Former Riot execs raise $55 million to launch new studio: The Believer Company

Former Riot Games executives Michael Chow and Steven Snow are announcing the founding of a new Los Angeles-headquartered game studio: The Believer Company.

The studio has raised $55 million in Series A financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with support from Andreessen Horowitz, and additional seed funding from Bitkraft Ventures, Riot Games, 1Up Ventures, and other venture partners.

Believer has not yet announced any new titles, though the company is immediately recruiting to build a "world class team" to create an original open-world game based on "an original IP."

Chow will serve as the company's chief executive officer, while Snow will serve as chief product officer. Other former Riot Games employees like Tim Hsu, Shankar Gupta-Harrison, and Landon McDowell will fill out the C-suite, joined by former Bungie and Electronic Arts creative exec Jeremy Vanhoozer.

There is one rather odd paragraph in The Believer Company's formal announcement. Snow dedicates one of his statements to describing how the company will bring "select technologies into the development and gameplay spaces explicitly for the betterment of our players and the games they love."

That normally wouldn't be unusual, but Snow concluded his comment by saying "we are excited to say 'no fucking thanks' to the technologies that won't make the game more fun."

The Believer Company did not specify what technologies Snow was referring to (it's hard to keep track of them at this point—blockchain, generative AI tools, and virtual/augmented reality might all be on the table), but it seems notable that the letters "NFT" (normally representing the blockchain technology 'non-fungible token') can be an acronym for "no fucking thanks."