THE BELIEVER COMPANY LAUNCHES OPEN-SOURCE GAME DEVELOPMENT TOOL ‘FRIENDSHIPPER’

Believer :

LOS ANGELES — June 4, 2024 — Believer, a global, independent game studio founded by industry veterans behind League of Legends, Destiny, Words With Friends, and more, today shared the source code for Friendshipper, a platform aimed at improving the way games are built. With Friendshipper, dev teams of all sizes can quickly alleviate pain points that have historically burdened game-makers, dramatically increasing their ability to iterate on builds and improve their games through testing.

 

Friendshipper is available today as an open-source project on GitHub for any game developer, student, or curious mind to explore, information and quick start help is available in the Friendshipper Discord. 

Previously, game studios would have to spend resources building their own deployment solution. Friendshipper fulfills this need with a best-in-class, user-friendly playtesting platform, for free. Friendshipper offers  continuous deployment to allow any number of developers to create code branches, merge them and run playtests—even remotely—extremely quickly. With Friendshipper, developers can commit code and conduct a playtest quickly and easily, far surpassing the efficiency of proprietary processes at even major established studios.


"At Believer, we have a key culture tenet, “We Believe In Games”. We try to challenge each other to think about this broadly — not just in the context of our own work, but the collective endeavor of all game developers everywhere," said Michael Chow, CEO of Believer. "If we can share our own tools and techniques with our brothers and sisters in the global community, and make their jobs easier as a result — that’s a very, very good day."

As of today’s initial open-source release, Friendshipper’s game-changing feature set includes:
 

“Our industry has been slow to adopt workflow innovations from other corners of tech. We’re discovering new solutions to industry challenges in real-time as we develop and deploy Friendshipper at our own studio,” said Landon McDowell, Chief Technology Officer for Believer. “We believe it is vitally important that we share these solutions with fellow game-makers. By open-sourcing Friendshipper, we invite their collaboration so we can all do better for players.”

Believer invites game developers from studios of every size to go hands-on with Friendshipper, iterate upon the platform at will, and share feedback via Discord, where Believers and Friendshipper developers are collaborating and sharing ideas every day. For more information on Friendshipper, including supported platforms, compatibility, and technical guidance, read the intro blog and join the Friendshipper Discord.

Believer is hiring and looking to build a world-class team of game-makers: brilliant folks bursting with creativity who balance candor with compassion and are eager to share their discoveries. Interested? Check out believer.gg/jobs

About Friendshipper

Friendshipper is an open source project first developed by Believer that aims to dramatically reduce the time and resources required for game developers to update code, deploy builds, and conduct playtests. Its initial release, as of May 2024, supports integration with Unreal Engine and Amazon Web Services. Its original creator, the global games company Believer, is committed to open sourcing tools and collaborating with fellow developers, as both the game industry and the players we serve will benefit.

About Believer
 

Believer is a global games company with developers all over the world, headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

Believers have built lives around creating and serving games we’re proud of — from Words With Friends to League of Legends, from Destiny to PvZ. We still think this is just the beginning. We believe the last half-century of progress in games has culminated in a global congregation of players, creators, and technologies that can now make the difference between possible and impossible. We’ve worked hard to unite the best and bravest game creators we know, to deliver next-generation experiences equal to this unparalleled moment of possibility.

Believer’s leadership team includes veteran developers, producers, and visionaries responsible for seismic shifts in the video game medium, including CEO former Riot Games Vice President Michael Chow (League of Legends: Wild Rift; Words With Friends) and Chief Product Officer Steven Snow, founding member of Riot Games and former Executive Producer of League of Legends.

In early 2023, Believer secured $55 million in Series A financing. The round was funded with the key support of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), plus additional seed funding from BITKRAFT Ventures, Riot Games, 1Up Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Next Play Capital, Don Thompson’s Cleveland Avenue, and Michael D. Eisner’s Tornante Company. Additional strategic partners and investors include Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Dan & Mac Reynolds of Imagine Dragons, Christian Linke & Alex Yee of Arcane, Maureen Fan of Baobab Studios, and many others.