São Paulo-based mobile game maker Wildlife Studios raises $120M at a valuation of $3B, bringing its total raised to $250M
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Wildlife Studios' $120M round at a $3B valuation puts the São Paulo studio in the top tier of mobile game fundraises of its moment — and the coverage around it shows this was not an outlier but part of a capital wave hitting mobile gaming. Weeks later, Scopely raised $340M at a $3.3B post-money valuation, effectively confirming the price band Wildlife had just set.
The broader corpus frames two different uses of that capital: N3twork raised $40M specifically to build a publishing platform that helps games gain traction, while Tripledot's $78M Series A backed raw user growth (11M active users, up from 6M six months prior). Wildlife's raise sits between those models — scale capital for a hit-driven studio rather than infrastructure or early traction.
First-order effects
- Wildlife Studios now has $250M raised in total and a $3B valuation, giving it war-chest capacity to fund new titles and user acquisition against rivals like Scopely and N3twork.
Second-order effects
- Competing studios face pressure to raise at comparable scale or differentiate: Scopely answered within weeks with a larger $340M round, while platform plays like N3twork's publishing model pitch themselves as the cheaper route to traction than self-funded UA.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward consolidation as the endgame for mid-scale mobile studios — the eventual $620M Modern Times Group acquisition of Plarium shows where studios that don't reach independent scale end up, with earnout structures tied to multi-year financial targets.
The trend: Mobile game studios are raising ever-larger rounds at billion-dollar valuations, splitting the industry into well-capitalized platforms and studios that eventually become acquisition targets.