UK studio Landmark has raised $4.6m to step up its efforts on coop game Sea of Souls.
Project A Ventures and InReach Ventures co-led the round, with participation from existing investors Moonfire and Concept plus angels including Nick-Button Brown and Aream co-founder Kartik Prabhakara.
Landmark is led by CEO Dave Burpitt, technical director Jonathan Chisholm and creative director James Older, and was founded last year from the ashes of Pocket Mortys maker Big Pixel. Elsewhere on the team there are staffers with experience on titles including Hungry Shark World and RuneScape, says the press release announcing the news.
Landmark will use the funding to expand the studio to 20 people and continue to develop Sea of Souls, a game based on cooperative play designed to be more accessible than most team-based games.
“We want to fundamentally change the experience by dismantling the negative expectations of being out-skilled or pummeled by your friends in exchange for joining what should be a fun gaming session.“ explains CEO Dave Burpitt.
“There are billions of potential players who love the idea of fast-paced action in a highly social experience that are put off by the ultra-competitive and often anti-social environment,” Burpitt continues. “It takes a different approach to build a studio dedicated to this huge audience and we are ahead of the curve here at Landmark.”
Project A Ventures principal Jack Wang added: “We were looking for a hybrid genre mobile game for quite a while before coming across Dave, James and Jon at Landmark Games. After the first play test of Sea of Souls we got really excited about the core game loop…we haven’t seen many unique combinations of that in mobile gaming and think it could be the next genre winner especially for the next billion mobile first players.”
