Striked Rewind 2022

Is it already that time of the year again? The new year is knocking on the door and an exciting & thrilling year is coming to an end. 2022 was marked by historic industry events — like the day Microsoft announced it was buying Activision Blizzard for a “measly” $69 billion, or Gamescom 2022 finally returning to presence. But it was also a very exciting year for Striked! Let’s take a look back at 2022 — but those who have been following our blog so far will recognize it all ;-)

At the beginning of the year, we applied for Innostarter funding in Hamburg — and got the acceptance. As a result, Striked has settled in Hamburg and it’s been going uphill ever since! After one year, our EXIST funding expired in April 2022. EXIST gave us the basis to start Striked, and we would certainly not exist in this form today if things had gone differently. At this point, we would like to thank the K1-Gründer-Service of the University of Jena, who accompanied us the whole time (and a bit before and after)!

After EXIST, we then founded Striked as a GmbH in May 2022. There were many weeks between the first visit to the notary and the final entry in the commercial register, as well as business registration and tax number, but in the end it was all done and we could finally move on to the day-to-day business.

Almost immediately after the foundation, the first employees joined us. In the area of marketing we urgently needed support, but also in development there is (still) more to do than hands that can do it. We hope that the team will grow even more next year, because there is more than enough to do. Not employees but still somehow part of the team were the HNU interns who were with us over the summer. They developed self-organized small game prototypes to gain practical experience and organizational skills. We have presented the games in detail, hopefully there will be much more to see soon!

To position ourselves in the European market, we also applied to the Concordia Design Accelerator in Wrocław, Poland — and were accepted here as well. Poland is a very important gaming market in Europe and we have the opportunity here to prepare our expansion to Eastern Europe in addition to cool new contacts.

After two years, Gamescom was happening again in person, and our marketing manager Johannes was able to go there — not only to play new games, but also to talk to developers. We didn’t have our own booth, the time wasn’t right yet. But it is definitely planned for next year!

Since September we are a member of the game Verband to connect us even more within the gaming scene in Germany. Furthermore, we support the Godot and Bevy Engines financially as sponsors to give indies more opportunities and to promote these great projects.

At the end of the year, we finally launched our alpha. Several studios already have their games in the store and we’re fixing more bugs every day — the product gets more rounded and beautiful with every small (or big) update! Since we are now online and largely functional, we are also actively going into acquisition mode. At first we are only talking to studios, we will recruit players as soon as there is something more to play — and a few more features have been added. In general, we get a lot of feedback that helps us get better. We’ve done a lot of re-sharpening on the various pages so it’s clear what we offer and how we can help game studios.

There’s a lot more that happened this year, of course, but we’ve certainly written about that — and this text is long enough already! We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who follows our journey and reads this blog. Next year will be even more exciting — and challenging — than 2022 and we are looking forward to it!

We wish you happy holidays, a happy new year, and will be back in touch in 2023!