Griffin Gaming Partners, one of the world’s leading venture capital firms focused exclusively on gaming, announced the acquisition of Playdigious, the team behind hit mobile adaptations of popular indie titles, including Dead Cells, Northgard, TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, Loop Hero, Little Nightmares, Spiritfarer, and Subnautica.
Following the news, we have contacted Nick Tuosto (Co-Founder & Managing Director, Griffin Gaming Partners), Tim Bender (President of Playdigious, Operating Partner at Griffin, CEO of Hooded Horse), and Playdigious Leadership (Abrial Da Costa, CEO / Xavier Liard, Co-Founder) to learn more about this major move.
Playdigious marks Griffin’s first full entry into the buyout space. What made this the right moment for Griffin to take that step and move beyond venture investing?
Nick Tuosto: At Griffin, we’ve always been focused on discovering untapped, compelling investment opportunities within the games industry.
A driving force behind our approach to investing is finding differentiated avenues for value creation, with an emphasis on situations that allow us to lean upon our proprietary execution capabilities and network to maximize outcomes for the companies and teams that we work with.
With Playdigious, we saw an opportunity to back an experienced team finding success within a compelling market vertical – indie – which thematically is in perfect alignment with our Operating Partner Tim Bender’s expertise as CEO of Hooded Horse.
While we’ve never consummated a control buyout to date, our conviction in both Playdigious’ business fundamentals and vision, as well as our ability to deliver value as a shareholder via Tim and our execution expertise, led us to believe that this was the perfect opportunity to pursue a new investment structure.
Many investors entering the mobile space tend to focus on casual or free-to-play developers. What made Playdigious, with its emphasis on premium indie adaptations, the more compelling choice for Griffin?
Nick Tuosto: Playdigious was a particularly interesting opportunity for us, given how it operates at the confluence of both a high-growth (indie) and large, established (mobile) market.
We feel there’s an untapped opportunity to bring leading offerings in the indie genre to gaming’s largest segment, increasing the top of funnel for indie as well as providing the mobile space with yet another interesting set of entertainment offerings.
That being said, we’re still firm believers in traditional mobile gaming’s opportunity to produce venture-scalable outcomes and continue to underwrite investment in the space. We see our investment in Playdigious as complementary, not competitive, with our existing and future positions in mobile.
Would you describe this acquisition as a selective strategic move, or do you see Griffin expanding further into publishing and content ownership in the future?
Nick Tuosto: At the moment, we’re choosing to focus the bulk of our efforts on unlocking Playdigious’ next step-function of growth alongside our world-class management team in Tim, Abrial, and Xavier.
We’ve always kept an eye towards opportunistic capital deployment in areas we feel are under-indexed by the part of traditional games investors, and we’ll remain open to making similar moves in the space as our conviction in the market opportunity grows.
As Playdigious transitions under Griffin’s ownership, what will your immediate priorities be, and how do you plan to guide the company’s next phase of growth?
Tim Bender: We’ll do everything we can to support Abrial and his amazing team as they realize their vision for the company. Ultimately, Playdigious is an amazing team – the absolute best in class for what they do – and they have a plan for taking that to an even higher level.
How will your experience at Hooded Horse influence your decision-making at Playdigious, and where do you see indie game ports in the mobile scene evolving in the coming years?
Tim Bender: Ultimately, Playdigious and Hooded Horse have a lot in common — they are both companies that aim to deliver great experiences to players while being a good partner to developers.
What Playdigious is doing is uniquely valuable in mobile, offering indie developers a chance to see their games get solid mobile ports and offering players the chance to experience some of the most amazing titles from PC in a mobile format. I think we’re going to see enormous success as Playdigious continues to grow.
With Griffin’s support, how do you plan to scale Playdigious’ porting capabilities while maintaining the level of quality and creative trust that developers have come to associate with your work?
Playdigious Leadership (Abrial Da Costa, CEO / Xavier Liard, Co-Founder): With Griffin’s backing, we’re entering an exciting new phase for Playdigious – one where scale and craftsmanship can finally grow hand in hand.
Our first commitment remains unchanged: to deliver ports that honor each developer’s creative vision and the spirit of their original work.
Griffin’s support gives us the ability to invest in technology, infrastructure, and talent that will streamline our pipelines and expand our capacity without compromising the artistry and polish that define every Playdigious release.
Beyond expanding your porting capacity, what kind of new opportunities do you hope to explore under Griffin’s ownership, whether through new genres, technologies, or publishing initiatives?
Playdigious Leadership (Abrial Da Costa, CEO / Xavier Liard, Co-Founder): We’ve had a wealth of creative ideas in the pipeline that we can now bring to life with Griffin’s partnership.
Together, we plan to pursue high-profile licensing opportunities, deepen our data and analytics capabilities, and elevate the Playdigious brand globally, especially in markets like China, where we see significant growth potential.
We also want to strengthen our relationship with players through new publishing initiatives and community engagement efforts, ensuring Playdigious continues to stand for innovation, quality, and respect for the games we help bring to life.
