The studio that decided making an online multiplayer game shouldn't require a studio. Its answer is Core.
The wordmark for Core, the flagship platform. A four-letter promise: the hard part of building a game is supposed to be the idea, not the toolchain. Everything else is kitbashing.
There is a familiar shape to the ambitious technology company. It looks at some activity that normally requires professionals - trading stocks, editing video, writing software, filming a movie - and it says: what if a regular person could just do this, in an afternoon, for free? Manticore Games, a roughly 50-person studio in San Mateo, California, has pointed this idea at video games, which is a genuinely hard thing to point it at, because games are among the most technically demanding software humans build.
The product is called Core, and the pitch is refreshingly literal. The company's own tagline was "Making games WAS hard. Now there's Core." Core is a free platform where you build, share, and play online multiplayer games - up to 32 players - without needing to be an artist or, really, much of a programmer. It runs on Unreal Engine technology, which is what actual professional studios use, but it hides most of that behind a workflow called "kitbashing," where you snap pre-made 3D pieces together into new objects. If you want logic, there's Lua, which is about as friendly as scripting languages get.
Here is the interesting economic move. A game engine is a tool, and tools are commodities; anyone can download Unreal. What Manticore built on top is the thing tools don't give you: an audience. Core is a platform and a community at the same time, so when you make a game, there are people right there to play it. This is the whole trick of every successful creator platform - the distribution is the moat, not the editor - and it is the reason Manticore raised the kind of money it raised.
Which was a lot of money. The company has pulled in roughly $164 million across three rounds: a $30 million Series B led by Benchmark in 2019, a $15 million round in 2020 that notably included Epic Games, and then a $100 million Series C in 2021 led by the hedge fund XN, with SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 and Epic joining in. Manticore described the goal, with a straight face, as powering a "games multiverse." You can roll your eyes at the phrase, but the underlying bet is coherent: platforms aren't funded for one game, they're funded for the possibility of thousands.
The Epic Games detail is worth sitting with, because it is a little bit funny. Epic makes Unreal Engine. Core is built on Unreal Engine and puts it in the hands of amateurs. So Epic, the supplier of the professional-grade technology, invested in the company whose entire purpose is to make that technology usable by people who are not professionals. When your own supplier writes you a check, that is usually a sign the thing you're building is structural rather than incidental.
"Core frees creators from those constraints and allows their creativity to thrive with experimentation and collaboration."
Frederic Descamps — CEO & Co-Founder, Manticore GamesManticore is not a first-timer's company. Its two founders had already spent full careers inside the machine of commercial gaming - the part that makes and ships and monetizes games at scale - before deciding the more interesting problem was helping everyone else do it.
Twenty-plus years across Xfire, Trion Worlds, and A Bit Lucky, which he ran as CEO until Zynga acquired it in 2012. He then spent four years as Zynga's VP of Corporate Development before starting Manticore in 2016. Holds an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and law and business degrees from France. He could have stayed at Zynga; he chose the harder second act.
The creative half of the pair, with a background spanning major studios including Trion Worlds and A Bit Lucky. His stated design tension is the one the whole company runs on: creation tools that are "radically accessible" while still enabling "extremely high quality graphics and gameplay." Easy to start, hard to outgrow.
Kitbash 3D worlds from a large built-in asset library and add behavior with Lua scripting. No art degree, no engine license, no build pipeline. Single-player or up to 32-player multiplayer.
Publish into Core's community and get real players immediately. The platform is the distribution - the part indie developers usually spend years chasing on their own.
Core's monetization gives creators a share of revenue - roughly a 50/50 split - so a hobby project can become an income stream if it finds players.
"Truly one of the most exciting things we've seen in gaming in many years."
Mitch Lasky — General Partner, Benchmark (lead Series B investor)Three rounds, roughly $164 million, and an investor list that reads like a thesis on where interactive media is going. Bars below are proportional to round size.
Investors include: Benchmark · Epic Games · XN · SoftBank Vision Fund 2 · LVP · Bitkraft · Correlation Ventures · Sapphire Sport · SV Angel
Descamps and Maynard start the studio in San Mateo to democratize game creation.
Benchmark leads a round to build a new ecosystem for creating, sharing, and playing high-quality online games.
Core launches publicly on March 16; Epic Games joins a $15M funding round later that year.
XN leads a $100M round with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Epic; Core reaches Early Access in April.
Core redesigns its character creation system and keeps expanding creator features.
Manticore deactivates Core's MetaMask integration, citing limited use.
A co-op roguelite built on Core releases to the Epic Games Store - the platform ships its own game.