The TechCrunch Exchange is a weekly startup-and-markets newsletter. The daily column where it gets its name is what inspired it. Do you want it in your inbox every Saturday? You can sign up here.
I hope that you are safe and happy today, my dear friends. The weekend is here. I hope the Exchange note is fun. Two of my favorite things are gaming and competition.
Some builders are sticking to more traditional models while the venture capital world is losing its mind over video games that bring fiscally focused activity to the gaming space.
One such company is Frost Giant, which announced a Series A this week worth $25 million, and is building a game. I have been a fan of this genre for a long time. I am curious as a journalist.
I talked to the Two Tims on the phone about what they are building. The company is still in the process of releasing its title. But! It will be a real-time strategy game, a genre made famous by popular entries like Age of Empires and Starcraft. We learned that it should feature a campaign. The group is talking to players of the game so that it works out for more competitive battles.
The game is being built to be a service, with a long shelf life. That is a big goal. The core is a big gamble. I think venture capital is for venturing into the unknown. Not just building more.
We will be keeping an eye on what the game is building for now, as Frost Giant is staying mum on setting and anything more substantial about the game's core elements.
After being founded in 2020, Frost Giant raised $4.7 million in a seed round and another $5 million in a later round. The Series A should give the team of 25 full-timers and 12 contractors plenty of breathing room to get the game right.
Let's talk about the game and how to get it right. The studio that makes grand strategy games is based in Sweden. They are real-time in a way, but different from the traditional genre in terms of complexity and length of play. If you know what you're doing, you can play the game in 15 minutes. Crusader Kings 3 could take you days and days to play through. I am not aware of that fact.
Royal Court is the first major expansion of the company. The company only told fans last October that it would come out in February. The news was a bit of a surprise, but after some issues with expansions for other titles, the player base appeared mostly cool with the later-than- anticipated launch.
The launch date for Royal Court is February 8, and as a public company, we will be able to see if the wager that making players wait and possibly lose interest is worth it. I am buying the expansion, but don't want to over-index on my own experiences.
The title will be coming to consoles this week. I was invited to a press event with the company and the studio it hired to help bring the game to a handsets-powered environment. I learned a lot about how games are made for other platforms when I was a kid. It takes a lot of work to make a PC game work in a non keyboard/mouse environment.
Did you catch the story in The Information? Databricks and Snowflake were friends at one point. If you asked Databricks about the other company, it might tell you that they were operating in different areas.
It is no longer the case as The Information notes.
Why bring this up? Is it possible to make another public request for the Databricks S-1 document? Well, yes, but more to point out that startups of all sizes love to talk about how they aren't really competing with one company or another. As they grow, they tend to overlap with a larger portion of the market.
If a startup says that they aren't competing with a similar entity or a major firm in their space, just set a timer. And wait.
Alex.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
