Playful has raised $48 million to date.
Playful has raised $48 million to date.
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Playful Studios raises $23 million for spectator-enabled games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

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.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.