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The funding will be used to continue empowering every player to become a creator.
Two brothers and Epic Games veterans Mike and Nick Atamas announced today that their company Omni Creator Products, created last year to empower every player to become a creator, raised an additional $16.25 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s new gaming-focused fund, Games Fund One, led by general partner Andrew Chen. According to the team's announcement, this additional funding will accelerate their efforts to empower every player to become an active participant in game creation.
"OCP’s mission is to make game creation accessible to every player by tackling both the creative and technical challenges of game creation. To accomplish this, we’re building two projects, codenamed CreatorLab and Muse," commented the team. "CreatorLab is a tightly focused sandbox that contains only the tools necessary to express novel game design in an intuitive and accessible way. With Muse, the OCP team is orchestrating all of the complexity of game creation so that a player can take Muse as a base and modify or extend it as far as their imagination will take them."
We had a chance to talk with the brothers and ask them what this new funding round means for OCP and how they plan to continue supporting game developers.
Introduction
80.lv: Please introduce yourself to those who still don't know you.
Nick Atamas: I’m the CTO of OCP. I have always straddled the line between building games and building tools. Before starting OCP, I was at Epic Games, where I was the first person to contribute code to Unreal Engine 4: designing and implementing the Slate UI framework, the user experience for the UE4 Editor, and the Blueprints editor. I’ve also worked on many games: Fortnite, Gears of War 2 and 3, Robo Recall, Paragon, and some unreleased titles. Most recently, I was a tech lead on Verse, Epic’s new programming language.
Mike Atamas: I’m OCP’s CEO. Previously, I headed up strategy and operations for Unreal Engine, with a focus on growing the UE creator community. I worked on several acquisitions to support UE creators (e.g., Quixel) and drove their integration into Epic’s offerings. I also created and ran Epic MegaGrants, Epic’s $100 million grant fund. Before that, I ran all legal aspects of Unreal Engine licensing and global privacy.
80.lv: What have you and Nick been up to since the previous 80 Level Interview?
Mike: Nick had another kid, but other than that, we’ve been heads down working on OCP’s core mission: to empower every player to be an active participant in game creation. Building a startup is an incredibly humbling experience and you quickly realize how much you had relied on others in a large org. We’ve got a more hands-on deck now; but when you start, there is no accounting department, no recruiting department, no legal, and no IT – just the founding team. It’s a great opportunity for high-velocity learning, but not for the faint of heart!
Omni Creator Products
80.lv: How did Omni Creator Products change since November 2021?
Mike: The biggest change has been how much OCP has grown. We started as two guys with a dream and are now a team of almost twenty. A few of our friends from Epic have joined us as well, but we are very consciously trying to not just create a mini-Epic. Veterans from companies like Valve, id Software, Roblox, ArenaNet, Bungie, EA, and Sledgehammer have joined the OCP team as well. We’re constantly blown away by the world-class team that has formed around OCP’s vision.
80.lv: What new features have you added? How do you work with the community?
Nick: Muse and CreatorLab have advanced quite far since we’ve started, but we’re not ready to share more details yet. We’re lucky to have a dev rel team that is deeply connected with UGC creators at all levels and are able to lean on them for feedback and insights. The entire team is excited to start exposing CreatorLab and Muse to some of these UGC creators and seeing what they make.
The Funding
80.lv: Could you tell us about your recent funding round? What does it mean for OCP and your userbase? What new features do you want to implement?
Mike: OCP’s mission is quite ambitious. There’s only one way to deliver on it: assembling a team of talented and hardworking people and giving them time to work. The new funding allows us to continue doing both. While it’s always tempting to add new features when additional resources come in, we’re staying focused on delivering on the core vision.
Nick: We are building something new. There’s no existing roadmap that we can copy for how to make game creation broadly accessible; we’re carving our own path. We have a clear vision for how to build Muse and CreatorLab, but there are areas of implementation where we need to experiment. Often we get it right, but sometimes we discover that we need to backtrack and try something new. When you’re building something new, there is no substitute for a great team and time to explore.
Future Plans
80.lv: What are the company's future plans? How do you plan to continue supporting OCP?
Mike: The team is working towards a closed alpha and bringing in third-party creators and players. Everyone is very excited to see what the community will come up with. In the meantime, we’re continuing to build Muse and CreatorLab and grow OCP. We’ve got a number of open roles and definitely encourage your readers to apply here.