Artie raises $10 million to make instant games playable via messengers and browsers

Artie, a mobile platform for instant games, raised $10 million with money coming from Zynga and Shutterstock founders among other investors. It supports not only JavaScript and HTML5 but also Unity.

The list of investors includes Zynga founder Mark Pincus, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, basketball star Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, and Google vice president of product Manuel Bronstein.

Artie can run games without installing separate apps and play them from browsers, messengers, and other platforms. The company says it will let developers deliver their titles bypassing app stores and not having to pay 30% to Apple.

According to CEO Ryan Horrigan, the main difference between Artie and other platforms for instant games is Unity support. It can help developers make not only hyper-casual games but more complex projects.

Artie also wants to solve the main problem of cloud gaming — huge infrastructure costs and input lag.

“Similar to cloud games, we’re running Unity games on our cloud, but rather than rendering their graphics on the cloud and pushing the video to players, we’re not running graphics on the cloud. We’re streaming assets and animations that are highly-optimized and rendered in real-time through the embedded web browser,” Horrigan told TechCrunch.

The company is now developing its own games, including Alice in Wonderland and one project based on a superhero IP. Artie also plans to release an instant MMO project by 2022. All the titles will be free-to-play with in-app putsches.

On top of that, Artie promises to release an SDK in the future, so developers will be able to distribute their games through this platform.