Welcome back to another quickie roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news. Business business business!
Clockwork Labs: Brand-new indie game studio Clockwork Labs has raised $4.3M US for its “upcoming unannounced community sandbox MMORPG.” According to the press, the studio is “dedicated to building massively-multiplayer “societal games” that are less focused on pure combat and instead encourage social interaction and cooperation between players.” The game will reportedly “feature a truly unique level of social interaction and cooperation between players” and has attracted investment from no less than CCP Games’ Hilmar Pétursson.
LOTRO Forums: Roger at Contains Moderate Peril noticed that LOTROCommunity, which had taken over hosting the data from Codemasters’ old forums, is closing down next month, largely due to a lack of activity. SSG’s forums, of course, are not impacted by the move.
PlayerUnknown Productions: Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene is moving on, as he announced this week that his outfit PlayerUnknown Productions has moved on from its role as a Krafton substudio, though Krafton will keep a minority stake in the company. The indie studio will be “exploring the systems needed to enable massive scale within open-world games.”
NPIXEL: MMO Culture reported that Gran Saga developer NPIXEL is now valued at more than 1T (yes, trillion) Korean Won, approximately 860M USD, thanks to a fresh investment round.
Gamescom: The 2021 edition of Gamescom last week counted 5.8M live viewers during its digital opening show, 30% more than its digital version in 2020, with a concurrent count of 2M. “In all, 13 million people watched gamescom shows this year – an increase of 30 per cent compared to the previous year. gamescom was followed in more than 180 countries around the globe.”
MY.GAMES: The Mail.ru games division has invested “€3.5 million in the PC and console games development studio The Breach Studios based in Barcelona” as “part of the international expansion strategy of MY.GAMES to consolidate the company’s position in the global gaming market.” That’s around 4.15M USD.
League of Legends: Finally, Kotaku has a fun piece on the Hangzhou in Zhejiang, China, where the metro has been decorated to celebrate League of Legends’ 10th anniversary in the country.
https://twitter.com/lolweibo_en/status/1432361230602149896
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