Why we invested in Series AI
I’m excited to announce F4 Fund’s investment in the seed round of Series AI, alongside a16z, BITKRAFT and the Siqi Chen Access Fund.
We’ve talked a lot around here about the costs and risks of making games, and how investors approach the industry as a consequence.
When I first spoke with Pany Haritatos about these challenges and the project he was working on to address them, I was immediately intrigued.
Pany puts it more eloquently than me so I’ll just quote him:
Long before I ran Kongregate or the Games program at Snap, I was an indie game developer. The early 2000s was the start of the golden age of web games, and also some of my favorite times as a game developer.
Thanks to the ubiquity of Flash and the rapidly growing browser game ecosystem, you could build and test new game ideas faster than ever before in the history of games. Going from idea to validation took just a matter of months, and in an environment of rapid product cycles and fast releases, innovation thrived. This tight feedback loop led to a period of hyper innovation, establishing many new game genres and mechanics. It’s no surprise that this environment led to the creation of many of today's generational mega franchises like Candy Crush and Angry Birds.
PC gaming had its own version of this innovation incubation in the form of modding communities. At the height of the modding era, innovative designers in modding communities like Warcraft and Arma rapidly prototyped the design innovations that went on to form mega franchises like League of Legends and Fortnite.
Over the years, these innovation hyper loops have broken one-by-one, unwound by growing development costs, longer development cycles, and the increasingly punishing consequences of failure. Innovation, by definition, requires risk taking, and risk taking, by definition, risks consequences. It is completely rational that harsher consequences have punished risk taking, and stifled innovation. It is likewise understandable that new game launches have been dominated by playing-it-safe sequels and risk-mitigating product strategies.
The Series AI team believes that the next wave of innovative games will come from human hands enabled by powerful generative AI tools, and I think they may be right.
But tools alone are not enough. Breakout success in entertainment has repeatedly come from companies that are able to combine mastery of new technologies with the creativity to deliver great new experiences with them.
The most important and valuable tools and platforms for the creation and distribution of interactive entertainment have always come from game makers themselves.
By building what they needed to bring their own creative and entrepreneurial vision to life, it is these pioneering companies that have created incredible businesses with thriving ecosystems.
Pany has assembled a formidable team of gaming veterans to build a platform that combines powerful generative AI models with an easy to use game editor, with the ultimate goal of dramatically shortening the time between having an idea and being able to play it.
We hope that reducing the time and cost for exploring new mechanics, themes and ideas will lead to an explosion in the experimentation and creativity that ultimately drives the games business. I am particularly excited that Pany and his team of creators are using the tools themselves to bring their own products to life.