Announcing Lightspeed’s investment in Hidden Leaf Games
Indie developers are the future of gaming
Players today are looking for fun, new experiences to share with friends. Fun no longer needs to mean expensive to develop. Famously, Stardew Valley, a mobile RPG that sold over 10M copies, was created by one developer. Valheim, a survival game with over 5M copies sold since Feb 2021, was created by five developers. Hidden Leaf is an indie developer building the next great breakthrough title.
Today, Hidden Leaf announced their first round of funding and Lightspeed is proud to lead.
People who know me know how much I love gaming. I grew up playing Diablo, Counterstrike, and Left 4 Dead 2, but missed the boat entirely on League of Legends. I was bad at playing MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arena), and the more my friends played, the more daunting it felt to start. I came to realize there are plenty of people like me who are looking for fun gaming experiences with their friends that can be competitive while friendly for beginners.
David Li and Bao Lam of Hidden Leaf are making such a game. They quietly bootstrapped their first game, FANGS, on a budget of $75,000 through CoVid, inspiring a team of designers and developers across 4 continents to work nights and weekends on the game.
Then, something incredible happened. They convinced Steve “Guinsoo” Feak to come out of semi-retirement to join as head of design. Guinsoo is legendary among gamers as a founder of the MOBA genre, as co-creator of DotA-Allstars, a mod of Warcraft III. This became the core gameplay in Dota 2 and League of Legends, where Guinsoo was one of the first designers.
FANGS is an Action MOBA, created for the modern player, and aiming to launch cross-platform. Rounds are fast, just 15 minutes rather than League’s 30–45 minutes. The game is inherently social, tying gameplay and personalization incentives into playing with friends and guilds. And it is also friendly to solo players by introducing new team discovery and grouping incentives to the core loop.
Hidden Leaf has innovated by creating multiple ways to win, while introducing a layer of depth for high-level players and coordinated teams. Each season will bring new maps, game mechanics around champions, and items to keep the game fresh. It launches in closed alpha later this month, after just a year of development.
David and Bao represent a new generation of indie game developers combining traditional game design with a natively social experience, and agile, continuous deployment. At Lightspeed, we are committed and passionate about supporting innovation in gaming, alongside existing investments in Epic Games, TripleDot Studios, and others. Games are increasingly social, with over 2 billion players, generating $175 billion in revenue last year and growing 20%+ annually. It’s a tremendous opportunity and one we’re bullish on.
