GYLD raises $1m to fund proprietary games research system that marked Clair

What the report says

Games publishing and investment agency GYLD has raised $1 million in funding to support its proprietary games research system Critical Compass.The tool, which the firm has been developing since 2020, delivers a deep analysis of a game's features and potential audience and has been used at "some of the largest publishers and platform holders in games," co-founder Lex Suurland tells GamesIndustry.biz.Led by Kameha Ventures, the round also drew participation from angel investors at mod.io, indie.bi, and ICO Partners.The firm developed the tool partially as a correction to existing reporting, which targets publishers and investors rather than developers, and relies on genre classifications that don't accurately reflect what games offer."In our research we reverse-engineered and replicated the big industry-wide reports and 'trends,' finding that many rest on faulty sampling and data collection – that's how you end up with claims like "RTS is dead" or that whole genres are oversaturated," says Suurland.

"Correct those faults, and the explanations for hits and failures stop being hindsight and become predictable."The primary cause for the tool's development, he says, was GYLD's "business model forced it.""The system kept improving because real money kept depending on it, and somewhere along the way we realised we'd built something the industry lacked""As a no-win-no-fee agency, we absorbed the cost when we backed the wrong project. We needed to know which projects to commit to with a rigour the research firms didn't offer," he says. "The system kept improving because real money kept depending on it, and somewhere along the way we realised we'd built something the industry lacked."Critical Compass has subsequently been used by a range of companies "making games on budgets from $300,000 to over $60 million" says Surrland.

The company claims that the tool has "a 100% record on projects it identified as commercially unviable," stating that every project that proceeded without following its recommendations either failed to secure publishing or launched to poor commercial reception.The tool is built on "games-industry AI agents" which "investigate market, storefront, community, and competitive evidence within frameworks built by GYLD's data scientists;" human analysts analyse the results and "remain accountable for every recommendation," the firm said.An early version enabled GYLD to identify Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as a potential hit, based on viewing a prototype of the game at GDC 2022.

Key details

"An unproven title from a first-time studio, exactly the kind of bet that's hardest to make on instinct," says co-founder Lex Suurland."We ran it through what was then a prototype version of Critical Compass ourselves, and the read was clear: every unique selling point (USP) in the game mapped directly onto core player needs and expectations, and innovated on each one of them. That evidence was a major factor in our decision to work with the team."From there, our role was making sure they secured the right publisher partner on the best possible terms and the rest played out in public.

It became one of the biggest games of last year. The point of the story isn't that we predicted a phenomenon. It's that evidence lets a small, unproven team be judged on their actual market position rather than their size."Suurland highlights that a five-person studio can afford Critical Compass, but GYLD are not expecting smaller studios to be the main users as "the mix is the point.""The biggest companies in games adopted this before it even had a website, and they'll stay heavy users," he explains. "What's new is who else can now afford it.

Our Pre-Launch Viability Report starts from $5,000, delivered in days. The mission is to democratise these systems and keep pushing the price down over time; current fees reflect the fact that real professional analysts work on every project – a five-person indie team gets the same quality of work and the same dedication to detail and accuracy as a 300-person studio. Custom research models and agent builds are scoped to the question."So no, small studios aren't the 'main' user. The honest framing is that the giants were already inside, and those larger clients are what let us keep building the smaller, more affordable tools indies genuinely need.""A five-person indie team gets the same quality of work and the same dedication to detail and accuracy as a 300-person studio"However, there is a limit to how many studios the firm can support with Critical Compass."We're not going to pretend otherwise, every report has human analysts on it, which is exactly what makes it worth buying.

More from the announcement

While we already have some existing clients on retainer, from launch we can take on ten additional projects a month.