The team is using the funding to start up its studio in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, just about an hour west of Toronto.
Odyssey Interactive is a new Canadian video game studio founded by ex-Riot Games developers and Netflix employees. The company began fundraising around February of this year and just finished raising $6 million in seed funding. The investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Golden Ventures, A16z Cultural Leadership Fund, and several angel investors. The angels include Eros Resmini (Discord chief marketing officer), Kevin Lin (Twitch co-founder), Steve Chen (YouTube cofounder), and Paul Della Bitta (former Blizzard executive).
We want to try to build games with the depth of the PC game, but designed around the constraints of mobile first, and then maybe bring them to PC or console down the road. Just because the constraints on a phone are that you’ve got two thumbs, so there’s a lot of limitation to how you can deliver really deep, quality gameplay. And we don’t want that audience of new gamers to feel like they’re playing second fiddle to other platforms.
Richard Henkel, Odyssey Interactive CEO and co-founder
With this funding, Odyssey Interactive has an opportunity to create several games, not just a single game. The investors gave the studio the money even though the team hasn’t announced a game. In fact, the team hasn’t even decided which game to make itself. The company is in the midst of prototyping game ideas, but the investors liked the pedigree of the developers and the way they were approaching their work.
I think our general strategy has been to try to build a company a lot more like a Supercell than a Riot or Blizzard or a larger studio. And this is pretty grounded in a lot of our experiences working on Teamfight Tactics, where it was a smaller team. The agility that you’re afforded when you have a small team, and the alignment conversations that need to happen, are faster because it’s a smaller group of people who bought into the same idea, the same vision.
Richard Henkel, Odyssey Interactive CEO and co-founder
Despite previous success with a Riot Games, the studio founders don’t want it to get too big. By the end of year two, they want to be at around 20 people, and while they may keep growing from there, they don’t want to move too fast. Odyssey Interactive has a goal to make mobile video games that will give players an emotional connection with other players, and create a positive cultural impact. They want to create a “game that you live,” or one that becomes so ingrained in your habits that you can’t stop talking about it.
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