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freedom games said it has completed its first outside funding round, raising a total of $10 million in both primary and secondary capital to publish indie games. Play ventures led the round.
The Huntsville, Alabama-based company is only about 18 months old, but has published successful indie projects such as Coromon, Dreamscaper, Dark Deity, Cat Café Manager and Symphony of War. Each of those titles sold hundreds of thousands of copies, which is pretty good by indie standards.
“As we looked for a partner to join us for the next leg of our exciting journey, we knew we needed someone with a background in bringing compelling experiences to a wide audience, and Play Ventures definitely does that,” says Ben Robinson, COO of Freedom Games, in a statement.
“We couldn’t be prouder to be working together. Not only will this enable us to thrive even more high-quality indies and continue to grow our platform for creators to share their content, but also to remain committed to our developer-first mindset by continuing to invest in our suite of tools and services for indie developers,” said Donovan Duncan, CEO of Freedom Games, in a statement.
Play Ventures said it shares Freedom’s vision for a diverse industry that brings out unknown game development talent from around the world. The investment will accelerate Freedom’s growth, enable the hiring of additional production staff to expand and better serve indie developers, expand their community platform: wiki.gg, and expand Freedom Games’ indie game catalog.
Play Ventures’ investment was joined by Nashville Capital Network (NCN) and GFR Fund.
“Freedom’s rapid growth is a clear sign of where the heart of the gaming industry lies, with indie games,” Harri Manninen, Founding Partner at Play Ventures, said in a statement. “We believe Freedom Games will become a fixture in the indie world alongside Devolver, Annapurna, tinyBuild, Team 17 and so many others. As fans, we also look forward to playing across all platforms what they have in store for 2023.”
The success continues into Q4 2022 with the anticipated release of the first indie title 9 Years of Shadows, and into Q1 2023 with highly anticipated games such as Mail Time, One Lonely Outpost and many more.
“We support indie developers and creator ideas,” Donovan said in an email to GamesBeat. “We believe that more and more creativity will emerge here. This normally means smaller development teams that normally don’t have access to the resources and capabilities we provide. Our games themselves are very broad, we think we can find fun in many genres and instead we look at supporting a variety of games versus a single niche or a specific type of game.
The company is not focused on Web3 games yet. It has 10 employees and it started in August 2020, after Donovan left his position as president of Fandom.
“During my career, I was fortunate enough to build and lead some of the largest gaming communities in the world, and historically we would use advertising dollars to grow these communities and keep them online,” Donovan said. “These advertising dollars only came from the biggest games, but for a long time I felt that indie creativity was at a disadvantage because I couldn’t spend the big budgets. With our community platform, wiki.gg, our unique marketing experience and our understanding of the community , we believe we can take great indie ideas and share them with the world in a way that makes economic sense for our developer partners, and they share great games with the world that we as gamers love.”
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