Resolution Games has just received $7.5 million in a series B investment round that will go toward AR and VR game creation. The Scandinavian game studio is funded by MizMaa Ventures, GP Bullhound, and Fly Forever.
Unity’s own founder, David Helgason, is also an investor. With prior investors like GV, Bonnier Ventures, Partech, Creandum, and Sisu Game Ventures on board, reports Venture Beat’s Dean Takahashi.
AR Gaming Gets Funded
With global estimates for AR and VR smart glasses expected to reach a worth of $31 billion by 2023, AR has a tall order to fulfill. Innovators in the AR realm have developed uses in gaming, but also in autism education, for surgical use, to shop on Amazon, and several other applications.
Resolution Games has already created AR and VR games for mobile and PC headsets. They also recently designed an AR and Mixed Reality game for the Magic Leap One. From the looks of it, the gaming studio is already seasoned and ready to use that $7.5M funding in two growing markets.
Upload VR’s Jamie Feltham reports, “Resolution has had a pretty busy few years, starting out with a free solitaire game on Gear VR before launching its popular Bait! fishing series, which has enjoyed VR and AR entries and even a minigame inside Facebook’s Spaces social VR platform.”
The Upload VR reporter details, “Since then the studio has released Google Daydream titles like Wonderglade and Narrows but, more recently, launched an AR version of Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise on the Magic Leap One.”
Pigs are flying today! @AngryBirds FPS: First Person Slingshot – the game we made with @Rovio – just flew onto the @MagicLeap One. #AngryBirdsFPS pic.twitter.com/w8aK31euTn
— Resolution Games (@resolutiongame) October 9, 2018
It’s an AR and VR Market and Resolution’s Jumping In
VR’s future worth dangles right below AR’s with 51.2M users for AR and 36.7M users for VR set for the end of 2018. The reason why? Many point the finger towards access to hardware that’s more readily available, which the smartphone wins hands down. To be fair, Q4 hasn’t ended yet, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still up for the taking.
What sparked investor’s to infuse Resolution Games with $7.5M (a total $13.5M in funding)? Maybe it was the four billion game downloads behind Angry Birds games and a fanbase to boot. Or perhaps it had something to do with the two million downloads and counting of Bait! for VR. Just a hunch.
Tommy Palm, CEO of Resolution Games, was quoted by Venture Beat saying, “We’re very excited to have these high-caliber thought leaders join our team, and to see the continued support from our current investors.”
Thinking about what lies ahead for the group, Palm confidently states, “With this group behind us, we can work towards scaling and being better prepared to take advantage of the maturing market.”
In the Upload VR article, Palm suggests that the release of standalone headsets like the Oculus Quest may be what jump starts consumer buy-in. Palm predicts that the headset and variety of games being created are a signal of the “viable multiplayer market”. This leads many fans online to believe they’ll release a game onto the new standalone in the future.
