How Mike Morhaime's Dreamhaven helps indies with "the good, bad and ugly" of launching games

gamesindustry.biz:

In 2020, Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime co-created Dreamhaven, a new developer and publisher with two internal studios and a partnership program designed to help other indies.

Few companies can survive four years without announcing or releasing a product, but the funding put forward by Morhaime and his wife Amy (also a co-founder), as well as external investment partners, has given Dreamhaven the runway to fully staff up its publishing team.

It has also been able to recruit for its Moonshot and Secret Door studios, both of which are led by former Blizzard developers. There are now 100 people across all of Dreamhaven, including around 30 at Secret Door and just over 50 at Moonshot.

Yesterday, Dreamhaven announced the first title it will be publishing – Lynked: Banner of the Spark by FuzzyBot Games, a studio that's been part of the company's partnership program. The game enters Early Access on Steam on October 22.

Meanwhile, Secret Door is on course to announce its first title next month with Moonshot not too far behind.

"We would have loved to release our games earlier, had they been ready," Morhaime laughs. "The course of development is what it is and this is how long it took."

"Nobody had to start Dreamhaven. Everybody chose to do this because it allowed them to focus on the things they were excited to focus on"

Dreamhaven's partnership program involves making small investments in each studio, but also offering the team's considerable experience in an advisory capacity.

"We have a lot of expertise, not only in our publishing capabilities but also we have really good designers that could potentially just jam with some of the developers in our partner studios, help them think through problems," Della Bitta explains. "It's really good to have an independent person in your discipline to talk to. Our engineers are always talking together about challenges that they're facing.

"And so through our partnership program, we actually built this really cool community of independent