Powering Game Developers to Create the Cross-platform, Multiplayer Games of Tomorrow
March 12, 2020Mar 12, 2020 | By Kevin Zhang

The global gaming market reached $148B in 2019, growing 7% year on year, with close to 2.5B players. It is now the biggest entertainment market in the world, topping music ($19B), movies ($42.5B) and streaming video ($24B) combined. 2019 also marked the 10 year anniversary of League of Legends (LoL), with 115M monthly active players spending $1.4B. Over its lifetime LoL has grossed more than $20B, making it a top 3 gaming franchise, behind only Mario. I highlight LoL because it is a real time multiplayer game of enormous scale, created in an era before mass adoption of game engines for frontend creation like Unity and Unreal, and scalable cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Riot had to spend tens of millions building their own game engine, server infrastructure, and backend. These days, the first two are largely relegated to robust 3rd party tools and platforms, in the process creating giants like Unity (approximately $6B) and Unreal (~$15B). The last piece around backend unfortunately is still built custom, one game at a time, costing 10-15% of the budget over 2-3 years (backend developers command the highest pay), with ongoing live operations in the 10% range of revenue. This is the problem Eden and Chris are tackling with their new startup Pragma, building an extensible “backend as a service” solution that can work across any game on any platform, not siloed and custom to each game. I’m honored to jump on the journey with them and lead their $4.2M Series Seed.

I’ve known both through the LA entrepreneur and gaming communities. Eden is a serial entrepreneur who’s run his own hedge fund as well as preferred development agency Fisherman Labs on interactive media to the likes Snap, Sony. He’s also worked in investment banking, learned to code and reached top 10 in World of Warcraft (currently obsessed with Apex Legends). Chris is one of the best backend engineering leaders period, having scaled enormous games at Popcap and Riot Games. Most recently he built his own gaming studio, which sold to Phoenix Labs. The two of them are exactly the type of passionate, ambitious entrepreneurs with unique subject matter expertise we look for at Upfront, and when I discovered they’ve known each other for years and finally decided to co-found a startup, I jumped at the chance to invest.

When I invested in Stray Bombay last year, a seasoned gaming team building a cross platform, multiplayer game, I talked a bit about the coming shift towards ever larger, more accessible games for an expanding player base. Simply put we are in another golden age of game development, with a torrent of capital available from traditional publishers, VCs (existing and many new funds in just the last few years from former gaming operators), and most notably, tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Epic, Improbable Labs, etc. Veteran game developers are setting up new studios and raising capital from the above to create cross platform, multiplayer games. They all need backend services spanning accounts, player data, lobbies, matchmaking, social systems, telemetry, store fulfillment, and more. A survey of popular games and their backends span Java, .net, custom C++, and to a lesser degree Python. I strongly believe in Eden and Chris’ vision that this can be productized and delivered as a service, ready to scale out of the box to millions of concurrent players. They have hit the ground running with their first customer (fantastic IP already with a huge following), please reach out on their website if you’re an interested game studio or talented backend developer.

Kevin Zhang is a partner at Upfront. He is excited by interdisciplinary teams solving big problems in healthcare and the life sciences. He's also a passionate gamer and invests in interactive media platforms, tools and content.

The global gaming market reached $148B in 2019, growing 7% year on year, with close to 2.5B players. It is now the biggest entertainment market in the world, topping music ($19B), movies ($42.5B) and streaming video ($24B) combined. 2019 also marked the 10 year anniversary of League of Legends (LoL), with 115M monthly active players spending $1.4B. Over its lifetime LoL has grossed more than $20B, making it a top 3 gaming franchise, behind only Mario. I highlight LoL because it is a real time multiplayer game of enormous scale, created in an era before mass adoption of game engines for frontend creation like Unity and Unreal, and scalable cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Riot had to spend tens of millions building their own game engine, server infrastructure, and backend. These days, the first two are largely relegated to robust 3rd party tools and platforms, in the process creating giants like Unity (approximately $6B) and Unreal (~$15B). The last piece around backend unfortunately is still built custom, one game at a time, costing 10-15% of the budget over 2-3 years (backend developers command the highest pay), with ongoing live operations in the 10% range of revenue. This is the problem Eden and Chris are tackling with their new startup Pragma, building an extensible “backend as a service” solution that can work across any game on any platform, not siloed and custom to each game. I’m honored to jump on the journey with them and lead their $4.2M Series Seed.

I’ve known both through the LA entrepreneur and gaming communities. Eden is a serial entrepreneur who’s run his own hedge fund as well as preferred development agency Fisherman Labs on interactive media to the likes Snap, Sony. He’s also worked in investment banking, learned to code and reached top 10 in World of Warcraft (currently obsessed with Apex Legends). Chris is one of the best backend engineering leaders period, having scaled enormous games at Popcap and Riot Games. Most recently he built his own gaming studio, which sold to Phoenix Labs. The two of them are exactly the type of passionate, ambitious entrepreneurs with unique subject matter expertise we look for at Upfront, and when I discovered they’ve known each other for years and finally decided to co-found a startup, I jumped at the chance to invest.

When I invested in Stray Bombay last year, a seasoned gaming team building a cross platform, multiplayer game, I talked a bit about the coming shift towards ever larger, more accessible games for an expanding player base. Simply put we are in another golden age of game development, with a torrent of capital available from traditional publishers, VCs (existing and many new funds in just the last few years from former gaming operators), and most notably, tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Epic, Improbable Labs, etc. Veteran game developers are setting up new studios and raising capital from the above to create cross platform, multiplayer games. They all need backend services spanning accounts, player data, lobbies, matchmaking, social systems, telemetry, store fulfillment, and more. A survey of popular games and their backends span Java, .net, custom C++, and to a lesser degree Python. I strongly believe in Eden and Chris’ vision that this can be productized and delivered as a service, ready to scale out of the box to millions of concurrent players. They have hit the ground running with their first customer (fantastic IP already with a huge following), please reach out on their website if you’re an interested game studio or talented backend developer.