A studio led by the makers of the hit titles Sky: Children of the Light and Journey has raised $35 million in new funding to upend the viral “friendslop” genre of casual, whimsical video games played socially online.
Gardens Interactive announced on Wednesday that its Series B round encompasses several prominent investors, including Sequoia Capital, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and venture capitalist Moritz Baier-Lentz.
The studio’s first title, Gardens , is an ethereal online game in which friends weave together stories across a fantastical, changing world. The funding will give Gardens about a year of money after its release, which is not yet scheduled. Its lead designer, Chris Bell, has won several Game of the Year awards in the past. The new round values the studio at $190 million, before the new funding.
“It’s creating lasting, intimate, emotionally loaded player interactions,” Baier-Lentz said in an interview. “It’s extremely beautiful. The love they put into the rendering is quite unique. It looks like a Studio Ghibli movie.”
Gardens Interactive, which has now raised a total of $71 million, is the first and only video-game startup to date to receive backing from Yamauchi No. 10, the investment firm of Nintendo Co.’s founding family.
The studio is attracting heavyweight investors at a time when the video-game industry is going through a difficult stretch, marked by mass layoffs and studio closures. Gamers are looking for places to connect in new ways online, but competition is steep as players stick with old favorites like Fortnite and League of Legends , which can keep friend groups hooked for years.
Even so, game companies are on track to receive upwards of $1 billion more from venture capitalists in 2026 than in the prior year, when firms invested $4.12 billion, albeit from about half as many deals, according to data from PitchBook.
The friendslop genre — cheap, casual games that can attract huge audiences by tossing friends together in virtual worlds — has been an industry bright spot. On Steam, an online video-game store, “social party” game sales have more than doubled since 2023, according to researcher Sensor Tower. Baier-Lentz said that Gardens is not actually friendslop, because it’s not “janky.”
Bell envisions the studio’s first game as a “more ambitious” project than Sky , on which he led the design. That game — in which players traverse a kingdom with a cape that lets them fly — has earned about $2.5 billion since its 2019 release, according to an estimate from a person close to the game, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.
Bell said he decided that instead of publishing with Thatgamecompany, the maker of Sky , he would proceed independently so he could partner with his brother Stephen Bell, maker of the viral game Blaseball , and game developer Lexie Dostal. In total, the studio employs 42 people and co-develops with partners in Malaysia and France.
Gardens aims to be an online, open-ended world in which players can wander around, interact inside a shape-shifting wilderness and act as the authors of each other’s experiences. Bell said his greatest inspiration was the flourishing role-playing community around Grand Theft Auto V .
“You’re not just feeling the presence or weight of other people in your vicinity, but the consequences of others’ actions,” said Stephen Bell, the studio’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “We’re creating worlds that feel like they have history and memory.”