tinyBuild, the Bothell, Wash.-based independent developer and publisher behind such truly weird games as “No Time to Explain,” “Party Hard,” and “Punch Club,” announced this week that it’s one of 11 studios to receive backing from a new venture fund called Makers Fund.
tinyBuild has received $3.75 million and plans to invest that money into new projects while expanding old ones, such as its stealth horror game “Hello Neighbor.”
The Makers Fund made its public debut on Monday with a post by co-founder Jay Chi on Medium titled “The Impending Golden Age of Interactive Entertainment.”
The Fund draws its investors from “institutions and family offices and high net worth individuals, mostly across Asia, from Japan to Korea,” and has already raised in excess of $180 million.
The Makers Fund team also includes Michael Cheung, a former competitive “CounterStrike” player and former senior director at Tencent, and Ryan Payton, creative director on “Halo 4” and the founder of the Seattle-based studio Camouflaj (“République”).
Other studios that have attracted Makers Fund investment include Bossa (makers of “I Am Bread,” with a relatively new studio in Seattle); FaceIT (London-based makers of an independent platform for multiplayer matchmaking); Typhoon Studios (founded in 2017 by ex-Ubisoft dev Alex Hutchinson); Klang Games (German mobile developer that created “ReRunners”); and Teacher Gaming (Finnish developers of educational software).
tinyBuild’s current lineup for 2018 includes bringing several games in its stable to the Nintendo Switch. It’s already released “Clustertruck” (where you play a game of “the floor is lava” while jumping on trucks driven by terrible drivers”) and the post-apocalyptic train game “The Final Station.”
The company’s next planned Switch release is the adventure/management sim/boxing mash-up “Punch Club,” coming next month.
