Kinforge Raised $5.7M, Hit Its Milestones, and Still Couldn’t Reach Release: What Happened?

Travis McGeathy has been making games for nearly 30 years, with more than 35 shipped titles and leadership experience across Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, Amazon, Trion Worlds, and 38 Studios.

In 2023, he co-founded Seeker Entertainment and began building Kinforge, a co-op creature-collector action RPG. The studio raised an oversubscribed $5.7 million seed round, kept a lean core team, and, according to Travis, hit its production milestones on time and under budget.

The game also seemed to be finding an audience. Hundreds of players tested it, giving the prototype an 8.7/10 overall rating and a 9.7/10 willingness to recommend it to friends. Its teaser reached more than 2 million views and generated more than 30,000 wishlists.

And yet Seeker was unable to secure the additional funding needed to finish the game.

That makes Kinforge an unusually useful case for indie developers: what happens when the game seems to be working, the team is delivering, and the audience is responding, but the business still cannot get the project across the finish line?

Main Topics

• Game Funding & Investment
• Indie Game Development
• Production & Scope
• Fundraising Challenges
• Lessons from Kinforge

Interview

With Travis McGeathy, Chief Creative Officer, Game Design Executive, and Co-Founder of Seeker Entertainment

Q: Looking back at the full journey of building Kinforge, what changed between raising the first $5.7 million and eventually having to close the studio?

Where did the original plan stop matching reality: development cost, fundraising, market conditions, scope, timing, or something else?

I’ll take this opportunity to walk through the journey in a bit of depth in the hopes that there’s something here that’s useful to others reading this.

As we’ve seen over the last few years, the industry itself has gone into a bit of a depression around funding for new games, particularly in the AA range. It’s odd because game sales have continued to grow and AA is where the biggest “surprise” hits have come with games like Clair Obscur, Helldivers 2, Palworld, etc. not just dominating the awards circuit but crushing it on sales. So, you’d expect that to be where funding would be directed but it’s been exactly the opposite.

When we started Seeker, we decided to try venture capital to fund the game. It’s a relatively new model in gaming but had been deployed to some big ticket games over the previous couple of years. It comes with a lot of benefits for the company, particularly around ownership of the IP and revenue.

We came along after the gold rush of VC capital. Investments were slowing as the initial slate of games hadn’t launched yet and investors were waiting to see if they’d play out. VC games funding was down significantly from the previous year, and a lot of money was now going to AI instead. But we were still able to raise funding easily on the strength of the team and the concept. It took about 2 weeks of pitching to get more interest than we could handle. That put us into the great position where we could pick our investing partners which was ideal. We loved all our investors.

If you’re not familiar with how VC funding works, it generally follows a form where raises happen in stages. The initial stage is known as seed funding and is meant to allow you to prove out your concept on a relatively small investment. After that, you’re expected to raise additional funds in a series A round (and potentially series B, C, etc.) to go big. VC is designed for big bets. They are looking for 10x to 100x returns so the original version of Kinforge we went out with had lofty goals. It was a $25M total budget, squarely in the AA range, on a game that could reasonably expect to bring in $100M and grow into a billion dollar franchise over time.

The seed funding was designed to last 18 months, during which we’d build out the core team, the development pipelines, and a prototype that we could get in front of players to test, refine, and prove out the concept. Then expand the team and create a vertical slice before going out to raise a series A for production funds.

We kept the team small, only 8 developers including us two founders, all extremely senior. We used off-the-shelf tools and leaned on outsourcing for the heavy lifting on things like art assets and the integration pipelines so the core team could stay focused on the game itself.

Roughly 3 months after closing the seed round, we had 3 new hires and a truly playable multiplayer prototype that let us start playtesting internally daily. The game grew in leaps and bounds from there with tight scope control to keep us on track.

Six more months of development and we did our first friends and family tests with good results and great feedback. Another couple months of refinement from there and we brought in playtesters recruited largely from Reddit’s ARPG subreddits. Results were beyond expectations with the aforementioned 8.7 overall rating and, my personal favorite stat, 9.7/10 on whether they’d recommend it to friends. Players were loving what we were making and wanted to play it with their friends, which was the critical stat for a co-op game meant to build social ties.

