Today, we announced our lead investment Playgig’s seed funding round. Read more about Playgig from CEO & Founder, Bruno Schirch, below.

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Today, I’m thrilled to announce the official launch of Playgig, a new gaming studio creating cross-platform, free-to-play games that are accessible to a broad universe of gamers. We’ve raised $10.85 million in seed funding, led by March Gaming (Louis Gresham), with support from additional global investors including Paramark from South Korea, Aream from the U.K., and Gaingels, the largest LGBTQIA+/Allies investment syndicate.

We’ll use the funding to recruit additional talent to join our fast-growing team of 40 game developers building our first game and original IP, Mystic Kingdoms, and to support our work to serve a global community of gamers with captivating experiences. We’re grateful to have our investors’ support.

What is Playgig?

I founded Playgig in January 2021 after nine years leading global publishing and esports at Riot Games, where I worked with a talented team to pioneer the games-as-a-service model. Our vision with Playgig is to build a studio from the ground up to bring the fun of deeply engaging multiplayer games to a broader global community of gamers. 

Playgig is composed of a diverse group of artists, engineers, writers, game designers, and game development pros who have built billion-dollar entertainment franchises. We see play as our life’s work, and will use the power of play to bring people together.

The Game We’re Developing

Our first game, Mystic Kingdoms, is a team battler set in a fantasy world. It will be fast, easy to pick up, and free to play, but will also offer satisfying depth to players who delight in pursuing mastery. Importantly, it will be playable in all major languages, across all major platforms, and accessible to a global and diverse audience.

We’re currently testing with hundreds of players whose feedback has been incredibly useful as we continue to make our core gameplay as engaging and fun as possible. We plan to increase the number of players for our pre-alpha launch in early 2023. We can’t wait to open the game to even more players for continued testing and feedback as we move toward commercial launch.

Building a Global Team

We’re proud to be a global team of over 40 talented professionals distributed across multiple countries and continents thanks to our fully remote studio culture. We believe the best games are developed from a diversity of perspectives that allow us to think about player needs from every angle and a culture where it’s safe to take risks and tackle challenges that are at the edge of one’s capabilities. Building a diverse, world-class team with unique perspectives and experiences to help us enhance the games we develop is a core priority for Playgig as we continue to scale.

We believe that ideas are common, but that skillful and rapid execution is rare, so we look to hire great people with a knack for getting things done and with the trait of resilience. We’re investing heavily in hiring developers to build our first game and original IP, Mystic Kingdoms. If you’re interested in joining us, you can find our open roles here. Additionally, if you’re interested in signing up for our pre-alpha launch and staying up to date on our latest news, sign up for updates at Playgig.com.

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Investor Quotes 

“It is a privilege to support Playgig in realizing their ambitious vision of bringing cross-platform, free-to-play games to a broad market of gamers. The speed with which they have ‘found the fun’ and the power of the IP they’re building is a testament to their world-class team, composed of veterans who’ve led their respective disciplines at billion-dollar franchises. I can’t wait for the world to see what they’ve built, and I look forward to partnering with Bruno and the team as they continue to bring their vision to life.”
– Louis Gresham, March Gaming

“We were immediately drawn to Bruno’s commitment to deliver a remarkable gaming experience to the global community, ranging from casual to hardcore gamers across platforms. Even at the early stage of development, Bruno’s ability to corral a team of talented professionals, responsible for the industry’s biggest hits, coupled with his deep insights into what gamers desire today, reinforced our confidence in Playgig’s potential to capture the multi-billion-dollar opportunity at the intersection of widely popular MOBA and FPS genres. We are deeply impressed by Playgig’s early work and look forward to following the team in its further development of not only an AAA-quality game but further a compelling universe, built on top of its original IP, that can potentially expand beyond its debut title.”
– Chunsoo Kim, Paramark

“As the largest investor network focused on supporting and investing in the best venture-backed companies that embrace and value diverse leadership, including LGBTQIA+, Gaingels is proud of participating in this financing and is resolved on helping the company grow and scale while strengthening its prospects of success by building a culture that reflect the diversity of its executive teams, staff and customers.”
– Lorenzo Thione, Gaingels

At The Montgomery Summit presented by March Capital in 2021, I sat down with EA COO Peter Moore, Pearl Abyss America CEO Jeonghee “JJ” Jin, and Zynga President Bernard Kim to discuss the long-term outlook for gaming amid technological disruption in the post-pandemic environment and how we can look to the past for guidance.

One of the most important questions on everyone’s mind focused on how the gaming industry experienced an extraordinary step change in growth over the past year due to extenuating world conditions in terms of both market capitalization and player count—will this trend persist into the future?

JJ approached the question from a social perspective. For JJ, building games is about community philosophy, and the past year was a great opportunity to expand Pearl Abyss’s demographic. According to JJ, “[gaming] is a forum of community whether it encourages people to form an in-game community or outside just talking about their favorite games or hobbies with each other.” Companies cannot expect new gamers to act and behave like their historical counterparts. Instead, new games need to be designed to retain across the increasingly broad spectrum of user preferences as entirely new segments are being welcomed into the fold.

Peter remarked that the social capability of games has evolved accordingly over the years, and the gaming industry is an ambassador to cloud technology. For example, games have not always had 24-hour update and live service capability. These features are a stark comparison to building the early social games in EA’s history when the primary concern was how to make a game run smoothly on dial-up modem. The infrastructure of the past would not have been either capable or scalable enough to handle the surge in modern gamers. Peter sees a positive trend in spreading gaming technology, citing examples such as in-game concerts and contributions to the automotive industry based on driving games. However, the real excitement is for the next step of “how can we take gaming technology and improve the way we watch sports [or] improve the way we go to concerts. [Advancements in games-as-a-service platforms and philosophy along with the shift into virtual experiences allows for] creating a 24/7 experience instead of going to a concert, enjoying for two hours, and then forgetting about it after a few weeks.”

Bernard added that there has been a fundamental shift in what players can do over the past few years as well as a shift in the average gamer based on mobile adoption. People are able to have a social/hardcore gaming experience almost everywhere today, and mobile-native gamers now outnumber those on console. Bernard stated, “at Zynga, they’ve actually done studies with people with some of their players that say, ‘hey we’re not gamers.’ Then, they get on their phones and see they are playing Words with Friends.” The goal is to design broadly appealing games that can be marketed to everyone rather than self-defined or specific segments of gamers.

The discussion then transitioned to discuss the financial implications of the past year for studios. Over the last year, there have been a series of high-profile M&A transactions from large studios such as Zynga, Embracer Group, and EA, culminating with Microsoft’s recent announced acquisition of Activision Blizzard $68.7 billion. Many of these acquisitions have been talent acquisitions, as there is not an immense pool of talented AAA developers.

“Balance sheets are healthy, and so companies are using them accordingly to beef up for next phase of growth over the next two or three years. [I’ve] seen this in the industry for 30 years,” according to Peter. If the positive momentum and healthy returns continue for gaming, then consolidation will continue.

At March Gaming, we love the creativity, storytelling, exhilaration and passion that comes with building the next big gaming business. As enthusiastic life-long gamers, we are excited about the future of the gaming industry, and look forward to working with entrepreneurs that are building industry-leading content, technology and platforms.

For more information on the past and future of gaming, check out the entire discussion: