Streamplay expands gaming and music streaming market share in South Africa and the Pacific
August 1, 2023 | Special Report SP8 is having a win with its mobile gaming expansion plans.
Streamplay Studio has furthered its gaming and music streaming footprint into South Africa and the Pacific region, inking partnerships with Digicel and Telikom and rolling out R&D initiatives.
Competitive casual gaming and music streaming provider Streamplay Studio (ASX:SP8) is expanding its market share with its music streaming and gaming products with partners MTN Arena and Pacific telco’s.
MTN Arena
Quarterly activities included implementing marketing initiatives for its social gaming tech under South Africa’s MTN Arena brand, which resulted in an immediate lift in revenues.
Streamplay collaborated with MTN to introduce new weekly $1.70 and monthly $2.55 subscription price points for MTN Arena, which saw better performance than the previous daily 25c subscriptions.
The MTN Arena platform saw significant growth, recording ~255,000 new monthly subscribers (+165%) during the quarter, compared to ~96,000 in the previous quarter, with revenue generated during the quarter amounted to ~$226,000, compared to ~$163,000 in the previous quarter.
Streamplay earns 50% of the shareable revenue derived from the MTN Arena platform.
The company is also pushing its MTN Arena Plus rebrand and says it will “continue to focus on new acquisition strategies and social engagement with dual focus on brand awareness and increase in token sales”.
“The quarter will also see the release of a number of new features into the service, including the much-anticipated support for native Xbox and Playstation controllers, new bespoke game titles and a drastically improved audio playback and streaming experience,” SP8 said.
“We are excited about the possibilities that cloud gaming brings our customers. It provides one of the critical customer-ready use cases for our high-speed 5G data network,” John Hoehler of MTN South Africa says.
“Still, it allows our customers across South Africa to experience console-quality gaming on SA’s best mobile network through their mobile devices.”
MTN Group Limited is a South African multinational mobile telecommunications company, operating in many African and Asian countries. Its head office is in Johannesburg. As of December 2020, MTN recorded 280 million subscribers, making it the 7th largest mobile network operator in the world, and the largest in Africa.
Streamplay Pacific
During the quarter, SP8 partnered with Telstra-owned Pacific Digicel to launch its gaming and music platforms in Fiji, paving the way for further expansion with Digicel in the Pacific. The company also partnered with PNCC in Palau.
In Papua New Guinea, it launched casual gaming experiences to subscribers on the Telikom network through its mGames brand.
Plans are in place to rapidly expand mGames offering to other partner networks in existing markets like American Samoa, Digicel Fiji, and Tonga.
Expansion and R&D
SP8 said the quarter’s primary focus was on enhancing stability and scalability of its bespoke game engine and its upcoming original game Slime Crisis.
It’s also continuing to implement its MNO expansion strategy with MTN Group which has an addressable market of ~120 million.
The company says it will continue to invest in R&D of “game streaming technology capable of streaming premium games, realtime multiplayer features, new competition features (such as Head-to-Head competition), extended brand engagement features and new social engagement features”.
During the last financial year, Streamplay posted receipts from customers of $804k of which $171k were banked in the current quarter.
Total Cash balance totalled $15.4m Cash on hand being $6.4m and $9m invested in long dated term deposits,
“We are pleased with the performance for this quarter, with our teams maintaining revenue whilst concurrently deploying multiple integrations across our telco partners; a crucial milestone that paves the way for continued future successful launches of our platform in newly formed markets,” SP8 chair Bert Mondello said.
“The successful rollout of mGames in Papua New Guinea has been met with resounding success, with a rapidly growing user base which will result in increasing revenue for the Group. These achievements reinforce our confidence in a promising FY24.”
Digicel Pacific is the leading telecommunications provider in the Pacific region. Operating in Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, and Fiji, Digicel Pacific serves as a vital connectivity provider in these markets. In 2022, Digicel Pacific was acquired by Telstra, Australia’s largest. This strategic acquisition marked Telstra’s expansion into the Pacific market and enhanced its presence in the region.
This article was developed in collaboration with Streamplay Studios, a * advertiser at the time of publishing.
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