Fresh off a capital infusion from its $25 million Series A funding round, local video game coaching platform Metafy announced that it acquired a Denmark-based video game instructional course offering platform called GamerzClass.
Metafy CEO and Co-Founder Josh Fabian declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal but noted that prior to the acquisition, GamerzClass pulled in about $500,000 in annual recurring revenue and had 6,000 users paying for a monthly subscription fee to access a premium version of the product. During the close of its Series A funding round announcement, Fabian said Metafy had annual revenue of $2.4 million.
Currently, Metafy's offerings allow for coaches of various video game titles to use the Metafy platform to then teach skills to students via live, one-on-one sessions. As independent contractors, these coaches earn 100% of the rate they individually set to coach on Metafy, with Metafy charging students a 5% fee of that rate for the managerial overhead of the platform and other expenses.
But in the coming months and following this acquisition, Metafy will soon begin offering prerecorded instruction courses on its platform for students to take at their own pacing. Metafy will take a 30% cut of the price for these courses with the other 70% going to the course's respective creator, or expert as Fabian referred to them. That's down from the previous rate before the deal where GamerzClass took 80% of a course's rate. Metafy's cut will be used to supply course experts with the necessary equipment — cameras, lighting and recording software, in addition to other costs — upfront so that these creators can make their courses for the platform.
For Fabian, these courses will be a "master class" in video game coaching excellence. He said no other business offers video game courses like GamerzClass and that if Metafy could've done it better, it would've. The acquisition will also further broaden Metafy's potential audience, too.
"For us, it really is a matter of widening the funnel," Fabian said. "Right now, we only offer coaching."
Fabian said there is a limited customer base of gamers who want coaching.
"It's an audience of people that want to improve so badly they're willing to overcome how intimidating getting on a call with a stranger is, and not just any stranger. This is a stranger who is worlds better than you at the thing you want to be better at and they're going to watch you be bad. It's very intimidating, it's intense, but quite a lot of people have done it and are continuing to do it. But we know it's a small audience," Fabian said. "So when we think about courses, well, now we have an audience of people who may not be comfortable enough yet to hop on a call with the best player in the world, but they're very comfortable going through that person's insights and advice on their own time and in more of a self-driven way."
Fabian said all of GamerzClass' more than 150 course offerings will make their way to Metafy in the coming weeks. The startup is also working with its now Denmark-based team to create new course offerings in time for a more ceremonial launch this summer. Overseeing a lot of that work is Victor Folmann, the CEO of GamerzClass, who joins Metafy as its GM for courses.
"The single most important thing that makes you do great work, is to love what you do," Folmann said in a press release. "GamerzClass and Metafy unifying will allow me and my team to continue loving what we do, but with increased ambitions and firepower."
When these courses launch, they'll come in two tiers: a high-production-value "Crown series" — a tentative title — that will take longer to produce and serve as master classes for a given video game title as well as courses that can be produced on a daily scale and that are more relevant to what might be happening in a given video game on a day-to-day basis, like for those that offer weekly challenges as opposed to video games that tend to be more static after an initial launch.
Metafy now employs 60 workers following the acquisition, almost all of whom work remotely, though four work out of the Pittsburgh region.
