Playful Studios raises $23 million for spectator-enabled games

Playful Studios, the maker of the Lucky’s Tale series of games, has raised $23 million in funding from a wide variety of individual investors as it moves into a new stage of making games enabled for the spectator era.

The McKinney, Texas-based studio will use the money to go beyond virtual reality games and focus on more traditional platforms — but with the twist of bringing spectators into the action of a video game, said CEO Pau Bettner in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.