Double Loop raises $8M for mobile game development

Double Loop Games has closed an $8 million round of funding as the firm begins beefing up for the production of its mobile puzzle hybrid game.

The funding is a massive round for a female-run game studio. Veteran market leaders Emily Greer and Shelby Moledina began the firm to style deep games for smartphones.

Hiro Capital led the round with participation from Garena, Riot Games, London Venture Partners (LVP), and other people. As aspect of the round, Cherry Freeman, a cofounder and companion of Hiro Capital, has joined the Double Loop board. Double Loop will use the investment for its initial mobile title, a hybrid puzzle game with a deep social world, and expand its group, mentioned Greer and Moledina in an interview with GamesBeat.

The founders’ vision is to make games for all sorts of players, developed to be social, relaxing, and accessible to every person, going beyond persons who recognize as gamers. Greer serves as CEO and was the former boos of Kongregate, although Moledina runs development and spent a couple of decades generating games at providers such as Warner Bros. Between the two of the founders, they have published about 50 or 60 games every single.

“It’s nice to have a healthy bank account and to be growing,” Greer mentioned. “We always had a target of raising $10 million. It made sense to break it into two different rounds. A good chunk of this will go toward finishing the game, but the majority is planned for marketing and live operations.”

Greer mentioned the group hit a milestone of getting a playable game to show off, so she knew it was time to raise a new round of funding, following by means of on a program just after the firm raised $2.5 million in seed funding more than a year ago.

“We’re making a puzzle hybrid game that has a really deep metagame,” Moledina mentioned. “Our audience is people who don’t consider themselves to be gamers. But they may be playing actually an hour or two of games a day on their phone. But we feel like they’re really critically underserved in some ways. We think we have some really novel and interesting and deep ways to offer them something new.”

The mobile games market is continuing to see massive development in 2021, as mobile insights firm App Annie projected it will develop 20% to $120 billion this year.

“We are hiring,” Moledina mentioned. “We’ve got team members distributed up and down the West Coast and a couple on the East Coast. We’ve worked with them and we’re flexible on that. We’re definitely building for flexibility in the long term.”

Greer mentioned it was fortunate the group had a very good six months with each other in the prototyping phase ahead of they had to go into lockdown. That helped establish a very good work routine for the group ahead of they had to deal with remote working, Greer mentioned.

“We had pretty good puzzle mechanics and a lot of in-depth conversations,” Greer mentioned. “We were pretty far along in the prototyping process.”

Double Loop has 14 personnel, and it is hiring at least 4 more to deal with production. Down the road, Greer mentioned that the firm will employ more persons for publishing and advertising and marketing, as the firm is going to be self-publishing its initial title.

Hiro Capital, cofounded by former Eidos chairman Ian Livingstone and Luke Alvarez, has been actively investing in games this year. Livingstone spoke at our GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse occasion in January. Moledina and Greer mentioned that had numerous very good conversations with Livingstone and other people at Hiro Capital about gameplay. They showed about 10 to 12 hours of gameplay to the investors and that helped motivate the investments, Greer mentioned.

“We had some really fun game design conversations and it just clicked from that very first one,” Moledina mentioned.

The lockdown also made it simpler to speak to investors outdoors of Silicon Valley.

“It really shrank the world in terms of who we could really talk to, from an investment perspective,” Greer mentioned.

The Singapore-based Garena, meanwhile, is the publisher of Free Fire, the most downloaded mobile game in the world in each 2019 and 2020. And Los Angeles-based Riot Games has been actively spreading out beyond its core League of Legends game to fresh game providers and diverse founders.

Greer mentioned the firm hopes to have a soft launch for the game in the fourth quarter and then launch the title sometime next year. But she mentioned it will rely on the metrics for the benefits of the soft launch.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz