Critical Compass has already supported over $100 million in funding and publishing outcomes across more than 45 projects

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."

"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.

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