In 2023, two industry veterans decided to establish a game studio.
Ivan Marchand, a veteran of firms including Amazon, Google and EA, and Arthur Van Clap Ceulen, formerly of Ubisoft, were dazzled by the stories they had read about small studios raising millions of dollars on the back of pitches that wowed investors.
“We had a strong team and strong concept, so started pitching to publishers and investors,” Marchand tells Gamesindustry.biz.
“Very quickly, I saw that something was wrong.”
The duo were told over and over again that if they had only pitched two or three years earlier, they’d have already left with their money. But times had changed and there was less cash up for grabs.
Marchand and Van Clap Ceulen’s story, sadly, is not unique. It’s become alarmingly common in the last few years. Smaller studios across the industry have found it much more challenging to secure funding. This isn’t a case of fewer projects worth financial backing, either; publishers and investors have the cash but have become increasingly risk-averse post-COVID and have instead chosen to keep their powder dry for when market conditions are more stable.
“Something was wrong in the market,” Marchand says.
The duo, after speaking with publishers and investors, developed the concept of Gamevestor, a new French-based crowdfunding platform designed exclusively for games. The service is designed for developers looking for between €100,000 and €5 million to fund their projects. Consumers can either back the project in a traditional fashion – i.e. to receive a copy of the game – or they can invest €100 or more for a share of a game’s revenue.
Void Reaver is one of the projects on Gamevestor. | Image credit: Banana Blitz/Entalto Publishing
“We wanted to transform players into investors, based on a royalty model,” Marchand, Gamevestor’s president, explains.
“We only have game projects, no tech, crypto or hardware on the platform. All of the projects are vetted by a team of experts and we offer tailored support to studios, with very limited spots.”
Gamevestor is also today (Friday, January 16) announcing that it has secured €1 million in funding. This is mostly going towards paying off the substantial costs of securing authorisation to provide investment with regulators, as well as building up the platform. It also provides the company with a bit of runway.
“We provide marketing for the studios to acquire players and investors for our platform,” Gamevestor GM Van Clap Ceulen explains.
“We are in a hand-in-hand collaboration with the studios. We have a boutique approach where we select only a few games, and we really support them with real marketing money. This investment will enable us to run for up to two years; we take the exact same fee as Kickstarter and other competitors, but the service we provide is much more costly.
“We will lose money initially, but when a successfully funded game starts selling and starts sharing revenue with investors, we’ll take an additional fee; then will be more balanced on our finances. It’s important to us that we share the risk with the studio and the investors.”
Campaigns on Gamevestor look remarkably similar to other crowdfunding platforms; 45 days to secure funding. Developers can have various ‘objectives’, the service’s spin on stretch goals, but once the first objective is surpassed, the campaign is considered a success.
The platform also has a group of angel investors who can put down their money ten days before the campaign goes live, “to bring traction to the project,” Manchard says.
Another interesting feature of Gamevestor is that once a campaign is successful and completed, the developer is not given all of their money at once. Instead, the platform gives it to studios in stages, much in the same way a publisher might have a studio hit certain milestones before giving them the next piece of runway.
“We do it by milestone,” Manchard says. “For example, a studio could get a third of the money when the campaign is successful, another third six months later once a demo is released, and the final third comes when the game hits Early Access.”
He continues: “We haven’t met any studios that have an issue with that. It’s reassuring for investors, too. A studio can’t run away with 100% of the money.”
“We derisk projects. We already have publishers that are interested in working with us because they can reduce the risk on a project”
Ivan Marchand, Gamevestor
Crowdfunding in games ebbs and flows in popularity. There have been big years, like 2012 (Elite Dangerous, Broken Sword 5, Star Citizen, Double Fine Adventure) and 2015 (Yooka-Laylee, Shenmue 3, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night) when big projects from big names were successfully funded on platforms such as Kickstarter, but it’s been some time since a major game emerged from these platforms.
But the desire for people to back these upcoming games has not gone away.
“2024 was the biggest year for successful game projects funded on Kickstarter ever,” he says. “Until 2016, Kickstarter was very efficient. Then, publishers and investors were looking for games to fund, especially during COVID. The studios no longer needed crowdfunding, but they do now. Kickstarter is not sufficient anymore because of the rising costs of production. Before, you could have a team of three or four people, they would raise €30,000-to-€50,000 and would go to the next step.
“Kickstarter is just a marketing beat. You do a campaign on Kickstarter to say something like: ‘We got a 300-person team funded in 48 hours’. It’s a good thing and a good start for a video game project. It actually proves there is a market. But if you want real money to really fund your game, we need something else. We are this missing link. Right now, with everything that’s happening, funding is harder than ever for studios. Kickstarter is not enough anymore, so we are here.”
The Gamevestor website is launching this week ahead of the platform’s rollout in early February, when there will be three projects available for backing immediately and another two in the pipeline. The hope is to have a new crowdfunding campaign going live every other week. Gamevestor adds that it is being very selective with the games it is featuring on its platform, saying that more than 200 developers had reached out.
Black One Blood Brothers is another game raising money through Gamevestor. | Image credit: Helios Studio
“We had a lot of small studios, but also big names have reached out and are very interested,” Manchard says. “These are studios that could easily get funded on their own or with a traditional investor. But they are willing to see how it goes because they would love to be able to leverage their playerbase in order to fund their next game. Financially, it would be more interesting for the studios. But also, they would involve their community, which would ensure easier marketing in the sense that their players would be their investors and they would be more willing to push the game out there because they have a strong interest in the game being successful commercially.”
Over the last few years, developers have found it increasingly hard to secure funding. Gamevestor’s founders themselves have experienced this very problem, but they see their platform as a win-win for studios, publishers and investors.
“We derisk projects,” Manchard says. “We already have publishers that are interested in working with us because they can reduce the risk on a project. If players invest in a project, it means there is strong initial traction and that’s the main thing that’s missing for those publishers and investors at the moment. They do have money, but they do not want to take risk anymore because of what happened during COVID. A lot of people invested in a lot of things and now they cannot get the return. They want to be sure that a project will at least refund them before they do anything.”
In fact, the platform is already in discussions with publishers about how where they can fit into this ecosystem.
“Mid-sized games have the potential for the highest return on investment, but, right now, they are also the ones struggling the most to find funding”
Arthur Van Clap Ceulen, Gamevestor
“We have come at the perfect moment for that because publishers – we are already in talks with a few – are willing to test us,” Manchard continues. “If a project is successfully funded on Gamevestor, they might double that amount and position themselves on the project and they’ll split the revenue. Half of the publishers we talk to are really curious. We are already working with what we call a la carte publishers, who quickly understood the potential. If the launch is successful, we’ll be working with bigger, more traditional publishers which want to derisk projects. The risk is split between us, the studio and the player; if a project works, everybody is happy.”
Long term, the Gamevestor founders want the platform to host crowdfunding campaigns for big names in the industry.
“The big dream is being able to work with big IP,” Manchard says. “Obviously, big studios and big IPs will attract a lot of attention. But we are quite confident. We are already in discussions with big IP, which is a strong sign. Obviously, our first goal is to successfully launch and fund projects and be appreciated by the players and the studio.”
Van Clap Ceulen adds: “The big dream is to be the No.1 funding method for mid-sized studios. It’s mostly studios between the very small indies and AAA that have can explode. Those mid-sized games have the potential for the highest return on investment, but, right now, they are also the ones struggling the most to find funding. We want to take this empty space in the market right now. Our ultimate goal is to be the No.1 source of funding for those mid-tier games.”