Anthony Leung’s consequential game mechanic may be the one where nothing explodes. In Palia, when two strangers fish beside each other, both can benefit. The other player becomes good company, translated into code, rather than an obstacle or rival for the podium.
That small choice carries an entire founder thesis. Leung is the CEO and co-founder of Singularity 6, the Los Angeles studio that built Palia as a persistent fantasy community simulation. Before that, he was a development director on League of Legends at Riot Games, helping operate a title synonymous with competition. When he and fellow Riot veteran Aidan Karabaich started Singularity 6 in 2018, they did not make a gentler copy of their old game. They placed the genre’s usual side dishes - gardening, fishing, gathering, cooking, decorating, friendship - in the center of the table.
The decision looked soft. The undertaking was steel. A welcoming world still needs economies that resist abuse, servers that remember where players left the furniture, systems that connect friends across geography, and a live team able to keep the place interesting after launch. Cozy is a mood. Persistent multiplayer is an engineering condition.
The operator learns to dream
Leung’s route into games began with less cinematic systems. At the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, he studied Management Information Systems and Computer Science, graduating in 2001. His early career moved through applications development, project management, program management, and consulting. He managed software teams at Comet Computing Systems, co-founded Splinter Technology Services, and spent more than six years in roles connected to Vancouver Airport Authority.
Airports are persistent worlds of a less whimsical sort. They combine schedules, infrastructure, safety, vendors, software, crowds, and the permanent possibility that one small delay acquires friends. That experience did not make Leung a game designer. It did give him years of practice in the unglamorous art of making many moving parts agree.
He also kept starting things. Leung co-founded Octoknow in 2012 and served as its president. That year, a project called Birdsai, built with Will Prater, won the AngelHack Los Angeles event and advanced to the global finals. He later held a technology director role at Brighter Collective. By 2014, he had joined Riot Games as a development director. His public credentials form a small alphabet parade - CSM, PMP, SCPM - but the more revealing pattern is the blend: technologist, program operator, founder, team leader.
Graduates from UBC with business, information systems, and computer science training.
Builds a decade of software, project, consulting, and program-management experience.
Works as a development director on League of Legends at Riot Games.
Co-founds Singularity 6 with Aidan Karabaich and raises a $2.5 million seed round.
Singularity 6 joins Daybreak Game Company after Palia’s PC and Switch rollout.
Palia reports a community of more than 10 million players worldwide.
A pitch for the unranked life
At Riot, Leung and Karabaich saw how deeply an online game could matter to its players. They also saw unused territory. Their founding argument was that games could become primary communities, as socially meaningful as a sports team or a familiar local institution. Competitive play would not be Singularity 6’s organizing principle. The studio wanted a gameplay-first virtual society in which players could choose their roles and affect a living simulation.
Selling that idea required more than an enchanting concept painting. The founders described building models, collecting data, and validating theories so investors could see both the imagination and the business beneath it. London Venture Partners led a $2.5 million seed round in 2018. Andreessen Horowitz led a $16.5 million Series A the following year. After Palia’s reveal in 2021, the company raised a $30 million Series B.
Money bought runway, not certainty. The team spent years translating “belonging” into decisions concrete enough for a player to feel. Make the game free to play. Let someone enjoy fifteen minutes alone. Make it better when friends arrive. Avoid locking people to a single server. Turn crafting and housing into main events. Give players reasons to help rather than harass one another.
The result is visible in a resource-request feature inspired by real-world “buy nothing” groups, in bonuses for fishing near another person, and in a world without player-versus-player combat as its social engine. Palia’s designers still made room for skill, mastery, and long-term progression. They simply refused the assumption that depth needs a defeated neighbor.
Leung applied the same community language inside the studio. Singularity 6 calls its employees Sixers, a small bit of nomenclature that could have landed as corporate whimsy and little more. The 2022 studio summit gave it physical form. Nearly 150 colleagues, many accustomed to meeting through screens, gathered in Los Angeles for design sessions, karaoke, kart racing, dinners, and a contest involving spaghetti towers held together with marshmallows. Leung said he was struck by the energy and especially pleased to see newer employees working with veterans.
The anecdote matters because the company was trying to manufacture serendipity in two places at once. Palia needed strangers to feel comfortable sharing a riverbank. Its makers needed artists, engineers, producers, designers, and community staff to share judgment across disciplines. Neither kind of togetherness can be ordered into existence. Both can be made more likely by arranging the room, giving people a useful task, and leaving enough space for something unplanned.
When the warm world meets cold math
Palia’s public life supplied encouraging numbers. Before launch, more than 600,000 people had signed up to test it. More than 20,000 alpha players logged 167,000 hours during one month-long test. The open beta arrived on Windows in August 2023, followed by Nintendo Switch that December and Steam in March 2024. By late June 2024, Daybreak said the game had attracted more than four million players, with more than 100,000 active each day.
The company also encountered the part of game development no fantasy veneer can charm away. Singularity 6 made significant layoffs in April and May 2024, after earlier staff reductions. The cuts affected dozens of people and made plain the commercial pressure behind a long-developed free-to-play game. In July, Daybreak Game Company acquired the studio as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Leung framed the partnership around distribution and durability. He wanted Palia available to anyone who wished to play, and Daybreak brought decades of experience operating online worlds. The deal offered infrastructure, investment, and an MMO portfolio. It also marked a sober transition: an independent studio built around one long bet was now part of a larger company.
The idea survives contact
In 2025, Palia reached PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, completing the kind of broad platform expansion Leung had long discussed. In April 2026, Singularity 6 announced that a player in Germany had become the ten-millionth Palian. The number is tidy enough for a cake. The better evidence lives in the behavior around it: friendships that moved from the game to brunch and tabletop nights, strangers calling out rare resources, people organizing cooking parties, players waiting their turn at a prize wheel.
The studio continued to revise the experiment. The 2026 Royal Highlands expansion added a new region and mounts. Its fall roadmap introduced a shared global civic project to rebuild Kilima’s docks and raised player counts in larger spaces. The work remains unfinished by design. A place meant to last for decades cannot treat launch as a graduation ceremony.
Leung’s public comments tend to return to a few nouns: players, community, worlds, lives. His management story adds the verbs. Model. Validate. Hire. Scale. Ship. Adapt. Partner. The dreamer on his profile is accompanied by the developer, and the pairing explains more than either label alone.
There is a useful lesson here for anyone designing a community, game or otherwise. People do not become generous because the mission statement uses the word “belonging.” They respond to the world as built. If scarcity rewards hoarding, they hoard. If attention rewards cruelty, cruelty arrives in costume. If standing beside a stranger makes the fishing easier, perhaps the first conversation has somewhere to begin.
Anthony Leung wagered that online play had room for a different reason to return, without assuming everyone secretly wanted a quieter game. Eight years after Singularity 6 began, Palia’s scale does not settle every question about the business or the genre. It does establish one pleasing fact: ten million people were curious enough to knock on the door of a virtual neighborhood. Someone had remembered to leave the porch light on.