ITEM 1. BUSINESS
General
AppSoft Technologies, Inc. (“we,” “us,” or the “Company”) develops, publishes and markets mobile software applications for smartphones and tablet devices (“Apps”). We generate revenue from sales, or downloads, of our Apps and from advertisements published on our ad supported game titles. We currently own a portfolio comprising over 400 Apps titles including games designed to appeal to a broad cross section of consumers and legal-related Apps that provide compilations of federal and state laws and regulations across a variety of legal disciplines and digests of court decisions rendered by federal courts. We offer some of our game titles in both a free advertisement-supported version and a paid version that does not display ads. We believe that the ad supported versions allow for wider dissemination of our titles to consumers who might not otherwise spend money for an App without first playing the game.
We may purchase App titles directly from developers or enter into agreements with third-party developers to sell us titles under development or to create new Apps for us. Consumers download our Apps through direct-to-consumer digital storefronts, such as the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
History
We were organized in the State of Nevada in March 2015. In April 2015, we concluded a transaction in which we issued 2,000,000 shares of our Series A Preferred Stock in exchange for the sum of $50,000 and a portfolio comprising over 400 Apps titles.
On March 31, 2016, we closed our initial public offering of common stock, which we refer to throughout this report as our IPO. In our IPO, we registered 1,000,000 shares of common stock for sale at a price of $0.50 per share and sold 252,500 shares of common stock to the public for an aggregate offering price of $126,250.
On December 4, 2018, the holders of a majority of the outstanding shares of our common stock approved an amendment to our articles of incorporation to reduce the price at which shares of our Series A Cumulative, Convertible Preferred Stock convert into shares of Common Stock from $0.005 per share to $0.0002 per share. See the disclosure under Part II, Item 13 “Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence” for a discussion of the amendment. The amendment was filed with the state of Nevada on April 10, 2019.
Our App Portfolio
Our Apps are divided among game titles and Apps that provide compilations of federal and state laws and regulations across a variety of legal disciplines and digests of court decisions rendered by federal courts.
Our game titles are designed to appeal to a variety of age groups ranging from younger teens to adults. We offer some of our games in both a free advertisement-supported version and a paid version that does not display ads. We believe that by offering free ad supported versions we can build a significantly larger customer base more quickly than we could if we charged users an up-front fee to download our games since they may be reluctant to purchasing a game without first playing it. If a consumer enjoys a title, they may purchase the game and play without interruption from pop-up ads.
Product Development
We seek to develop and acquire new Apps to supplement our portfolio. Our primary focus will be to release new game titles. We are seeking to develop a pipeline of independent game designers, developers and programmers who provide us with new ideas and titles to publish. We typically enter into services or consulting agreements with our independent developers. Agreements with third-party developers generally give us exclusive publishing and marketing rights and require us to make development payments, pay royalties based on product sales and to satisfy other conditions. Our agreements with third-party developers generally provide us with the right to monitor development efforts and to cease making development payments if specified development milestones are not satisfied.
We also solicit new games and concepts that we may acquire from third parties. When we receive an idea for a new App, we research the commercial viability of the concept and undertake an analysis of the cost to develop the App against its potential economic return. If we determine that the App is commercially viable, we may fund the cost of development, publication and marketing. Upon completion of development we will own the App title.
In view of our current lack of liquidity, we have suspended our development and acquisition efforts unit such time as we have cash available to re-commence these activities. The statements below are subject in all events to possessing the capital required to undertake such activities and we cannot provide investors with any assurance that will have capital available to us in the future.
We develop and publish free-to-play games. Free-to-play games are games that a player can download and play for free, but which allow players to access a variety of additional content and features for a fee, through “in-app purchases” utilizing virtual currency they may be purchased through digital storefronts, and to engage with various advertisements and offers that generate revenues for us. Several large game publishers are successfully employing this business model. In order for us to achieve success using this model, we must develop and publish games that are widely accepted and commercially successful, which will provide us with the largest base from which to monetize our in-App sales. In addition to building strong core gameplay, successful monetization will require that we continually create new content within games and otherwise find ways to retain players and incentivize them to make in-app purchases. As these games gain wider acceptance and mature in the market, we may seek to improve monetization and increase awareness of our games by building social media communities around these titles and by delivering additional features, such as tournaments, live events and more frequent content updates.
We may seek to acquire franchises around which we develop games. Franchises may include movies, television programs, toys and other cultural phenomena that lend themselves to gamification. We will have to obtain a license from the owner of the franchise for each App we publish that is based on a third-party franchise and we likely will be required to pay ongoing royalties to the franchise owner.
