Ruckus Games has raised $19 million in funding to disrupt the multiplayer gaming landscape with an RPG shooter.
Still under wraps, the debut title will be a third-person, cooperative, session-based RPG shooter, with a unique blend of style, humor and explosive action. It’s a game about a “suburban invasion,” which I guess can mean a lot of things.
Ruckus Games was founded in 2021 by a spirited team of award-winning industry veterans led by CEO and game director, Paul Sage. Known for his work as creative director on the multi-billion-dollar Borderlands franchise and the massively popular Elder Scrolls Online, Sage brings know-how to the helm.
Building a dream team
Joining Sage is the art director, Scott Kester, whose visionary work was key in transforming the original Borderlands aesthetic into the iconic graphic novel style that defined the series. Together with founders Carl Shedd, Kevin Penrod, Keith Schuler, Chris Strasz, and Jesse McIntyre, this game dev team hails from gaming giants like Gearbox, Riot Games, Blizzard, Epic Games, and more. Ruckus Games is based in Frisco, Texas, the same city where Borderlands maker Gearbox is based.
“They’re all very big heavy hitters coming from the triple-A gaming sphere,” said Devann McCarthy, senior community and public relations manager, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Ruckus Games’ new title will offer co-op for up to four players in an evolving world that will be updated with new emergent content over time. The game is deliberately not part of the first-person shooter genre, which is crowded. Rather, it’s intentionally in the co-op third-person shooter space, which Ruckus believes is underserved.
Alexandra Takei, business director, said in an interview with GamesBeat the game will be a live ops title, but it’s not free to play. Rather, the team wants it to be a universe where people want to return to repeatedly, where people can have and build shared experiences and shared community.
“On the scale of premium being God of War and then the creative play on Fortnite, we would probably be somewhere in the middle,” Takei said.
Suburban invasion
Featuring a large roster of playable characters and thousands of unique make-shift weapon combinations — like a toaster kitted to shoot saw blades or a modded power washer turned flamethrower — players will “smash, grab, and grow” as they blast their way through thrilling suburban invasion scenarios.
Set in a reminiscent era amongst the backdrop of the American heartland, destroy whatever you want, find cool new weapons and resources, rescue non-player characters (NPCs) to take back to your hometown, then upgrade your weapons and abilities to head out even stronger for another round of chaotic fun.
The art style is comic-like and stylized. It has a realistic, high-quality 3D look, but the characters are definitely stylized and not realistic. There is a nostalgia appeal to the setting, which is set in pre-cellphone American, the suburban heartland of America. It’s very different from Borderlands, for sure.
“It has that nostalgia factor of people who are interested in shows like Stranger Things, and you know that the 80s, the 90s, the retro synth wave style,” McCarthy said. “One of our goals is to have this be a Ruckus look. You can recognize that it’s a Ruckus game in five seconds.”
A good prototype
To bring this ambitious vision to life, Ruckus Games previously raised $5.5 million in seed funding led by Transcend Fund in late 2022. This investment was instrumental in developing a high-quality prototype that showcases the game’s immense potential.
Made by only 14 people in 12 months, this prototype proved that Ruckus Games’ development costs remain much lower than triple-A, while the team still delivers that same level of quality and fun of titles with exponentially bigger budgets, McCarthy said.
“We had about 20 minutes of their time, and they loved the game so much that they stayed for over an hour, and they could not stop playing. So we were very excited about that,” said McCarthy.
The team now has 23 people.
“It’s never easy to get money from anyone, especially in the video game space currently, but we were very fortunate to find the investors that were so eager and excited to invest immediately,” McCarthy said. “It spoke volumes to the quality of the game that we’re already crafting with the vertical slice that we presented.”
“Ruckus Games is the epitome of what we seek in our investments — a visionary team with an extraordinary track record in games as a service, poised to carve out a blue ocean in the multiplayer gaming space,” said Andrew Sheppard, general partner at Transcend Fund and a board member at Ruckus Games, in a statement. “This Series A, the strongest in its category this year, not only validates our early belief in their potential but also underscores their capacity to innovate and lead.”
The latest funding round
Takei said that the company started pitching for its most-recent Series A round in Asia, looking for a strategic investor.
“We were looking for people who have a lot of platform and live ops expertise. And we thought that there was no better place to go than Korea and China for that,” Takei said. “With Krafton, we’re definitely in total admiration of what they’ve done with the PUBG franchise, and also how they also flex in and out of live ops to premium titles.”
There are two game publishers and two strategic investors (including Krafton and China’s Hypergryph) among the investor group.
“We believe in the future of co-op gaming, and the Ruckus team has demonstrated incredible progress with a small team in a short period of time,” said Maria Park of Krafton, who will be joining the Ruckus board, in a statement. “They’ve crafted something so on-trend, with stylish action and humor, that it not only entertains but also connects players in memorable ways – a vision that strongly resonates with Krafton.”
The momentum generated by this early success led to the new round, led by Krafton, with participation from Bitkraft Ventures, Transcend, Hypergryph, and others.
Clare Yang, head of investment at Hypergryph, said in a statement, “We’ve had the privilege of witnessing how Ruckus Games is pushing the boundaries of the looter shooter genre with their player-centric development approach. Chinese players represent one of the largest and most passionate gaming communities in the world, with a strong demand for something new, authentic, and fun. That’s exactly what we believe Project Bobcat offers. We are excited to partner with Ruckus Games and support their creative vision in the long term.”
There’s no game trailer yet. And the company isn’t yet disclosing the name of the game.
“Successfully raising a $19 million Series A in the current environment is truly remarkable,” said Jasper Brand, partner at Bitkraft, in a statement. “It is a testament to the team’s long-standing bond together and their ability to build a highly polished game proving fun moment-to-moment, a compelling style, and depth of systems with high replayability after raising a Seed round.”
Sage, CEO and game director, said in a statement, “Having Krafton and Hypergryph join us is amazing. They bring not only a global reach, but as developers themselves, they bring a unique perspective to our team. I felt incredibly lucky to have great investors like Transcend, Bitkraft and 1Up Ventures in our seed round and this level of support is a great show of confidence that bodes well as we search for the right publishing partner going forward.”
A growing team
The team has grown since 2022, but it will stay relatively small.
“We are continually growing our roster of developer positions that we have filled recently, but we have more coming up over the next few weeks, we’re looking to keep our team small, under 100 developers,” said McCarthy. “We don’t ever expect to be larger than that.”
As development continues at a rapid pace, the team is expanding its roster of talented game developers. Ruckus Games is currently accepting applications for experienced candidates seeking to craft gameplay experiences for today’s audience.
“The funding will help us reshape the multiplayer landscape, building games cheaper than other studios and with a smaller team, and we’re doing it at still such a high quality that it is double-A or triple-A,” said McCarthy.
The company is looking for playtesters to join early on in development, starting early next year, when private playtests will start, McCarthy said.
“We have a player-centric development cycle,” McCarthy said. “Throughout development, playtesters are extremely essential to us and provide all of the the feedback and bug reports. We want to make something that not only is fun for us to play. The players are heroes. That’s our motto. That is our whole scope of things.”
Those eager to get their hands on Ruckus’ breakout title will not have to wait long, as sign-ups for early playtest opportunities this winter are currently open on the Ruckus Games’ website.
At the same time, McCarthy said, “We’re scratching our own itch. We are building the game we want to play.”
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