We don’t usually cover much investment news around here as typically it’s hard to come up with things that are more boring than board room financial dealings, but this news hits all my feel good buttons which is just what the doctor ordered on a Monday afternoon. Backing things up a bit, earlier this year it was revealed that some pretty great ex-Halfbrick guys left the company and started their own three man indie studio named Prettygreat.
We were justifiably pretty excited about all this, as when you’ve got a small group of super talented dudes and you basically put them in a room and say, “OK, make awesome stuff," it usually results in some pretty great games. At some point, however, the realist in you comes out and you start wondering how long the guys at Prettygreat can afford to experiment and iterate on cool game concepts before needing one of their games to hit big to keep the lights on.
Well, news just came out from the land down under that Crossy Road (Free) developer Hipster Whale has provided Prettygreat with AUD $500,000 worth of seed money. This also brings Hipster Whale’s Matt Hall and Andy Sum on as advisors, and the two companies will be helping each other out in whatever way makes sense to produce rad games.
This hits my personal feel good buttons for a number of reasons- First off, it’s totally awesome to see Hipster Whale do more with the success of Crossy Road than buy a fleet of Teslas. You hear a lot of mobile success stories, particularly with how unpredictable the App Store is… But they usually end in “Oh, hey, that guy just bought a really huge house, that’s cool," and almost never in “Oh, hey, they’re giving back to the community in a huge way in directly helping other indie developers."
Additionally, this cash just provided Prettygreat with a long enough runway that they’ve got a ton of time to release all sorts of different games before needing one to hit big. As a studio of three, half a million smackers could have them potentially making games for years. Knowing what I know about the company culture of both Hipster Whale and Prettygreat, it also seems reasonable to assume that the terms of this investment isn’t even in the same universe of how gross a lot of investment deals can be with massive equity shares and similar.
So, yeah, if you weren’t excited about Prettygreat before, riding on the back of Hipster Whale almost completely guarantees we’re going to see some really great stuff come out of Australia. It doesn’t sound like we’re going to have to wait too long to see Prettygreat’s first game either, so stay tuned for that.
