Fresh off shipping an augmented reality game for Magic Leap, Resolution Games has farmed another $7.5 million in funding through a Series B round.
The round was led by MizMaa Ventures, with new investors including venture capital firms GP Bullhound and Fly Forever, as well as Unity founder David Helgason. Existing investors participating in the round include GV (Google parent Alphabet's investment arm), Partech, Bonnier Ventures, Creandum, and Sisu Game Ventures.
"The Resolution Games team is taking the lead in innovation for VR and AR games. Their team's background, market leadership position and ability to innovate in the space is unmatched. We are thrilled to be joining their team as they set out to establish even more standards for the VR and AR games markets," said Catherine K.C. Leung, co-founder and general partner of MizMaa Ventures.
Resolution has now raised a total of $13.5 million in funding, bringing its valuation to $87.5 million. The latest round will contribute towards expanding their intellectual property library of augmented and virtual reality games.
"We're very excited to have these high-caliber thought leaders join our team, and to see the continued support from our current investors. With this group behind us, we can work towards scaling and being better prepared to take advantage of the maturing market," said Tommy Palm, CEO and co-founder of Resolution Games, in a statement. "Every one of our investors shares our incredible enthusiasm about the future of visual computing. With the amount of interest we're seeing from the industry around our titles, coupled with the exciting new platforms like the Oculus Quest coming to market, we foresee larger volumes of players and a viable multiplayer market. Needless to say, these are exciting times."
Resolution's AR titles include Angry Birds: First Person Slingshot, recently released for Magic Leap One, and Bait! Under the Surface, a forthcoming mobile AR app based on the studio's popular VR game.
Augmented reality is gaining increasing investment attention this year from Google's investment arms, with the company backing funding rounds from AR Cloud companies Blue Vision and Ubiquity6 and neural interface maker CTRL Labs. Google also has capital invested in Magic Leap and Jaunt, among others working in AR.
Despite Apple and Google integrating AR capabilities into their respective mobile operating systems via ARKit and ARCore, we haven't seen the gaming segment of AR take off just yet. Sure, Pokemon GO demonstrated that the technology can find success, but that gold mine hasn't been replicated to date.
And it may not truly take off until consumer headsets arrive. Resolution itself has alluded to this in the decision to skip mobile and go straight to Magic Leap for Rovio's AR debut of Angry Birds.
"We've always been focused on innovating and driving the adoption of emerging technologies and platforms, and we believe that the future of AR is head-mounted devices, so Magic Leap was a logical platform for us to develop for. It's exciting to see what is opening up for developers and how it can change the way people look at gameplay," Martin Vilcans, CTO of Resolution Games, told Next Reality.
Nonetheless, AR gaming seems destined to be a lucrative area. For patient investors, a company that has shown the capability to develop games for mobile and headsets looks like a good bet to hedge between short-term returns while playing the long-game for wearables.
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