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The gaming industry has never been hotter or had higher expectations from investors pouring billions into upstarts able to adjust to changing tides faster than existing giants.
Bay area-based Manticore Games is one of the second layer gaming platforms looking to capitalize on market dynamics. The startup tells TechCrunch that it has closed a $ 100 million Series C funding round, bringing its total funding to $ 160 million. The round was led by XN, with participation from SoftBank and LVP alongside existing investors Benchmark, Bitkraft, Correlation Ventures and Epic Games.
When Manticore closed its Series B in September 2019, VCs were starting to take Roblox and the gaming industry more seriously, but it took the pandemic to really broaden their expectations for the market. “Gaming is now a great bona fide category,” CEO Frederic Descamps told TechCrunch.
Manticore’s Core gaming platform is conceptually quite similar to Roblox, the big difference is that the games company aims to quickly develop a crowd-oriented game and creator platform 13+. who may have already left Roblox behind. The challenge will be to convince this demographic faster that Roblox can expand its own ambitions, while other venture capital-backed game startups like Rec Room, which recently raised $ 1.2 billion. , compete for the same price.
Like other gamers, Manticore is attempting to create a game discovery platform directly in a game engine. They haven’t built the engine technology from scratch; they’ve worked closely with Epic Games, which makes the Unreal Engine and invested $ 15 million in the company last year.
One of the main goals of the Core platform is to give creators a true drag-and-drop platform for making games with a special emphasis on ‘remixing’, allowing users to choose predefined environments, Drop in pre-rendered 3D elements, choose a game mode and post it to the web. For creators looking to inject new mechanics or assets into a title, technical know-how will be needed, but the team at Manticore is hoping that lowering barriers to entry for new creators means they can grow alongside. of the platform. Manticore’s big bet is on the flexibility of their engine, hoping creators will join them for the chance to design their own mechanics or create their own path to monetization, something established app stores wouldn’t allow them. not.
“Designers can implement their own styles of [in-app purchases] and what we’re really hoping for here is that maybe the next Battle Pass equivalent innovation will result, ”co-founder Jordan Maynard tells us.
All of this comes at an additional cost; developers earn 50% of the revenue from their games, leaving more of the potential revenue stranded in fees channeled to the platforms Manticore depends on than if they were building directly for the App Store, but that revenue split is still much more friendly to creators than what they can earn on platforms like Roblox.
There are many challenges in creating cross-platform side game platforms. The platforms involved not only have to contend with the piling up of revenue sharing fees on non-PC platforms, but also some hardware platforms that are reluctant to allow all of them, an area in which Sony has been particularly persistent with PlayStation. The long-term success of these platforms may ultimately rest on greater independence, which seems hard to imagine happening on consoles and mobile ecosystems.
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