As of the date of this report, we have retained the services of eight professionals who render coding, design, management, and marketing services to assist with the development of new Apps. Presently, we have four Apps/games under development, including an eSports tournament platform, Packzombie, WTFiT and GoDex. We expect to launch one or more of these Apps this year. Set forth below is a brief description of the new and existing Apps under development.
During 2016, we purchased an eSports tournament platform and the related software, trademarks and trade names; and other intellectual property. When we took control of these assets, they still required development and other pre-launch work. eSports (also known as electronic sports, competitive (video) gaming, professional (video) gaming, or pro gaming) are a form of competition that is facilitated by electronic systems, particularly video games; the input of players and teams as well as the output of the eSports system are mediated by human-computer interfaces. Most commonly, eSports take the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players. The most common video game genres associated with eSports are real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), and multiplayer online battle arena. Tournaments such as The International, the League of Legends World Championship, the Battle.net World Championship Series, the Evolution Championship Series, and the Intel Extreme Masters provide live broadcasts of the competition, and prize money and salaries to competitors.
eSports have become popular worldwide, not only with participants but also with fans who watch them online and in public spaces, including arenas. Newzoo, an online statistics gathering and dissemination portal, estimates that in 2020, global esports revenues will grow to $1.1 billion, a year-on-year growth of +15.7%, up from $950.6 million in 2019 and that the total esports audience will grow to 495 million people
Our App will provide eSports players with an easy-to-use platform that provides fair, transparent, and prompt payouts for prize tournaments. We will differentiate our product from competing platforms by focusing on casual games and mobile games. We also expect to focus on direct integrations with existing game publishers enabling them to offer prize tournaments to their existing player base.
During 2016, we acquired a suite of concepts, artwork, story lines and related computer software in connection with a computer game titled “CryptoGene,” for mobile application. CryptoGene represents a potential franchise that we can develop and roll out over multiple platforms, including as an App and video game version, graphic novels and other print and audio-visual media. This is a long-term project that will require significant financial and personnel resources.
We currently have substantially completed development of PackZombie, a strategy/ survival genre video game that is built as a multiplatform game. Consumers will be able to play it on both Apple and Android mobile devices- smartphones and tablets, as well as on Game Consoles like Xbox and Playstation, and on Laptop and Desktop computers. The game follows a post zombie apocalypse storyline where players level up and build up their home base and their characters, known as ’survivors’, so that they can fight off the Zombie onslaught. There game comprises two main segments: the home base/character screens and the 3D puzzle maze. In the home base, players build, grow, level up and strengthen their characters by collecting resources, or ’supplies’, and allocating them among the different characters and base options. To collect supplies, the characters must leave the base and select a supply run from an options tree which advances in difficulty as they complete levels, Supply run options include Grocery Store, Forest, Hospital, or Warehouse. Each of these options opens a 3D puzzle maze where the chosen character begins a supply run by avoiding or killing zombies, while collecting randomly deposited crates of supplies. The puzzle maze is completed, once they collect 3 keys and find the exit. This game is a free to play app monetized through IAP (in app purchases) such as, a $4.99 crate upgrade or a $2.99 speed upgrade.
WTFiT is an App we’ve been developing for almost two years. This App allows users to take a picture of something with their phone and quickly get an answer suggesting what the picture might be. Using high quality image recognition software, the user will be told what the image is, and if the software is wrong, they can challenge the system and then ask their friends and post their own answers on their friends’ pictures. We will use these answers to make our results better. We believe that the social component and the crowdsourcing component will make our App extremely addictive, viral, and self-learning. The steps are simple:
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Take or upload a picture
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Submit it to the hive-mind of image recognition software
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Agree or contest the findings
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The more interactivity by a user with the App, the more points they earn. Similar to Yelp and Google contributions, points equal status and badges. This will also lead to high growth of users and usage. During the App’s natural usage, we will integrate video ads and targeted sponsored ads, i.e., if a user submits a picture of an article of clothing, we present an ad for a similar article of clothing.
The markets for our products are characterized by rapid technological change, particularly in the technical capabilities of mobile phones and tablets, and changing end-user preferences. Therefore, we will be required to continuously invest capital to innovate and publish new games, regularly update our games, and modify existing games for distribution on evolving platforms. We cannot assure that we will have the capital to develop new and update existing game, that we will be successful in selecting new games to bring to market or that our updates to successful games will allow us to retain market share.
