Linq Games operates the Toffee co-branded card product through Galactica Games Inc., serving a growing roster of mid-market mobile game studios in the United States. Drive, DraftKings' venture arm, led our seed round.
Dmitry Vysotski spent two years as a product lead at a mid-size mobile RPG studio in New York, watching the studio lose 60% of its paying players within 90 days despite spending $1.2M annually on retargeting ads. After a post-mortem on one cohort, he pulled the player-level data and found that the top 12% of spenders — the ones who churned — had no financial touchpoint with the studio outside the game itself. Every dollar they spent went through the app store. The studio had no relationship with their bank account.
The insight was simple: retention is not a content problem for players who have already demonstrated willingness to spend. It is a relationship problem. Game studios have no mechanism to create financial utility outside the game, so players who temporarily stop spending have no thread pulling them back. A co-branded debit card that earns game currency on everyday spend creates a daily touchpoint that exists in the player's physical wallet, not just on a notification screen.
The first attempt was a small pilot with a single mobile title: 200 players issued a Linq-branded prepaid Visa linked to in-game coin rewards. 90-day retention in the pilot cohort ran 2.8 times the studio's historical baseline. Average session frequency increased by 41% versus the matched control group. The data was enough to bring in Drive, the venture arm of DraftKings, as the seed investor and convert the pilot into a productized SDK.
Linq now operates the Toffee co-branded card product for a growing roster of mid-market mobile studios in the US, with the SDK integration layer enabling studios to trigger rewards from any in-game event. Revenue model is interchange share plus a monthly SaaS fee per active card holder.
Banking-as-a-service has matured to the point that a 10-person studio can launch a co-branded debit card without a charter, without a compliance team, and without rebuilding their event pipeline. The infrastructure is there. What is missing is a platform that combines card issuing with the gaming-specific reward primitives — in-game currency, segment cohorts, SDK triggers — that studios already understand. Linq is that platform.
We believe the long-term shape of mobile gaming monetization includes a financial-utility layer alongside the in-app purchase layer. Studios that build a real relationship with player wallets will retain more lifetime value than studios that rely solely on app-store transactions and retargeting ads. Our job is to make that layer easy to ship.
Linq is a seed-stage company with a deliberately narrow operating shape. We focus exclusively on mid-market US mobile game studios, on iOS and Android live-service titles, with monthly active users between 50,000 and 2,000,000. We do not serve hypercasual studios with insufficient card-adoption base. We do not serve enterprise publishers with in-house loyalty infrastructure. We do not serve real-money gaming. The narrowness is the point — it is what lets the platform be opinionated about reward primitives, cohort analytics, and dashboard ergonomics.
The values below are operating principles, not marketing copy. They show up in how we prioritize product work, how we evaluate customer fit, and what we say no to.
The studio's existing player base is more valuable than the next ad install. Every Linq feature is judged by retention impact first.
Card spend tells us what players actually value. The data informs reward design, not just monthly statements.
The compliance and banking-partner overhead is ours. The studio integrates an SDK and configures rules — nothing more.
Studios should call our API from their event pipeline, not reverse-engineer rules from a dashboard. The dashboard exists for tuning, not as the primary integration surface.
Cashback comes from real-world spend, not from manufactured in-game discounts. The retention is real because the relationship is real.
We operate at seed scale. Public customer references would overstate go-to-market readiness. We talk in segment-level outcomes, not named studios.
Drive, DraftKings' venture arm, led our seed round. Drive's combined experience operating live-service consumer products at scale and investing in fintech infrastructure made them the right partner for a platform that sits at the intersection of gaming and embedded financial services. We do not disclose round size or date.
We always make time for studio operators thinking about card-linked loyalty, even if you are not ready to evaluate a vendor yet.