Freedom Games raises $10M to publish indie games

Freedom Games said it has completed its first outside priced-financing round, raising a total of $10 million in both primary and secondary capital to publish indie games. Play Ventures led the round.

The Huntsville, Alabama-based company is only about 18 months old, but it has published successful indie projects like Coromon, Dreamscaper, Dark Deity, Cat Café Manager and Symphony of War. Each of those titles sold hundreds of thousands of copies, which is pretty good by indie standards.

“When seeking a partner to join us for the next part of our exciting journey, we knew we needed someone with a background in bringing compelling experiences to broad audiences, and Play Ventures absolutely does,” said Ben Robinson, COO of Freedom Games, in a statement.

“We couldn’t be more proud to work together. Not only will this enable us to bring even more high quality indies to fruition and continue growing our platform for creators to share their content, but to also stay committed to our developer first mindset by continuing to invest in our suite of tools and services for indie developers,” said Donovan Duncan, CEO of Freedom Games, in a statement.

Play Ventures said it shares Freedom’s vision for a diverse industry elevating unknown game development talent from around the world. The investment will accelerate Freedom’s growth, allow the hiring of additional production staff to expand and better serve indie developers, expand their community platform: wiki.gg, and grow the Freedom Games’ indie game catalog.

Play Ventures’ investment was joined by Nashville Capital Network (NCN) and GFR Fund.

“Freedom’s rapid growth is a clear sign of where the heart of the game industry lies, with indie games,” said Harri Manninen, Founding Partner at Play Ventures, in a statement. “We believe that Freedom Games will become a staple name in the indie space, alongside the likes of Devolver, Annapurna, tinyBuild, Team 17, and so many others. As fans, we are also looking forward to playing what they have in store for 2023 across all platforms.”

The success continues into Q4 2022 with the anticipated release of premiere indie title 9 Years of Shadows, and into Q1 2023 with highly anticipated games like Mail Time, One Lonely Outpost, and many more.

“We are supporting indie developers and creator ideas,” said Donovan in an email to GamesBeat. “We believe this is where more and more creativity will originate. This normally means smaller development teams that might not normally have access to the resources and opportunities we provide. Our games themselves are very broad, we think we can find fun in many genres and instead look to support a variety of games vs. a single niche or specific type of game.”

The company isn’t yet focused on Web3 games. It has 10 employees and it started in August 2020, after Donovan left his post as president of Fandom.

“During my career I was fortunate enough to build and run some of the largest gaming communities in the world, and historically we would take ad dollars to grow these communities and keep them online,” Donovan said. “These ad dollars only came from the biggest games, but I long felt that indie creativity was at a disadvantage by not being able to spend the big budgets. With our community platform, wiki.gg, our unique marketing experience, and our understanding of community, we believe we can take great indie ideas and share them with the world in a way that makes great economic sense for our developer partners, and shares these awesome games with the world, which excites the heck out of us as gamers.”