EU-based Venture builder Embria has announced a $500 thousand seed investment in F2P publisher 10K Riders.
10K Riders is built around a “creative-yet-reliable” co-development approach, uniting different developers to pool resources and knowledge. Since the company’s founding in August 2021, 10K has worked on over 100 gaming projects with 78 studios online.
Through this approach, 10K Riders hope to address the problem of developers using their resources on projects the market doesn’t want, instead allowing them to collaborate directly with the publishers, creating games driven by market trends.
10K Riders founder and CEO Ilia Tumenko said, “The mobile gaming industry is in choppy waters right now, and we want to offer it our approach that can serialise success. We strive to share the knowledge and resources with the studios, offering a predictable path from the concept stage to launch, in a joint effort to release excellent games”.
Although co-development is an established method of game design, 10K Riders claims it’s taking a new approach, focusing on careful, data-driven development of initial ideas and matching each one to a studio with the best experience. The developer will also be given access to asset packs and art direction resources, lowering development costs.
The publisher has up to 40 teams working simultaneously on five different concepts, allowing each to put their own spin on them in terms of style, genre and setting, as well as implementing any additional features and mechanics. After testing, the best concepts are passed on to participating studios. Through this method, 10K Riders allows the developers to create games they’re confident will be successful.
Embria head of analytics Stan Gorozhankin said, “Investing in 10K Riders is a perfect opportunity for Embria to support an experienced, ambitious team. We share their vision of talent support, and we see great potential in the co-development of mobile games”.
Mobile gaming continues to grow in the market, with Ubisoft recently announcing that its mobile arm was a strong performer, despite the company’s decline in sales as a whole.
