Ex-Riot developers are making “Breath of the Wild with friends”
And why venture capital firms keep funding the same video game names
Former Riot Games developers are working on a new open world game they’re pitching as “Breath of the Wild with friends” or “Skyrim with friends.”
“Everybody has wanted the League of Legends MMO, or The Witcher but within the League of Legends universe, and just for so many different reasons, we’re just not set up to be able to do it,” former Riot Games vice president Michael Chow said of his previous employer in an hour-long interview with this newsletter.
Chow started the Believer game studio alongside former Rioter Steven Snow, chief product officer, and the team features executives from Twitter, Bungie, EA and more. The team announced on Tuesday it secured $55 million in funding, from investors including Riot and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.
“Open world games are very expensive, most people can't make them,” Chow said.
“My whole life, I’ve thought VCs sucked,” Chow said. “Turns out actually some of them have gotten pretty good over the past few years.”
Chow previously worked on the League of Legends mobile game, Wild Rift, and spent two years working on research and development for Riot. Before that, he helped create the mobile game Words with Friends, which launched in 2009. He said he sees the industry has a concentration of single player narrative-driven games like The Last of Us, which have traditionally been box products, or sessions-based multiplayer games like League, but fewer games that possess both qualities.
“We’ve worked on the problem for years in Riot R&D but we’re just never really structured to be able to go after it. As an example, we are much better funded than Riot’s MMO team right now,” Chow said, referencing Riot’s massively multiplayer online game that is still under development.
The Believer Company is looking at creating an open world game that is “characterized by optimism and by being a place worth fighting for,” Shankar Gupta-Harrison, chief marketing officer, told this newsletter.
“Open world games predominantly focused on a world that’s characterized by harshness and difficulty,” Gupta-Harrison said. “That’s understandable. Players thrive under conditions of hardship and difficulty, but it often can have an effect on people. In particular, when you’re spending time with your friends, it’s great to be in a place that looks like a place that you might take a vacation or that makes you feel uplifted.”
Gupta-Harrison is also in charge of developing the new intellectual property and conceptualizing the new title, and will be drawing upon his experience being a dungeon master over Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.
“Imagine Genshin Impact but you share that world with two to 12 of your friends,” Chow said. “Almost like a private server MMO. Other metaphors and examples we’ve given: like Skyrim with friends, Breath of the Wild with friends.”
The studio isn’t ready to share concept art yet, but they have “millions of dollars worth of concept art,” Chow teased. The new game will feature a very broad world and isn’t specifically locked into an Eastern or Western style.
“Open world games are very expensive, most people can't make them,” Chow said. “Most people can't collect the capital to do so with the talent to do so.”
A significant part of the $55 million funding will go towards employee salaries, developing new technology and training employees on how to use those new tools. Believer is bullish on generative AI and what it could do to transform video game development.
“The major costs for these types of ‘forever games’ is their ongoing development cycle, server needs, and customer support,” said Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer on the business of games at the NYU Stern School of Business. “One observation is the heavy-set C suite. That could be an advantage given their seniority, but right now all they’ve put together is a snazzy pitch deck.”
Chow and his team of executives include former Bungie head of art Jeremy Vanhoozer and former Rioters Tim Hsu (head of growth on Wild Rift), Landon McDowell (technical operations), Grace Park (product management) and Jeff Jew (producer on card game Legends of Runeterra). They aren’t the only band of developers from major gaming companies who have struck out on their own.
Last year, multiple studios started by ex-Blizzard developers announced upcoming games. One indie studio, Second Dinner, launched Marvel Snap, which drew from their creators’ backgrounds working on Hearthstone.
From their time at Riot, Chow said they are thinking about what creates satisfaction in gameplay and player fantasy.
“There’s so much of making a great champion in League of Legends that I think applies to exquisite game design in almost any genre but will definitely be true for us here. We want player characters to be rich, high fantasy, high power, incredibly satisfying,” he said.
Perhaps more notably, the executives are also thinking along the lines of Riot’s Marvel Cinematic Universe-level ambitions, such as the Netflix League of Legends show Arcane, which even collaborated with games like PUBG and Among Us. Believer has plans to develop an animated TV show alongside the new game.
“We are explicitly bringing in the aspiration for powerful media to live around the game so that the world can be rendered in lots of ways that don’t just live in the game,” Chow said.
As for how long it will take to make the game? Chow estimated that most open world games take three to five years and that Believer was aiming for that range. The team did not say what platforms they were developing for.