It can work well as a balancing play, but as a business, this has turned out to be surprisingly weak despite a clear value proposition. The added value is evidently small, as developers aren’t rushing to become Flexion’s customers; on the contrary, Flexion is forced to pay large licensing fees upfront on poor terms. Costs do not scale because sales and onboarding apparently require manual labor per game, and the game’s lifecycle is short in terms of cash flow. I can’t find any other explanations for the poor development.
If the founders and management truly believed in the business, they probably would have taken the whole company private by now.