Founder and CEO of Bidstack, James Draper, announced yesterday on LinkedIn that bidstack had secured £10m of funding from cybersecurity provider Irdeto. This will be their first strategic investment and brings their overall investment to, “Just over $42 million,” according to Draper’s post. Given the reduction of private investment across the broader tech sector this is a significant amount of money.
Irdeto are well-known for their anti-cheat service Denuvo, which has become increasingly common in AAA games and also expanded recently into the mobile sector. Bidstack meanwhile specialises in advertisements in-game across a wide portfolio of mobile titles. What’s most interesting in this post, however, is that Draper alludes to, “-many opportunities for our two companies to collaborate going forward, as strategic partners.”
Secure ads for Secure people
The implication is of course that there will be some measure of collaboration between the two businesses in the coming years. What form this will take is not yet clear but it could be anything from a simple financial collaboration to the active involvement of Irdeto’s assets in the advertising space. It would certainly not be unexpected for Irdeto to push their Denuvo services into the mobile sector as they have previously done with Superplus’ Hills of Steel 2.
Given the number of games for which Bidstack provides advertising services, it could be assumed that this will include some service to extend cyber-security to the games and developers with whichBidstack already works. In a recent interview with PocketGamer, COO of Denuvo Steeve Huin concentrated specifically on the android market and the following quote may suggest what this new collaboration could look like.
Answering the question, ‘What are the unique challenges of mobile?’ Steeve answered, “Well, there are a few. We look at games that are not protected, say, on an Android store today. If it’s a popular-enough game, you will find on a website, somewhere, a version that’s stripped of every ad, where all the in-app purchases are pre-filled so that you don’t have to spend money.”
The concentration on ads here suggests that Bidstack and Irdeto, or their subsidiary Denuvo, may collaborate on securing advertisement within games, making it more difficult for versions stripped of ads to pop up, by making sure that checks to ensure these and other monetisation is integrated more inextricably into the game.
