By Tim Rogers
Browser-based gaming company Arkadium announced today that it is celebrating its 23rd anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, it is launching eight new games on its platform, bringing the total number of new games for 2024 to 17 games. Arkadium reports that it’s seen record high engagement numbers this year, passing even the previous numbers set during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The eight games are:
Arkadium also this year opened publishing on its platform to third-party developers, offering a 75% revenue share (with the devs keeping the majority) while offering support services such as marketing, research and monetization. According to the company, it has seen great returns on its developers program and also launched the $1 million Arkadium Publishing Fund 1 to provide further monetary support for developers.
GamesBeat spoke with Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO and co-founder of Arkadium, about hitting the company’s milestone. What asked what had changed in the years of the company’s operation, Rosenblatt told us, “In the early years we were doing a lot of work-for-hire development work for companies like Warner Bros, Microsoft, EA, and Mattel. We’re proud that we built some very successful games for others, but we soon realized that we wanted to make games for ourselves as that’s where we saw real growth opportunities. We’ve worked hard, stayed true to our values and managed to go directly to the consumer and built the Arkadium brand into a leader in browser-based games.”
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Rosenblatt also added that he and his wife, Jessica Rovello, founded the company together and led it together for most of Arkadium’s existence. Rovello left the CEO role in 2023 to pursue opportunities outside the company following a turbulent period in its history — which included the COVID-19 pandemic, sanctions against their studio in Crimea and the relocation of its Russia-based employees following that country’s invasion of Ukraine. Rosenblatt, who was previously Arkadium’s president, took over as CEO at that time.
When asked what he’s most proud of about his company, Rosenblatt said, “In general, less than 1% of companies survive more than 20 years and less than 1% of companies generate more than $20m in revenue. We’ve done both and that’s something we’re proud of. We’ve grown through 2 recessions and major swings in both the macro-economy and the shift in game platforms like PC to mobile. Most recently, I’m proud of our ability to deliver games to our audience at a consistent clip. We reach more than 1,000,000 [daily active users] every day and our players are craving fresh new content.”
Rosenblatt also added that browser-based games have several advantages over other platforms that makes them appealing to developers and gamers: “From a player’s perspective, it’s because you don’t need any specific hardware to load a webpage and the browser is so ubiquitous and accessible. Every smart device has a browser, from your laptop to your mobile phone to your television…
“From a game developer’s perspective, the browser is a great platform because you don’t pay a 30% tax on your microtransactions to a first party such as Apple or Google. You can rapidly iterate and roll out releases without a black box approval process. You can target users with organic and paid UA that don’t exist in the mobile app ecosystem. Lastly, no one owns the browser as a platform and most of the world uses it so there’s a very large opportunity.”
