Why Europe Is Quietly Winning the Future of Gaming
💙 This month we dive into what’s next for gaming—and why infrastructure, not IP, is where smart capital is heading. Featuring highlights from our portfolio.
New Renaissance Notes: a monthly newsletter where we share insights about the intersection of culture, creativity and technology. We include our updates from New Renaissance Ventures - Europe’s first venture fund dedicated to the Creative and Cultural Industries.
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See here for our previous edition ‘The Designer's Dilemma: Quality vs. Control’
💙 NRV News:
Another Packed Month at New Renaissance Ventures!
We're thrilled to report another incredibly busy month at New Renaissance Ventures, culminating in the successful close of another deal just before the summer! We're bursting with excitement about a couple of significant announcements coming your way in the first week of July, so stay tuned – you won't want to miss them!
This past month saw us crisscrossing Europe, connecting with investors and founders across various sectors.
🇩🇪Our first stop was Berlin for SuperVenture, an unmissable event for any GP. While it's the largest GP-LP conference in Europe, as an emerging VC, our real value comes from the vibrant ecosystem of side events across the city. A massive thank you to our friends at Atlantic Labs, LeftLane, Interface Capital, Tiny VC, and many others for their hospitality and for making these invaluable networking opportunities possible.
🇬🇧The same week, we hopped over to London for the inaugural European SXSW. The hybrid conference defies easy categorization – is it a music festival, an art exhibition, or a tech gathering? Whatever it is, its unique vibe is great for connecting with diverse stakeholders from the creative industries. We even had the chance to rub shoulders with talent like Idris Elba!
🇫🇷Our final destination took us to the South of France for Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity...
🇦🇹 Later in October, the next CultTech Summit will take place in Vienna. New Renaissance Ventures is a proud partner of the Summit, and we look forward to two days of exploring the intersection of culture and technology. If you'd like to join us, use the discount code COMMUNITY20 at checkout here.
Now, let’s dive in!
💙 Why Europe Is Quietly Winning the Future of Gaming
Let’s get one thing out of the way: gaming is not dead. It’s just boring right now.
Venture-backed studios are releasing sequels to sequels. NPCs still have dialogue trees from 2009. Everyone’s waiting for the next platform shift like it’s the Second Coming.
Europe isn’t loud about much these days. Certainly not gaming. Not when California is still coasting on the fumes of Blizzard nostalgia, and Tokyo's still got Genshin fanboys in a chokehold.
But something is shifting in the plumbing—the infrastructure, not the hype.
We’ve been watching this shift unfold quietly across Europe—inside dev tools, simulation engines, and AI pipelines.
And we’re calling it: Europe is quietly winning the future of gaming infrastructure.
We’ve seen the charts. The top-line? Total gaming VC investment dropped to $1.2B, the lowest deal count since Q2 2019. Oof. But that’s not the story.
The real plot twist is happening in the margins—developer tools, generative AI, and backend game infrastructure. This is not about shipping the next Fortnite. It’s about building the systems that will power the next Fortnite.
And guess who’s building those systems?
SaaS Is the New IP
We’ve all seen what happened when Hollywood met AI. It’s getting weirder, faster, and cheaper. Gaming is on the same trajectory. As Eric Bellomo at PitchBook writes:
“Investor interest in SaaS continues to hold… propelled by rapidly improving generative AI and large language models… to reign in spiraling AAA development costs.”
Translation: building tools beats building titles. In Europe, that trend has deep roots. Here, we’ve always built the middleware—Unity (Copenhagen-born), Improbable (London), and now a wave of new names like Altera, Castle, and Halliday (shoutout to Paris, Berlin, Helsinki—Europe’s real game capitals).
Just in Q1, deals like Altera’s $31M raise for NPC toolkits and Castle’s $15M for its game engine tell you where the puck is going. And it’s not mobile adtech or crypto collect-a-thons. It’s backend. It’s boring. And it’s beautiful.
American Tariffs, European Advantage
Let’s talk politics (briefly, sorry). With Trump back and lobbing “Liberation Day” tariffs Asian supply chains are in chaos. The VIX spiked. Nintendo delayed the Switch 2. Hasbro’s stock did a nosedive.
Europe? Still making software. Still shipping digital tools. And when US policy gets messy, the upside accrues to ecosystems that don’t rely on ports or manufacturing nodes in Shenzen.
Call it soft power, call it survival instinct. Either way, Europe wins this round.
No One's Ready, And That’s the Point
In his essay I Am Not Ready for the Future of the Game Industry, Shahriyar Shahrabi gets it exactly right:
“The line between player and developer is disappearing. Future games are platforms, not products.”
That future? It won’t be built by studios burning $200M per title. It’ll be built by generative systems, multiplayer primitives, asset marketplaces, and real-time cloud editors. It’s open-ended. It’s creator-first. It’s deeply infrastructural.
Europe’s smaller teams, public funding ecosystems, and obsession with interoperable standards (we see you, EU Digital Markets Act) are weirdly well-positioned to lead here. We’re allergic to monopolies. We build for open ecosystems. That’s the new moat.
💙 And that brings us back to NRV’s thesis: fund what’s beyond the product, not the IP. The infrastructure layer where creative workflows are being rewired.
Because those building blocks? They don’t need a metaverse pitch. They just need time, runway, and maybe a Berlin co-working pass.
👀 Founders: Here's What We Want
We’re actively looking for:
Developer tools for generative workflows (AI-native game engines, world editors, NPC logic)
Infrastructure for user-generated content (UGC) at scale
Multiplayer primitives (netcode, voice, hosting, modding frameworks)
Cross-platform and input-agnostic UX layers
New monetization infra
If you’re in that weird place between gaming, dev tools, and cultural theory—let’s talk.
Putting our money where our mouth is: NRV’s gaming investments…
🇦🇹 Atlas Design
Powering Virtual Worlds.
Atlas empowers the next generation of content creators to build virtual worlds in a fraction of the time with cutting-edge generative 3D AI. They aim to be the market leader of 3D generative AI for the next generation of immersive virtual worlds across gaming, web4 and entertainment.
🇺🇦 Zibra AI
Real-time VFX powered by AI.
Zibra AI brings advanced simulation—smoke, liquids, destruction—into real-time game engines. What once required weeks of dev time now takes minutes. It’s a win for realism, performance, and smaller studios punching above their weight. Zibra AI is a Ukrainian deep-tech company that builds AI-powered solutions for VFX and 3D creation for gaming, TV, filming, and beyond.
🇨🇭Nunu AI
Building the first multimodal gameplay agents.
Nunu builds AI agents designed for game testing and to control any given body and perform a task in any environment. These AI agents will be versatile enough to test hundreds of game levels and do other tasks as well. The founders’ vision extends beyond video games. As games become increasingly realistic, game engines are evolving into advanced physics engines capable of simulating real-world conditions.
💙 NRV Picks
‘I am not Ready for The Future of the Game Industry’ - Shahriyar Shahrabi
The Political Economy of Gamers - Joshua Citarella
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