little in the way of revenue or sound business models, sometimes without even legitimate products to their name, valuations are now lower and funding is more difficult to come by, especially for consumer-focused products.
However, Wargraphs and Jean-Nicholas are examples of how a completely different approach can be just as, if not more, lucrative in the consumer market. The deal also speaks to an interesting evolution in consumer technology.
Gaming is huge business these days. Microsoft’s contested Activision acquisition for $68. 7 billion would be not only the biggest in gaming, but the biggest deal in the technology sector overall. However, companies like MOBA, Overwolf (valued at $515 million in 2021, according to PitchBook data), and Wargraphs are examples of how the industry is evolving.
Games are now at the center of larger ecosystems of products and services, which can themselves become significant areas of value, even if they’re not the blockbusters at the center of those ecosystems.
