LogInSprocket Games' Founding Team
A team of Riot Games veterans recently launched a new game studio called Sprocket Games. In late August, they announced they secured $5 million in a seed funding round led by Bitkraft Ventures, with additional participation from 1Up Ventures, Gaingels, and Substrate.
Sprocket pitches itself as a developer-focused progressive studio that "enables and encourages employees to bring their whole selves to work" saying that it will "provide developers opportunities they weren't afforded at previous studios, creating a better, safer environment that serves as a stable platform for moonshot after moonshot."
The studio also shared that it's currently working on its debut project – a cross-platform social adventure game set to use the team's experience creating online multiplayer titles like League of Legends, Valorant, and EVE Online.
We've talked to Sprocket Games' CEO and co-founder Josiah Kiehl to ask him about the recent funding round, the team's goal to build a studio that will provide developers opportunities they don't usually have at other studios, and the studio's approach to creating games.
Josiah Kiehl, CEO and co-founder of Sprocket Games
Sprocket Games
Hi, I’m Josiah Kiehl. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Sprocket Games. My background is in software engineering. My career is a mix of large-scale distributed systems and game development. I started my career at Oracle making enterprise software, then joined Riot Games in the early years of League of Legends when Riot was about 200 people. I worked on League of Legends for five years, then on Legends of Runeterra for three. I joined Google in 2019 where I worked on Cloud CDN for a few years.
I decided I’m much happier when making games, so I looked up my friend Nick Tittley, a supremely talented engineer and friend I knew from Riot Games, to see what he was up to and if we might be able to work together.
After much discussion of the problems we wanted to solve in the games industry, we settled on two important principles: the first is that working in video games is too often not the dream job it promises to be, but it could be if we build the studio culture on a solid foundation from day one; and the second is that many modern video games are fundamentally large-scale distributed software but many game development tools are designed around the old-school boxed-game model, which limits studios’ agility and delivery speed.
If we have a better technology foundation, oriented around how modern games are made, our studio will have a huge competitive advantage.
However, two engineers with no game design background don’t make a great studio, so we needed to find a game designer and a capable creative director. Our first choice was always Jo Graylock, who, at the time, was the design director for League of Legends. They agreed to join the project, and the three of us created Sprocket Games.
Our fourth co-founder is Reina Sweet, another Riot veteran. She is an incredible game design visionary with strong technical capability and was an essential part of our successful seed raise. Reina was a cornerstone of League of Legends development for more than a decade, both in terms of game design and content development tool creation.
Those who’ve joined the team since then include Willem van der Schyf from Riot Games as our art lead, Rowan Williams from Riot Games as our narrative design lead, Robert Moodey from Notorious and Blizzard as our gameplay tech lead, and Devon Cady-Lee from Warner Bros. as a principal concept artist.
The Funding Round
We’re very happy with how things landed in our first raise. What stands out about BITKRAFT, particularly, among other VCs, is how well-aligned they are with our vision of the future and how helpful they are in all aspects of running our studio. When we talked about taking better care of game developers and supporting them to do their best work both with better studio culture and a better technology foundation, they got it right away.
1UP, similarly, shares that vision, and has been a fantastic partner as we’ve set up the studio. The community of developers under the 1UP banner is unmatched in the practical advice and support that they offer.
Gaingels is a unique group that I specifically wanted as part of the round to ensure we deliver on our promises of a highly inclusive studio. They have a long history of supporting LGBTQ+ founders and have deep expertise in what it takes to have inclusivity as a core part of a company’s culture.
As for the market, it’s a common opinion that early to mid-2022 was the tail end of a hype wave of funding for new studios and that things are likely to dry up a bit. While I agree that things probably have cooled, games seem to be a uniquely recession-resilient industry and I expect that even if the expected recession does stick around a while, the games industry will just grow less quickly instead of declining. But who knows, if I could predict the future reliably, I’d make a lot more money in finance than game development.
Building a Developer-Focused Progressive Studio
One of the fundamental tenets of how we are building Sprocket Games is that talent is developed, not innate. As such, we are specifically orienting the company’s culture around ensuring the people who work here have the opportunities to not just show what they’re currently capable of but grow into what they have the potential to be.
Many studios struggle to invest in developers and internal talent, and this is especially true when it comes to leadership positions. There’s a great deal of study that shows that most corporate cultures, and I believe this is just as true in video games specifically, struggle to value effective leadership qualities over rewarding loud voices, narcissism, and big personalities.
