It’s the second time in a week that a foreign company has put money into a San Francisco game studio, and it’s a sign of just how international the game business has become. Brazil’s Wildlife Studios also said it was starting a new studio, Never Forget Games, in San Francisco.
My.Games Venture Capital (MGVC) made the investment. It’s a division of the My.Games, a big Russian game company, and it has signed a deal with Pizza Club Games, developers of the Raid Boss game.
As part of the deal, MGVC is providing both money and support for scaling the business, including marketing, game design, employee recruitment, and product analytics. Raid Boss is currently in early access on Android.
Four co-founders — Daniel Hunnicutt, Lisa Hicks, Todd Gunther, and Benjamin Gross — started Pizza Club Games studio in San Francisco in early 2020. They all have strong pedigrees in games and hail from companies such as Sega, Electronic Arts, NCSoft, Glu, Playdom, and others.
Above: My.Games has invested $1.5 million in Pizza Club Games.
Image Credit: My.Games
Raid Boss is a free-to-play mobile character collector that offers players the opportunity to take charge of their own guild. Along with an original setting, the developers created a project in the genre of hero collection role-playing game (RPG), combining character management with tactical real-time battles.
This combination of game mechanics is unique for the genre, the company said. In the future, the company plans to expand the game by adding new content, as well as multiplayer and player-versus-player (PvP) components. With the investment from MGVC, the studio is able to hire more people. It will also receive marketing support from hypercasual mobile game publishers.
In the near future, the studio plans to release an iOS version of the game and add new game mechanics.
Daniel Hunnicutt, CEO of Pizza Club Games, said in a statement that his company faced the challenging task of finding an investor with deep expertise in mobile games to help the company scale its game.
Nikita Matsokin, executive producer of MGVC, said in a statement that the deal is one more step in My.Games’ growing presence in the U.S. market. Pizza Club Games has 10 people.
MGVC was launched in 2017. Over the past three years, the MGVC team has processed more than 1,000 applications and offers for cooperation, closing more than 30 deals. It has previously invested in Bit.Games, Swag Masha, Panzerdog, BeIngame, and Deus Craft. My.Games has more than 1,800 people in 11 offices across Russia, Europe, and the U.S. The company operates more than 80 games.
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