We’ve been huge fans of Raw Fury basically… Forever. If you’ve never heard of them, they’re an indie publishing label that on mobile is responsible for games like Kingdom: New Lands ($4.99), Kathy Rain ($2.99), and Dandara ($3.99). On the PC and console side of things, they’ve got an even more impressive catalog with games like The Last Night absolutely stealing the show at E3 last year. For real, just look at this trailer and tell me this isn’t something you want to play:
Anyway, Raw Fury this morning announced that they closed a series A funding round of $5.5 million dollars from Nordisk Film, which is the largest media group in Denmark spread across film production, distribution, theaters, and of course, games (along with even more stuff). The reason I love this story so much is that when Raw Fury basically kicked off with a bunch of industry veterans who each worked at various positions at larger companies (with benefits like health insurance and other important things) who simultaneously seemed to say, “Screw it, let’s do something crazy."
The games industry is a straight up brutal place, and when I first heard of their plans to be an “unpublisher," I thought to myself, “That sounds awesome but I have no idea how you make a thing like that successful." Their business model reminds me a lot of the classic indie publisher labels that we saw on the App Store who really just focused on bringing awesome games to the masses instead of maximizing profits through loot crates. Unfortunately, as history has shown us, most of those publishers are now all dead and the few that remain largely have either pivoted to doing user acquisition or making boring freemium junk.
But, they made it work, and have made it work to an extent that they were able to raise millions of dollars from real deal investors to grow the Raw Fury brand into an even bigger global sensation. On our end, I’m really hoping this means Raw Fury will have the resources to release more things on mobile, as all three of their games on the App Store right now are among my recent favorites.
