We’re thrilled to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading the seed investment in Seidr AB who are building the next generation of midcore cross-play games. Based in Stockholm, a hotbed of games innovation, Seidr’s founding team are Adam Schaub and Marcus Jacobs. This duo has more than 40 years of games experience combined as senior leaders at some of the world’s top gaming companies.
In getting to know them, we were impressed by Adam and Marcus’ deep experience building out high performing game teams and scaling games businesses. Adam is a repeat founder who previously built a venture-backed games startup and launched games that were downloaded millions of times. Marcus was the GM of the Candy Crush franchise at King and grew the business from its early days into one of the most impactful and enduring franchises in all of mobile games.
The future of video games is platform-agnostic – players want to play the games they love wherever and whenever they want without being limited by form-factor. Gamers fall in love with great content and gameplay, not platforms!
However, cross-play enabled games are also expensive to make, requiring thoughtful UX solutions, experienced client developers, and additional & more robust art pipelines. This is especially true for midcore and core games which tend to have more game systems to build and balance than casual titles.
We’re completely aligned with and excited to support Adam and Marcus’ vision to apply lessons and techniques from mobile games development to make midcore cross-play games more quickly and iteratively. We share their belief that “finding the fun” in a great action strategy game shouldn’t come at the end of a long development cycle.
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Joshua Lu is a partner on the A16Z GAMES team at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on game studios and the intersection between games and social applications.
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Andrew Chen is a General Partner for A16Z GAMES, focused on the intersection of tech and gaming — this includes AI, studios, infrastructure, and consumer apps.
