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Funcom takes $10.6 million investment ahead of licensing push

Norwegian developer has co-founded a company to manage interactive rights of Robert E. Howard IPs

Funcom has taken on $10.6 million in new funding, in part to fund a push into licensing and co-development through a new company, Heroic Signatures.

Heroic Signatures will hold and manage the interactive rights to IPs based on the work of Robert E. Howard, and the Swedish original pen & paper and board games. This includes Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane and Mutant Chronicles, as well as Dark Agnes, Kult, Kull of Atlantis, Mutant: Year Zero, and El Borak.

Funcom will own 50 per cent of Heroic Signatures, which will control the rights for these properties to be used in video games on all platforms.

Rui Cassais, CEO of Funcom, said: "Any developer or publisher will be able to license these properties, and our ambition is to see a multitude of games grow from these worlds and to see the properties strengthened across the board to the benefit of everyone who works with them."

The foundation of Heroic Signatures is one aspect of a broader strategy at Funcom around co-development and working with third-party developers. The first of these projects, which will be published by Funcom, will be unveiled next year.

Funcom has taken a $10.6 million investment from SwedBank Robur Fonder AB, which will help to fund both this strategy and production of Funcom's own projects. SwedBank fund manager Erik Sprinchorn called the investment "a new giant leap in Funcom's turnaround," following the firm reporting its most profitable first-half of the year ever in 2017.

Funcom rebranded in August this year, when we spoke exclusively to CEO Rio Cassais.

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Matthew Handrahan

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Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.