For the first four years, Voodoo barely worked. Gabriel Rivaud, who later ran the games side, has said the company struggled until it changed strategy in 2015. That sentence sits oddly beside what came later: revenue of about 380 million euros in 2020, up from roughly one million in 2016.
It began with school friends. Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter had been friends since lycee. In 2012 they set up Studio Cadet, a small firm building apps for other people. It paid bills, but the plan was always larger. They wanted to be a publisher, the name on the product rather than the contractor behind it. Voodoo was incorporated in Paris on 15 April 2013, with Rivaud there from the start.
Voodoo shifted toward hypercasual games, tiny titles that a player understands in seconds, made with a network of outside studios.
Then came the lean years. Building apps for clients and publishing your own games are different trades, and the second is a lottery that most players lose. What nobody outside the company saw during that stretch was the grind of trying, and failing, to find a hit.
The turn in 2015 was a change of method. Voodoo shifted toward hypercasual games, tiny titles that a player understands in seconds, made with a network of outside studios. Hundreds of partner teams joined, and the company tested ideas and scaled only what worked. In May 2018 Goldman Sachs invested about 200 million dollars, the biggest French tech fundraising since 2015. Tencent took a stake in 2020 at a 1.4 billion dollar valuation, and in July 2021 the Belgian holding GBL paid 266 million euros for 16 percent.
Then the market turned. Hypercasual saturated, players left quickly, and Apple's tracking changes squeezed advertising. Voodoo cut its partner studios from around 700 to around 100 and moved up toward richer casual games. In December 2022 France's data regulator fined it three million euros for tracking Apple users who had opted out, a penalty upheld in 2024. The company bought BeReal in 2024 for a reported 500 million euros and reported 778 million dollars in revenue for 2025, up 16 percent.
The quiet lesson: four years of near-failure with friends you trust is survivable. Voodoo's fortune came not from a better game but from a better way of choosing games.