Over the previous year, though, we’d watched the funding environment get more challenging, so to be safe, we decided to adjust our plans. At the start of 2025, we cut off all external development to extend our runway and started fundraising conversations in February at DICE. Tons of interest. Great playtests. Continued discussions at GDC in March. Same thing. Got comments along the lines of “Wait, you built all this with 8 people in 12 months??”

The shows were followed by weeks of playtests with extended evaluation teams. Again, great response overall but conversations weren’t moving beyond that. Many of the bigger publishers were going through some form of restructuring that was pausing investing. For smaller players, a common negative response was that they loved what we were making, but the budget was too high for them. 

We’re well connected within the development scene and everyone was seeing the same thing but the story changed depending on the game. A $50M game was told that the company wasn’t investing above $20M. A $20M game that they weren’t investing above $5M. A $5M that $1M was tops. The general feeling was that companies simply weren’t investing, but wanted to keep an eye on what was out there, and using the budget as an excuse to decline.

Things continued like this for the next few months. Multiple investor playtests nearly every week, in addition to more player playtests on builds that were getting closer to a vertical slice. Results remained very high. Over the summer, we put together a backup plan with Gamescom as the trigger. If we didn’t have a serious option by then, we were going to cut scope down to the game we’d already built, double down on what was already resonating with players, and go back out with a smaller pitch. $5M to finish the game instead of the $20M we’d been looking for with a possibility to grow back into the original concept over time.

The response? $5M was too much and they were only investing $1M to $3M max. We couldn’t reasonably go below $5M without severely compromising the game but I suspect the message would have continued this pattern anyway. In an interesting twist, the budget was now too low for some of the bigger publishers. That may sound silly, but does make sense since budget is strongly correlated with sales and big publishers need enough to be worth their time. That’s part of why our original game vision was larger.

Our final shot was to try to generate public interest and an opportunity arose when we were contacted to let us know we’d won a 2026 Lightspeed and GamesBeat Game Changers award and would have an opportunity to accept it on stage. In two weeks. We quickly pulled together the teaser trailer you’ve seen, doing it entirely in-house using playtest footage we’d gathered over the previous few months. It generated more than 2 million views and, last I checked, over 30k wishlists.

Our austerity measures bought us over a year of additional development time, but just pushed out the inevitable, unfortunately and had to shutter. The industry has always been cyclical. Everyone is just surprised at how long this down cycle has lasted with no end in sight.

Q: Kinforge had strong playtest results, more than 2 million trailer views, and over 30,000 wishlists. Why weren’t those signals enough to unlock the next round of funding?

What were investors actually looking for that those numbers did not prove? Has the definition of “traction” for an early game changed?

It’s hard to know. Just like how the budget discussions were moving goalposts all the time, the wishlist targets were too. Early on, 10k wishlists was a good signal. When we hit that, 20k was the new target. At one point, we got told that the minimum number of wishlists they’d consider investing in would be 100k and only if the game was within a year of launch.

My general feeling is that two things are happening:

1. Investors have gotten very risk averse. They’re looking for games that are effectively done and proven that they can put money into and get a return quickly. Of course, from the developer perspective, if your game is in that state, you generally don’t need an investor.
2. The lack of funding means there are a lot more games looking for funding than there are ones being funded. So the money side of the equation has all the power. That allows them to be extremely picky because developers have to take whatever they can get. If investors can find someone with a game that’s launching in 6 months that has 100k wishlists and is still looking for investment money, that’s the investment they’re going to make and it’s hard to blame them for that.

Q: How should a studio decide how much runway is really enough when the game will probably need another funding round before release?

Where do founders most often underestimate the risk: team cost, development time, marketing, fundraising time, or the possibility that the next round simply does not happen?

This is the trick question that was at the root of our issues. The correct answer, right now at least, is that you need to be able to ship your game on whatever funding you manage to get. Don’t assume you’ll be able to raise anything more.

Beyond that, traditional development principals hold here. Keep your team small while you prove out the game, control scope, and use good production practices for planning and to keep things on track. Playtest internally as early as you can and externally as soon as enough of the game is there that you’re going to get usable feedback.

One thing that may not be obvious is that the harder the fundraising environment, and it’s rarely been harder, the more time fundraising is going to take. Expect it to be a full time job for as long as it takes and adjust your development schedule accordingly.