This is exacerbated by strong biases that limit opportunities for people who are most ready for them. This is further complicated by job postings that require developers to have significant time in high-seniority positions to even be considered. This means that many studios, even ones that want to improve their cultures and practices, have massive cultural barriers they need to clear before they’ll offer brilliant developers positions for which they’re clearly ready.
Sprocket was built to create a bunch of those positions, fill them with a host of wonderful, brilliant, and diverse developers, and build a company culture where we’re happy to invest in folks to help them reach their true potential and to get started on that today.
As to what we’re offering beyond opportunities to do great work, we recognize that game development is a fundamentally creative and improvisational process. That requires a safe and stable environment so devs have the mental bandwidth to take risks in the work they’re doing. To that end, we have extremely high-quality benefits that are competitive with the best studios in the industry, not just other start-ups.
We’re excited to explore progressive work practices that research has shown are worker positive, and studio positive. We’re committed to being remote first, which broadens the pool of talent we have access to in more ways than just geographically, and we’re currently exploring a four-day workweek, just as an example. We’re confident we can build a studio that’s highly productive and ships great games, while also taking care of developers above and beyond the current industry standard, which will allow us to sustain that productivity for years or decades to come.
Spotting New Trends
Spotting new trends is really a challenge. One of our most important strategies on this front is paying close attention to what perspectives we include in our game development process. The broader the diversity of perspectives on your team, the better chance you, as a team, will deeply understand potential players and be able to deliver products that truly fit the potential market as a whole rather than a smaller subset (which is perhaps just the existing players in the market).
I believe that the potential size of the video game market is still not fully realized, and much of the expansion we will see in coming years comes from people who don’t look like the stereotypical gamer we are familiar with from past decades. In order to understand these new blocks of players and give them a game they love to play with their friends, we need to make sure our team not only notices the potential in these audiences but understands them deeply.
Another aspect of this is making sure our company has the agility to adapt as new trends emerge. No one knows what the world will look like in 5 years, so it’s important that the studio is designed from day one to change with the market. Our investment in technical talent and our focus on content delivery pipelines means we can change direction efficiently and effectively.
Making a Commercially Successful Game
Commercial success is a big challenge. 10,000+ games were released on Steam last year. How many of them are commercial successes? I don’t know, but it has to be a very small percentage of that number. We have a few core components of our strategy.
Firstly, players are more friend-constrained than they are genre-constrained when selecting which game to play. We want to optimize our game’s experience to get players into games with their friends as fast as possible with as little friction as possible.
This includes the entire experience, from sign-up to business model to game infrastructure. Every friction point is an opportunity for players to decide to go play something else, and so our goal is to eliminate as many of those potential exit points as possible. We want the easiest way to hang out with your friends online to be in our game, and then want to give you an epic adventure that makes you want to come back again the next day.
Secondly, If the onboarding process for new players is very smooth, the next challenge becomes holding on to players long term. Our commitment to powerful content development tools, excellent infrastructure, and highly replayable game design means our creative disciplines are able to deliver content at a much faster pace, and the impact of each new piece of content is multiplied, enabling Sprocket to keep up with player demand for new experiences… something that PvE games have always struggled to do.
We’re building a game that’s always got something more to show you, and, even if you take a break or get busy, it's always worth coming back to see what’s new.
How Pandemics Influenced Sprocket
One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that it taught a lot of people the value of strong online social experiences, something that will stick with people going forward. I connected with new and old friends by playing a number of online video games while we were all at home, and, even as the lockdowns have lifted, we continue to play the games we were playing, and we’re regularly looking for new games when we’ve exhausted the content from the ones we’ve played through.
The pandemic has grown the video game market substantially and has specifically placed an emphasis on the social connections that online games facilitate.
Sprocket is a remote studio, which is easier now than it was before the pandemic. There are more tools and more firmly established work patterns for working remotely effectively.
Even this early, with our team of 8 people, we’ve been able to attract talent we otherwise would not have had access to if we had an office and required relocation. In addition to access to talent, this also allows developers to live the life that is most meaningful to them outside of work. Disconnecting from work effectively and being able to organize your work around your life rather than your life around your work is another critical piece of Sprocket’s approach to the long-term sustainability of excellent creative work.
Sprocket's Roadmap
We are just now getting started, and part of that process is laying the foundation and fleshing out our long-term roadmap. We are very much looking forward to sharing what we’re up to, and are diligently working toward the day when we can.