Wargraphs, a gaming startup with only one employee and no outside funding, sells for $54M

techcrunch.com:

While the U.K. and U.S. try to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision over concerns it will kill competition in games distribution,  competition appears to be alive and well in another (smaller) area of gaming: modding and analytics.

Wargraphs, a one-man-band startup behind a popular companion app for League of Legends called Porofessor, which helps players track and improve their playing stats, is getting acquired for up to €50 million ($54 million), half up front and half based on meeting certain earnings and growth targets.

MOBA Networks, a company founded out of Sweden that buys, grows and runs online gaming communities (MOBA is short for “multiplayer online battle arena”), is buying the startup and its existing products. The plan is to expand them to more markets, in particular across Asia, and to build analytics for more titles.

I write “startup”, but that might be with the loosest interpretation of the term. There is only a single employee, the mild-mannered Jean-Nicholas, and he has also entirely bootstrapped the business on his own. But that hasn’t held him back.

Wargraphs currently also builds analytics for Legends of Runeterra and Teamfight Tactics, but the League of Legends business has been its biggest it by far. Porofessor has had 10 million downloads of its app on Overwolf — which is where Porofessor was built — and more than 1.25 million daily active users if you combine traffic both from that platform and its own direct website.

The company, such as it is, has been around for some ten years, has pretty much always been profitable with revenues of €12.3 million in its last fiscal year.

The acquisition underscores an interesting leitmotif in the current world of startups. We’re coming out of a particularly