Posted Oct 11, 2022 8:05 AM
The France of video game studios is doing well. After Dontnod , Asobo or Plug In Digital , it’s Shiro Games’ turn to complete an eight-figure fundraiser. The Bordeaux firm raised just under 50 million euros in an operation led by the Cathay Capital fund, which is making its first investment in video games. The transaction valued Shiro at €150 million.
The two founders of the studio, Sebastien Vidal and Nicolas Cannasse, retain control of the majority of the capital where the Chinese giant Tencent had already entered, in 2020, in a “very minority” proportion. Founded ten years ago, Shiro quickly made a name for itself in the sector with its first title: “Evoland”.
Released in 2013, this action-adventure title – in which the rules of the game change and become denser as the player progresses in order to revisit the video game history of role-playing games (RPGs) – had everything he UFO was intended for a niche of purists… but was a worldwide success, selling several million copies, while the development budget amounted to barely a few tens of thousands of euros.
The success of “Northgard”
A recipe that has become Shiro’s trademark, profitable since its first steps. After launching “Evoland 2” in 2015, the Bordeaux studio released “Northgard” three years later, a real-time strategy game set in the Vikings universe. His biggest success to date.
“We sold over 3 million units. Every year, we make better sales figures and we recently broke our record for simultaneous players. The games that we design, we register them in the long term with teams that continue to create dedicated content”, confides Nicolas Cannasse, CEO of Shiro, whose teams have developed a slew of extensions (paid and free) for this word-of-mouth title.
After the release of “Darksburg” in 2020 – the only disappointment in Shiro’s journey – the studio released, one following the other, “Wartales”, then especially “Dune: Spice Wars”, between the end of 2021 and spring 2022, on PC and Mac. Two productions boxing in the category of “double A” games (mid-range) with budgets of a few million euros which have translated into hundreds of thousands of sales, while the console versions are not expected before 2023 as soon as possible.
An editor activity
“Shiro is one of the most promising independent video game companies in Europe. Many well-known studios are dependent on a franchise that has made them successful, forcing them to produce successive sequels at the risk of boring players, or are prisoners of a genre on which they are referents, notes Cedric Lagarrigue, senior advisor for investment bank Alantra who advised Cathay Capital on this operation. But Shiro has this rare ability to multiply successes in very different genres and universes,” continues the founder and former boss of publisher Focus Entertainment.
With the money raised, Shiro will expand its small and productive team, counting around sixty employees, to tackle the development of its two new games planned for 2024, while focusing on its new activity as a publisher; either the financing in whole or in part, the distribution or the communication of games developed by third parties. “We have signed with three European studios and two titles should be released in 2023”, notes Nicolas Cannasse, whose group has definitely entered a new era.
