Griffin Gaming Partners Fund to spend $235 million on Gaming Investments

VentureBeat reports on the plans of the Santa Monica investment fund.

What does Griffin Gaming Partners say about future investments:

• the owners of the fund will focus on two areas, the money between which will be divided equally — on game studios and companies dealing with gaming platforms and infrastructure;
• most of the amount will go to North American developers – about $ 117.5 million;
• the rest of the budget will go to international contracts. Most likely, with Finnish and Japanese firms;
• Griffin Gaming Partners is ready to invest money at any stage: from small seed rounds of financing in the amount of about $ 1 million to late deals in the amount of $ 20 million;
• investors are also ready to cooperate with any gaming segments, but they may refuse esports teams and VR projects. The fact is that usually the planning horizon of funds does not exceed ten years, and the return on investment in such areas as esports and virtual reality takes longer;
• but AAA games will definitely remain without funds from Griffin Gaming Partners. They are too expensive.

Griffin Gaming Partners was founded two years ago, but its portfolio already includes a dozen companies related to games. At various times, investors supported Skillz, Discord, Subspace, Wave, Frost Giant and other teams.

The fund is headed by three eminent investors: Peter Levin, Phil Sanderson and Nick Tuosto. Each of them actively invested in the industry before creating a common business.

Sanderson has the most extensive experience of investing in games. For 23 years of such activity, he managed to make deals with Funzio, Next Games, Telltale and Plain Vanilla Games.

Meanwhile, Levin is the former president of digital strategy at Lionsgate and co—founder of Nerdist Industries. He had a hand in the integration of John Wick in Fortnite, the appearance of “Mad Dogs” in Payday, the launch of Candy Crush Saga in the show on CBS and the involvement of the authors of “Wild West World” to work on the series on Fallout.

Tuosto works in parallel at the investment banking firm LionTree (it is she who helps the Skillz mobile esports platform to enter the stock exchange). He also regularly advises gaming companies on issues related to purchases and sales. His clients include Tencent, Scopely, AppLovin Machine and Phoenix Labs.

Also on the topic:

• A new investment fund for gaming startups has appearedSkillz has started the procedure for entering the stock market
• Blizzard veterans have opened their own studio.
• They will do RTSIs there any news?