Epic Games has led the pack of investors putting a new round of funding into Manticore Games, who just secured $15 million USD.
Manticore’s main product is Core, a user-generated content platform which uses a heavily modified version of Epic’s Unreal Engine to let people create their own games and modify existing games on the platform. Epic’s president, Adam Sussman, said this in a statement following Manticore’s completion of the funding round, “At Epic, we believe the industry is ultimately headed to games becoming more like open platforms where creators can build their own worlds. Built in Unreal Engine, Core exemplifies this future and goes one step further by providing the environment for anybody to create great multiplayer games, and a metaverse playground where players discover endless entertainment.”
Manticore CEO Frederic Descamps also commented on Epic’s investment. “We are thrilled about Epic’s support of Manticore’s vision and the Core platform. We admire Epic’s leadership in empowering our industry through technology and feel very aligned in a vision of the future for a user-generated multiverse: we are leading a complete democratization of the landscape in how games are made and played, and even who makes and plays games. Core represents a drastic paradigm shift in user-generated gaming that resembles how YouTube or Twitch completely changed expectations and economies for video and streaming; the difference is that Core users can already produce and play high quality games in a connected multiverse.”
Food For Thought
While it’s gratifying that Epic is supporting potential alternative avenues for indie development, this marks the third major round of investor funding Manticore Games has obtained in the last three years. It’s unclear at this point if Manticore is keeping this money saved up for future improvements to Core or if they’re burning through cash just to keep the lights on. And while Epic is unlikely to pull the rug out from under Manticore, the other investors who’ve thrown in their portions of the $60 million USD raised so far may not be quite as patient.