Q: If players like the game but fundraising stops, what options are actually realistic?

Do you cut scope, reduce the team, look for a publisher, go into Early Access, slow development, or stop entirely? How do you know which compromise gives the game a real chance instead of just delaying the same problem?

Once you’re at that point, your options are very limited. In addition to the fundraising for Kinforge, we tried a bunch of other avenues including multiple detailed game pitches that major IP holders asked us to do for them and even subcontracting the team out to help another team for a time. None of that materialized either but would have sustained the team for a time if it had, hopefully pushing past the current industry doldrums. 

Early Access is a viable option, but you have to plan for it from the start. Launching into EA too early will kill any chances your game has so it’s not something you can just decide to do once you’re in trouble.

As to compromises, that is basically the same as any game development. As your game develops, it also evolves, and it requires a strong vision holder to keep it on track and avoid scope creep. That same vision protects your game from being compromised too much. There may be an inclination to take whatever you can get, but be careful with that. If your game is going to suffer as a result, it’s not going to sell anyway and you’re just wasting your development team’s time.

In our case, the game we went back out with in fall of last year was a smaller vision, but still a great game. We cut back the parts we hadn’t built yet and doubled down on the parts we’d already proven out, so it was relatively easy to be confident in that adjustment. Sales would be expected to be correspondingly lower but still great for the lower budget.

Q: Looking back at Kinforge, what would you change on the business side if you were starting again today?

Not the game itself, but the budget, scope, fundraising plan, team structure, or the milestones you would use to decide when to spend more.

And now that Seeker has closed, what are you taking from that experience into what you build next?

The biggest thing is don’t bank on the future. Even if you’re in a great environment when you start, industry conditions can change quickly and you never know what support options you’re going to have available when you need them.

If you’re raising funds to develop the game, raise the full amount of what you need upfront because you may not be able to raise more later. And assume you’re going to need to change course at least once during development, because that’s how making games goes, so build in that buffer. That may mean you have to make a smaller game, which is a bit of a catch 22 since you’re less likely to raise funds on a less ambitious game, but that’s the reality you have to work with.

For us, I don’t think we could have raised our seed funding on a smaller game concept. The VC model is built off massive success from a small percentage of their bets and a small game is far less likely to have large returns. If I were doing it again, I’d probably take a longer view and start with the smaller game we ended up with anyway and see about doing it with project financing from traditional sources, then grow into the larger concept with a second or third game assuming the first one was successful enough.

As for what I’m taking from this, I’m personally not sure what the future holds for me. I was fully dedicated to Seeker until the very end so haven’t really had a chance to dig into that yet. We did a lot more right than wrong, which I’m proud of, but there’s always lessons learned from any project (quick plug for my ongoing blog dedicated to exactly this: How to Fail at Game Development: A Practical Guide to Learning from Other’s Mistakes). This was the first time I’ve co-founded a studio and the first time I’ve worked with equity financing. I’ve learned a ton over the last few years on both fronts which will be valuable no matter what I end up doing.

For Indie Developers

If someone were raising money for their first game today, what would you tell them to prove before they start spending heavily?

What should founders know about their audience, budget, runway, and next funding step before they build a team around the game?

There’s good news and bad news here for indies.

The good news is that there’s been a whole host of new publishers and investors popping up that are investing at the indie tier, usually with checks maxing out in the $500k to $1M range. 

The bad news is that you need to have a game that is pretty far along already to get interest from most of them and the competition is fierce. You need to find ways to create as much as possible, and get it in front of players to prove it out, without external funds.

The other good news is that agentic development techniques allow for rapid, solo prototyping and you can push a game pretty far with placeholder assets. 

The other bad news is the backlash to AI, particularly AI art, means that many of these new sources don’t allow any use of GenAI for games they publish.

The other, other good news is that you’re not in this alone. The game industry is incredibly supportive. We had an incredible network of investors, advisors, and friends supporting us from the inception and wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far without their advice. Reach out to others that have gone through this before you to learn what you can and you’ll find most people are happy to help. I’m one of them. Always happy to chat and share experiences to help set others up for success so feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn.

If you are able to find funding, assume that you need to ship on what you have. Keep your team as small as possible for as long as possible. Test early and often. And good luck!