TWIG #180 Ex-Blizzard / Riot executives as founders. Opportunity or threat?

[Music] one more game raises 22 million to build spellcraft strategy game now this is a little bit of a longer update it's not just an update that they raise money and i do have a point in the end but one more game or let's just call it omg omg is a game studio built by veteran developers behind warcraft starcraft diablo diablo diablo guild wars the the fun the this round was led by light speed ventures and also joining in this round are griffin gaming partners and of course if somebody says x blizzard or x riot and recent horowitz is there investing right away that's that's the theresa must have like a tent outside of [ __ ] blizzard right just waiting for people to come through to sign up with them it's like nuts dude what is going on they spin off like funds and game

studios out of riot they must have like a corner office somewhere and riot just but anyways um and good good for them it's i'm not saying that this bad it's just funny anyway uh the first game from omg spellcraft it's a pc first genre defining online competitive strategy fantasy game pc first genre defining online competitive strategy fantasy game i just want to say it it's a there's a lot of things here now the studio has more than 25 people and they are all remote um studio is based out of seattle but everybody works remotely the studio has been the game has been in development um and they're applying this novel alpha driven development approach to rapidly iterate on gameplay with feedback from real players so that means that the announced game or now announced spellcraft has been in operating as a live service with a regular play test for a small group of players since late 2020 now this is nicely put they're essentially being play testing to my understanding because they said that only about 100

people externally have played this game so it's not like it's been in live service externally if only 100 people have played it maybe this is the other reporting that is off in venture beat but you know i wouldn't call it live service i would say it's in active testing now investors say that pat wyatt the founder and james windsor the founder are a killer founding team as gaming establishment meets next gen gaming with pat's nine years at blizzard launching battlenet multiple iconic games and then co-founding arenanet and jamie's history at riot games and arenanet uh said amy woo of lightspeed and she's not at live speed anymore she's now at ftx um okay on to mike tay my take so what what's arena in it i don't remember what that is uh it's a it's a developer i think they had guild wars was that the game from marina net can you check it out is it guild wars there's an online gaming yeah they did give awards too yeah okay yeah got it so they've been playing

guild wars 2 very successful so mmo my take has little like some to do to this but more to do what now what um adam you talked about in the last podcast you talked about joe's joseph kim's uh game makers podcast where he talked about his series a and as guest he had his investors um who invested in his in his uh series a now one of the investors was galaxy and galaxy does a lot of uh a lot of investment in gaming business and there also he's doing super you're now one of his investors is galaxy interactive and and michael fann who's partner galaxy interactive was on this podcast and somehow he ended up being he ended talking about uh founding teams and he was quite quite critical about these uh top tier um funded game

companies as you know as as this one where they said like x blizzard x riot x big massive company founders and he said that working at these companies is i'm paraphrasing he said that working at these companies is totally different than working at a startup when you work at these big companies he said like when you snap a finger you got all the resources in front of you all everything is done all the people are here uh and and it's totally different than than the amount of resources you have at your disposal when you're in a startup it's just a fraction of that and if you're not used to it if you're not used to being scrappy uh you likely fail and vice versa i think is true for people coming from startups and going to or small companies and going to big companies it's just such a different game with with the management managing up and not focusing what you're doing but focusing what you're communicating anyways so what i'm trying to say is i'm not trying to undermine omg here i'm just thinking about all these studios of x blizzard x riot that have gathered these monster

founding rounds funding rounds namely from a16z and i personally don't know if these companies have shipped anything to date i just know that that there are quite many of of these x riot x blizzard companies and so but kind of listening to that i think michael with this one in particular though right like in this one in particular um they they co-founded arenanet which already was a blizzard spin-off from what was it 20 2000 right like they they already succeeded as a spin-off and they built arenanet they built guild wars 2 which was a very successful mmo so i i agree with that that that general generalization of blizzard and riot employees but i think these guys in particular pat and jamie have done the spin-off properly and clearly have been able to ship products outside of that kind of unlimited funding within blizzard yeah yeah i think they're definitely worth the 22

million yes right in this case go ahead i think this in this case is warranted i mean they've done they've been there done that right they've built a successful company and they sold it to nc soft right so i think then they exited but but i i do get i get skeptical when i just read these headlines and like some some you know outrageous number is raised by x big co game devs because it's like unless i mean there's a there's so yeah there's these sort of environmental differences and there's the resource differences and and there's the the degree to which you have to do stuff yourself that in a big co someone else would do for you um and those are like substantive differences between operating in a startup and operating in a big go but my bigger question is like what does that even mean right like because because your experience being like a level designer uh you know on league of legends or whatever or like and you know whatever you know a character balancer on league

of legends does that qualify you to build a game i mean these companies are big and especially like riot like they have i mean people might argue they have they have one really big successful hit game right and they but they employ like thousands of people and so you know anybody could and this happens because people come out of facebook and they do the same thing they kind of claim a lot more credit for the success of the game than they probably actually contributed right and so if you join riot in 2012 and you were like you know whatever an economist or you were a character designer even a piano yeah but even a pm for some really specific component of the game 100 right does that mean you're you're uh you've got success launching uh shipping successful games but to me that does or you've got experience shipping successful games to me that does it but that game was successful there was momentum it was a rocket ship you sort of joined it in orbit and and started working on like uh you

know a rotary piston in the engine eight right versus like yeah we built this thing in our garage right like i i always i always just i just i just wonder like how much due diligence could possibly be done digging into the actual contributions of these people when they say i'm ex whatever i'm next big company and it's not just these companies i don't want to single them out but you see this happening especially like you get people that are like oh there's x growth at facebook and then you you ask some people and like i never heard of that person like it's like oh yeah they were an analyst on the growth team um and they were like you know basically the bottom of the ladder and then they you know they go and pitch themselves as x growth of facebook and it's also like well they joined facebook in 2019 so like well facebook's already kind of an established company at that point how much did you really contribute and just to be clear i don't mean to dog at all at omg or one more game at all i was just kind of this news came in as i was listening to the podcast with with joe and michael fan talking about about this and i kind of raised it up but but you there's a clear point like they've

done a startup before and then i just started thinking about there's so many startups that have spun out of blizzard i mean it feels like there's three every quarter and every one of them gets like 15 million seed funds yeah i mean my thought here is that like we haven't seen any products from any of these companies that have spun out yet i think one of the first ones that spun out was second dinner and and i imagine that they should be relatively close but uh even if i knew i couldn't tell uh bonfire i think was the first one and dreamhead and dreamhaven still yeah bonfire was the first one and they have the multiple studios yeah yeah i think second dinner was before uh what's his name left bonfire but either way like on on this pitch particularly on omg right like these guys have already proved that they can spin off they can build a startup from from ground up with arenanet and guild wars and become successful so this they're well worth it but the one thing is with the pitch it sounds like it's like a pvp real time strategy game uh right wow

especially to come from mmos like the success they have from guild wars mmos are are big now they like i think we've gotten over the thing of like there's only world of warcraft and that's it right why not build a competitive pvp um mmo right you use that that talent instead of going directly against mobas right now which is basically what rts what an rts game would be yeah i think that that's a bigger the product challenge is interesting like that's i mean anyways all the best to omg let's let's move on