Play Ventures, a top 1% early-stage gaming fund, released its first performance update since 2023, reporting strong realized returns for its game investments.
This makes Play Ventures an outlier, since it hasn’t been easy to score good returns in either game investments or tech investments for venture investors.
Play Ventures Fund I, the firm’s flagship, continues to outperform benchmarks with a Net IRR of 43.55% and a DPI of 1.58 as of Q3 2025, placing it in the top percentile among global peers, said Harri Manninen, founding partner of Play Ventures, in an interview with GamesBeat.
The Net IRR in venture capital refers to the annualized internal rate of return that limited partners (LPs) actually receive after deducting all fund-level costs such as management fees and carried interest.
“We’re a venture fund first and foremost, and a very disciplined one. Our bread and butter has always been early-stage equity investment in the best founders globally and the best talent. But also keep in mind this. The reason why we exist is to provide great returns for our investors,” said Manninen.
The Play Ventures Future Fund also delivered strong results, posting a Net IRR of 27.90%, reflecting early exits and successful investments spanning Web3 gaming, infrastructure, and token-focused opportunities. Other funds, including Fund II, Opportunity Fund, and Fund III, reported positive momentum and have demonstrated resilience as markets evolve.
“At Play Ventures, we’ve been intentional about keeping our fund sizes modest because we’re focused on what actually matters: real returns to our LPs. In venture, bigger almost always means worse performance. We’re not chasing AUM; we’re chasing returns. That’s why we call ourselves the biggest little gaming VC. Most firms chase scale. We chase outcomes,” said Henric Suuronen, cofounder of Play Ventures, in a statement.
Key Fund Performance Metrics:
- Fund I: Net IRR 43.55%, DPI 1.58
- Future Fund: Net IRR 27.90%, DPI 1.00
- Fund II: Net IRR 12.85%, DPI 0.04
- Opportunity Fund: Net IRR 0.56%, DPI 0.00
- Fund III: Net IRR 6.61%, DPI 0.00
With over 250 portfolio founders across the world, Play Ventures remains dedicated to supporting innovators in gaming, interactive entertainment, and, increasingly, “playable apps,” consumer products that blend game design, smart monetization, and behavioral science to build lasting value.
“Playable consumer apps is our newest focus and one I’m particularly passionate about. We’re looking for the next billion-dollar companies building consumer apps that take what gaming figured out about keeping people engaged and making money, and apply it everywhere else,” said Phylicia Koh, general partner at Play Ventures, in a statement.
Industry benchmarks have been sourced from the Carta VC Fund Performance Q2 2025 Report. Play Ventures designed funds with DPI and actual capital returns in mind. That’s why they’ve resisted the temptation to scale up fund sizes. They’ve chosen to stay disciplined by backing companies early, helping them grow, and making sure that when they win, they actually return capital.
“Our fund one is among the top 1% of all funds that were of the 2018 vintage,” Manninen said. “Our other funds are also outperforming a lot of their vintage peers. We did the final close of fund three in the fall of 2024 and we’re about halfway through deploying our third fund,” Manninen said. “Gaming continues to power our DNA. But we want to look at gaming through the widest lens. That includes mobile gaming content. That includes also gaming adjacent platforms, tools and technology, including AI.”
Play Ventures is an early-stage gaming and consumer app venture capital firm with offices in Singapore and Helsinki, Finland. Play is founded by gaming industry veterans Henric Suuronen and Harri Manninen, who have made successful exits to King and Disney, respectively. Play invests globally in pre-seed to Series A startups in gaming, consumer apps, and gaming adjacent technology and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Origins
Play Ventures started out in 2018. It invested that money mostly in mobile gaming studios. The firm focused on areas of good risk and reward balance. Over time, it added to its investments into other areas around games, like Appcharge, which is providing direct-to-consumer mobile game stores to game companies in light of Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit victory in the U.S.
As Play Ventures came up with more funds over the years, it has expanded its investment focus to mobile consumer investments like playable apps and other consumer entertainment, Manninen said. He said the company is looking at new categories of games in areas like China and India.
For its first fund, Play Ventures raised $40 million in 2018. For its second, it raised $135 million in 2021. And for the third fund, it raised $142 million in 2024. The firm is Managed from Singapore, with offices in Helsinki, investing in early stage gaming and consumer apps startups since 2018.
While Play started in 2018 as a very focused early‑stage gaming fund, the DPI they’re seeing now is really the result of staying disciplined through a lot of noise in the market.
Fund I was almost entirely mobile free‑to‑play, but even then, Play Ventures was already backing things at the edges of that thesis. That included tools and infrastructure that helped games grow, such as programmatic ad firm Dataseat, which was acquired by MGI/Verve Group.
It also invested in Mod.io, which focused on modding across platforms, and Gamefam, which developers and publishes live-operated games on Roblox.
“Post-COVID, as you know, gaming has been a little stagnant in terms of pure growth numbers,” Manninen said. “We do think there are interesting pockets within it that have a lot of tailwinds. We are still big believers in mobile, especially specific categories within mobile. We’re still big believers in the overall industry. But there’s definitely pockets where we’ve seen more tailwinds than others. One being, obviously, the direct-to-consumer area and the innovation in the ad tech space, whether it’s rewarded ads or incentivized.”
An evolving role for game venture capitalists
He said the user-generated content market with Roblox, mods and other areas is also interesting. But he understands why game venture capital has declined since 2021. Gaming venture capital investments in 2021 were $12.5 billion, while the total in 2024 was $2.5 billion and in 2025 the total was only $600 million or so for the first half of the year.
“When you talk about gaming, or any category, AI is a key driver of innovation. The capital allocation at this point in gaming has been a little behind the curve in terms of new startup opportunities around AI. There’s sensitivity, he said, about using AI in a creative industry. But he believes game studios need to invest in AI to be competitive in the future.
“I also think we won’t lose any creativity,” he said. “The best studios will treat it as a tool to expand and empower their creativity.”
That’s where Play Ventures will continue to invest. For the high-risk, high-definition content in the PC and console gaming space, Manninen does not think game VCs are a good fit. The development cycles are too long for early-stage venture funding, and that’s not good for investors who want liquidity and exits and intial public offerings.
“There’s been a lack of exits in the startup phase,” he said. “We’ve had mega deals like the EA take-private deal with the PIF. But that’s with companies that have been in gaming from the start of the industry.”
A new role in user acquisition
Manninen said the company is an investor in PvX, which provides user-acquisition growth funding for mobile game companies. It’s another way of providing funding to companies in the form of a loan that is meant to spur investment in acquiring new users. Such non-dilutive funding, where the provider of the money takes no ownership stake, provides companies with a chance to grow without giving up equity. Play Ventures invested in PvX to help foster this new path for game companies to get much-needed money.
Manninen noted that VC funding for games is down 90% from the heyday of 2021, when confidence in games was at an all-time high because of the surge in gaming during the pandemic when people had few other ways to entertain themselves.
The future of games
Among limited partners, Manninen does not believe enthusiasm for gaming has waned.
“It’s by far the most engaging form of entertainment out there, and the demographics of gaming continue to expand,” Manninen said. “Those are just facts. We’ve gone from when you and I first got into the game industry from a narrow niche to essentially everybody playing some sort of game. There’s no doubt that gaming as a form of entertainment is still number one.”
Manninen is impressed with the ecosystems for gaming emerging in places like Turkey and Israel. He says he would not write off the U.S., but he expects strong regional growth in places like the Nordics. Play Ventures is also moving from preseed and seed deals to more later-stage investments such as a Series B round it did with Eloelo, India’s top entertainment app.