Voodoo SAS is a French video game developer and publisher based in Paris. The company was founded in 2013 by Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter, and focuses on free-to-play "hyper-casual games" for Android and iOS. As of December 2019, games released by Voodoo were collectively downloaded 2.6 billion times.
History
Voodoo was founded in 2013 by Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter. The two founders, who were friends from high school, had previously founded mobile application services company Studio Cadet in 2012, with the intent to become a publisher later. Yazdi serves as chief executive officer for Voodoo, while Gabriel Rivaud is the vice-president of games. According to Rivaud, the company was in turmoil for its first four years in operation and opted to change its business strategy thereafter. Using data it gathered from its previous games, it designed its newer games to attract more players. Through 2017, Voodoo quadrupled in staff count, reaching 80 employees, and expected to grow to 150 people by the end of 2018. In May 2018, American banking company Goldman Sachs, through its West Street Capital Partners VII fund, invested in Voodoo. It was the largest fundraising in the French technology sector since 2015. Yazdi and Ritter retained control of the company. At the time, Voodoo had, asides from its Paris headquarters, offices in Montpellier and Strasbourg. A development studio in Berlin, Germany, was established in December 2018, headed by general manager Alexander Willink. The studio started out with roughly ten people, looking to eventually expand to 40 employees. The Berlin studio later hired key employees from developers Blizzard Entertainment, King, and Mamau. A publishing office in Istanbul, Turkey, was announced in August 2019 and is headed by publishing director Corentin Selz. This continued with the opening of a Montreal development studio in November 2019, led by Mehdi El Moussali, a former producer for Gameloft. Voodoo also acquired Shoreditch-based developer Gumbug in December that year. In July 2020, Tencent was looking to acquire a minority stake in Voodoo, which at the time was still majority-owned by Yazdi and Ritter.
Games
Games published by Voodoo were downloaded a total of 2 billion times by April 2019. In December 2019, Voodoo games had 2.6 billion downloads, 300 million monthly active users, and 1 billion individual players. Games released by Voodoo include Helix Jump, Baseball Boy, Snake vs Block, Hole.io, Aquapark.io, and Purple Diver. The majority of its games are free-to-play "hyper-casual games" developed for the Android and iOS smartphone operating systems. Voodoo announced in November 2019 that it intended to move past hyper-casual games with the opening of its Montreal studio.
Criticism
Voodoo has been criticised for producing games that copied game concepts of indie games. Such games include Infinite Golf, Twisty Road, The Fish Master, Flappy Dunk!, Rolly Vortex, The Cube, and Hole.io. In the case of Hole.io, the game copied the core gameplay mechanic of Donut County, in which the player controls a hole in the ground to consume objects within the environment, progressively growing larger to be able to consume larger objects. Ben Esposito had been working on Donut County for more than five years when Hole.io released in mid-2018, prior to Donut County own release. In a response to an inquiry from Variety, Voodoo stated that Hole.io was not a clone of Donut County, although both were in the same sub-genre of games.