Sales, Marketing and Distribution
We market, sell and distribute our games Apps exclusively through Apple’s App Store and our legal titles through the Google Play Store, the largest direct-to-consumer digital storefronts. We expect that a majority of our revenues will be derived from sales on the Apple App Store. From time to time we may also sell development services to other business for products they will take to market.
We generate revenue from downloads of our paid Apps and from advertisements published on our ad supported game titles. We have entered into agreements with each of Apple and Google that govern our relationship as developers / distributors on their respective storefronts. We are party to two agreements with Apple, one that relates to App sales and one that covers net revenues generated from in-App advertising, for which we pay Apple a fee equal to 30% of net advertising revenues, which are defined as gross advertising revenue recognized through the delivery of ads by Apple less: a) any allowances actually made or taken for returns, credits, cash discounts and promotional allowances; and, b) agency and agent fees, discounts, commissions and referral fees and (c) certain adjustments and allocations specified in the agreement. Under our agreement with Google, we have agreed to pay Google a fee equal to 30% of net revenue generated from sales of our Apps on its storefront. These agreements provide that we will continue to own all rights to our Apps, subject to a license we grant to each party to market and promote our products and further define permissible and prohibited activities of the parties.
We may partner with other App publishers to develop and market new titles. These types of arrangements will allow us to defray development and marketing costs among a wider range of titles and increase our chances of publishing a successful title.
We employ advanced analytics, a means of analyzing data we collect about users of our Apps, to develop and publish more appealing titles and features in our games.
Our ability to market our Apps successfully on direct-to-consumer digital storefronts will depend on a number of factors, including our ability to build relationships with storefront owners and educate them about our title roadmap so that they feature or otherwise prominently place them within the storefront. If we are able to achieve these ends, we believe that consumers are more likely to find our Apps, which may result in greater downloads and more revenue. We believe that a number of factors may influence the featuring or placement of an App, including:
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the perceived attractiveness of the title;
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the level of critical or commercial success of the App or of other Apps previously introduced by a publisher;
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incorporation of the storefront owner’s latest technology in the publisher’s title;
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how strong the consumer experience is on all of the devices that discover titles using any given digital storefront;
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the publisher’s relationship with the applicable storefront owner and future pipeline of quality titles for it; and
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the current market share of the publisher.
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We also expect to undertake a number of marketing initiatives designed to attract consumers to download our Apps, including:
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using social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, focused directly at the target users of our Apps;
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paying third parties to advertise or incentivize consumers to download our Apps through offers or recommendations;
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using “push” notifications to alert existing and prospective users of updates to our Apps and new product offerings;
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cross-promoting our Apps through banner advertisements in our other Apps, as well as advertising our Apps in our competitors’ product offerings; and
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undertaking outreach efforts with video game websites and related media outlets, such as providing reviewers with access to our games prior to launch.
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Competition
Developing, distributing and selling Apps is a highly competitive business, characterized by frequent product introductions and rapidly emerging new platforms, technologies and storefronts. With respect to competing for consumers of our game related Apps, we will compete primarily on the basis of game quality, brand and customer reviews. We will compete for promotional and digital storefront placement based on these factors, as well as our relationship with the storefront owner, historical performance, perception of sales potential and relationships with licensors of brands, properties and other content. With respect to our legal Apps, we will compete on the basis of providing the most up to date content, the App’s ease of use (navigation and readability) and its price as compared to similar product offerings. We also will compete for experienced and talented employees and independent contractors.
We believe that our small size will allow provide us a competitive edge for the time being and allow us to make quick decisions as to product development to take advantage of consumer preferences at a particular point in time.
With respect to our game Apps, we compete with a continually increasing number of public and well-funded private companies, including Supercell, Niantic Tencent, NetEase, Machine Zone and many others. We could also face increased competition if large companies with significant online presences such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook or Yahoo, choose to enter or expand in the games space or develop competing games.
In addition, given the open nature of the development and distribution for smartphones and tablets, we also compete or will compete with a vast number of small companies and individuals in all of our segments who are able to create and launch Apps and other content for these devices using relatively limited resources and with relatively limited start-up time or expertise. As an example of the competition that we face, as of the fourth quarter of 2020, Statista estimated that 3.14 million mobile Apps were available to download from the Apple App Store for various iOS devices. The proliferation of titles in these open developer channels makes it difficult for us to differentiate ourselves from other developers and to compete for players and users who purchase content for their devices without substantially increasing marketing or development costs.
With respect to our legal-related Apps, we compete with a number of well-established companies that offer similar Apps, including LexisNexis, WestLaw, CCH, BNA and Bloomberg Law Reports. We may face increased competition from established or newly organized entities and from the governmental offices and agencies that promulgate the laws and regulations that are the subject of our Apps, should they decide to make versions of such laws and regulations available to consumers.
Most of our competitors and our potential competitors have one or more advantages over us, including:
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significantly greater financial and personnel resources;
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stronger brand and consumer recognition;
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the capacity to leverage their marketing expenditures across a broader portfolio of mobile and non-mobile products;
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more substantial intellectual property of their own;
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lower labor and development costs and better overall economies of scale; and
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broader distribution and presence.
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Intellectual Property
Our intellectual property is an essential element of our business. We currently use a combination of trade secret and other intellectual property laws, confidentiality agreements and license agreements to protect our intellectual property. We may seek to file copyrights with respect to one or more of our titles in the future. Our employees and independent contractors are required to sign agreements acknowledging that all inventions, trade secrets, works of authorship, developments and other processes generated by them on our behalf are our property, and assigning to us any ownership that they may claim in those works. Despite our precautions, it may be possible for third parties to obtain and use without our consent intellectual property that we own or license. Unauthorized use of our intellectual property by third parties, including piracy, and the expenses incurred in protecting our intellectual property rights, may adversely affect our business.
From time to time, we may encounter disputes over rights and obligations concerning intellectual property. If we do not prevail in these disputes, we may lose some or all of our intellectual property protection, be enjoined from further sales of our Apps or other applications determined to infringe the rights of others, and/or be forced to pay substantial royalties to a third party, any of which would have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
Government Regulation
We are subject to various federal, state and international laws and regulations that affect our business, including those relating to the privacy and security of customer and employee personal information and those relating to the Internet, behavioral tracking, mobile applications, advertising and marketing activities, and sweepstakes and contests. Additional laws in all of these areas are likely to be passed in the future, which could result in significant limitations on or changes to the ways in which we can collect, use, host, store or transmit the personal information and data of our customers or employees, communicate with our customers, and deliver products and services, or may significantly increase our compliance costs. As our business expands to include new uses or collection of data that are subject to privacy or security regulations, our compliance requirements and costs will increase and we may be subject to increased regulatory scrutiny.
Employees
As of the date of this report, we had one employee, who is our president and chief executive officers, who has other business interests and who is not obligated to devote any specific number of hours to our affairs. Our officer’s attention to his other business commitments may detract from his ability to devote time to our business and this may result in conflicts of interest that could harm our business.
We rely on independent game designers, developers, programmers and other IT specialists to develop new titles and update and maintain existing ones and from time to time we may have several contractors rendering services to us. As of the date of this report, we have engaged eight third party developers to assist with App development efforts.
Our employee is not represented by a collective bargaining agreement. We consider our relations with our employee to be very good.
Emerging Growth Company and Smaller Reporting Company Status
Emerging Growth Company
We are an “emerging growth company” as defined in Section 2(a)(19) of the Securities Act, as modified by the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012 (the “JOBS Act”). As such, we are eligible to take advantage of certain exemptions from various reporting requirements that are applicable to other public companies that are not “emerging growth companies” including, but not limited to, not being required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (the “Sarbanes-Oxley Act”), reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements, and exemptions from the requirements of holding a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation and stockholder approval of any golden parachute payments not previously approved. We intend to take advantage of all of these exemptions.
In addition, Section 107 of the JOBS Act also provides that an “emerging growth company” can take advantage of the extended transition period provided in Section 7(a)(2)(B) of the Securities Act for complying with new or revised accounting standards, and delay compliance with new or revised accounting standards until those standards are applicable to private companies. We have elected to take advantage of the benefits of this extended transition period.
We could be an emerging growth company until the last day of the first fiscal year following the fifth anniversary of our first common equity offering, although circumstances could cause us to lose that status earlier if our annual revenues exceed $1.07 billion, if we issue more than $1.0 billion in non-convertible debt in any three-year period, if, at the end of any fiscal year in which the market value of our common stock held by non-affiliates exceeded $700 million as of the end of the second quarter of that fiscal year, or if we become a “large accelerated filer” as defined in Rule 12b-2 under the Exchange Act.
Smaller Reporting Company
We also qualify as a “smaller reporting company” under Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act, which is defined as a company with a public equity float of less than $75 million. To the extent that we remain a smaller reporting company at such time as we are no longer an emerging growth company, we will still have reduced disclosure requirements for our public filings, some of which are similar to those of an emerging growth company, including not being required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements.