When we last talked with Lil Snack, they were a two-person company making little games that were like snacks. For fun, we posted their games on the GamesBeat.com web site, and it was cool to tell people that we had games on our site at the 2024 GamesBeat Summit.
It was just a couple of guys using AI to make games.
Flash forward to today, and now they’ve got a partnership with Hasbro to make a game based on the Scattergories board game. Lil Snack has ten new games operated daily for as many as 650 days in a row. It has 600,000 monthly active users and more than 10 million plays to date.
The company’s audience for its snackable games is broad, with roughly 50% male and 50% female across all demographics. It generated seven figures in revenue in its first year, and the deal with Hasbro means that Scattergories Daily Live will debut this month on LilSnack.com. About 35% of the audience is playing five days a week or more.
Lil Snack’s games have been played more than 10 million times.
“Our partnership with Hasbro highlights what’s possible when iconic brands like Scattergories meet fresh distribution — and affirms the momentum behind daily games as a new category,” said Eric Berman, cofounder of Lil Snack.
Not bad. The games are refreshed daily to challenge players. And more intellectual properties are coming soon based on the partnership. And more games are coming soon.
“The exciting relationship for us with Hasbro is incredibly topical, especially coming off the success of Monopoly Go,” said Berman. “We are building a game that will be utilizing AI with Hasbro. I think our approach to AI using consumer products is being human first, in terms of how we create games. What Scopely (maker of Monopoly Go) was for mobile, we would like to be for daily games,” said Berman”
He added, “Humans are the creative pieces behind everything we do, and we have no intent on that going away. If anything, we intend to try to make it more human, but we’re trying to use AI in a very novel way to deliver new game experiences that would not have been able to exist before.”
Not so much AI after all
Lil Snack has hired a sizable team in the past year.
While Lil Snack started heavily with AI generating games and game images at the beginning, it’s not doing as much now. The team of humans has grown instead.
But a number of them have never made games before. The AI tools have become a way for those people to make games that they could not have done before.
“We try to hire people across the country. We try to hire folks of different backgrounds, different demos, to just really keep the broadness of the games applicable to as large of an audience as we possibly can,” Berman said.
Lil Snack has raised money from A16z and Lerer Hippeau.
“We’ve been watching the rise of daily games closely—they’re a fun, bite-sized way people are building habits around play. Partnering with Lil Snack gives us a great chance to bring fan-favorites like Scattergories into that world in a way that feels fresh and relevant,” said Barry Dorf, vice president of interactive global licensing at Hasbro, in a statement.
Lil Snack Vision
Lil Snack’s growth is accelerating in an organic way.
“The goal with Lil Snack is to create a new form of entertainment – a daily ritual of play, with games that are quick, fun, and culturally in tune,” said Travis Chen, cofounder of Lil Snack.
Besides Hasbro, Lil Snack also made a game based on Sony’s Wheel of Fortune property. Berman said the game has done really well. Just about all the growth so far has been organic.
Regarding the business model, Berman said, “We partner with the biggest consumer platforms on the planet to deliver daily engagement and retention through daily games. Now, our partners can benefit from beloved IP from Hasbro, with many more games coming soon.”
Scattergories
Scattergories is going daily with Lil Snack.
Daily Scattergories is a daily single player interpretation of the iconic board game. Players are given a series of categories each day that they must find words to match – all in a race against the clock!
After players finish submitting their category answers, each answer is judged by the Scattergories head! This category judging introduces an innovative single player mechanic to the classically multiplayer game.
Players can then share their results with friends and family encouraging friendly competition. Berman expects to raise more money in the future to help fuel the growing team and build more product.
“We’ve run over 650 days of games in a row now, and we are pretty good at putting new games live every single day,” Berman said.
Berman sees a lot of big companies moving into daily games and light snackable games played on the TV. There are companies like Samsung and Netflix going at it from different directions, and more are kicking the tires, he said.
As for the games that ran on GamesBeat, Berman noted that some of them were just too hard. The company has since learned that people want light games where they can be successful. They don’t want to be stumped by tough trivia questions. They’re just looking for a daily escape.
“We’ve definitely been trying to be less narrow and are broadening it is as much as we possibly can,” Berman said.
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