Fateless Games founders on Godforge, community-led development and raising $14 million

• Fateless has raised $14 million with major support from its community.
• The studio grew from a creator-driven ecosystem into a 50-person global team.
• Godforge has been shaped by direct feedback from more than 2m community members.
• Many Fateless team members previously worked at Microsoft, Riot, EA and Scopely.
• Godforge blends dark fantasy storytelling with strategic PvE and PvP combat.

In an exclusive interview with Fateless founders Simon Lockerby, Dan Francis and Hisham Saleh, we take a closer look at Godforge, the dark fantasy RPG being built by a creator-founded studio that has now raised a total of $14 million. 

The trio discuss how their backgrounds as content creators built the foundation for a fully remote 50-person studio, why community input guides every development milestone, and how this financial momentum is helping them deliver a player-shaped RPG experience.

PocketGamer.biz: Tell us a bit about Fateless. How did your backgrounds as content creators influence your approach to building a game studio? 

Simon Lockerby: I first started playing Raid Shadow Legends on my phone on my way to work, soon thereafter deciding to make content on YouTube about the game. The community grew quickly with me, and I decided to quit my job three months after starting my channel and hit 100k subscribers within a year. 

With the help of Dan Francis, we built HH Gaming, a community site for Raid Shadow Legends and other RPG Hero Collector players. Around this time, we got a lot of requests from the community to build a game of our own. Initially this felt like such a crazy idea!

But the more we heard this, Dan and I started to have more serious conversations and eventually decided that if we were ever going to do this, then this would be the perfect time to do so. 

This ultimately led to the creation of Fateless. Our ambition has always been to build a game that, as fans of the RPG/Fantasy genre, we would want to play ourselves while also ensuring that we keep our community front and centre to all our decisions and milestones.

Dan Francis: I met Simon just as he was starting out as a full-time content creator, and together we were able to establish HH Gaming as the biggest platform in the world for Raid Shadow Legends and other western team hero collectors. I had a background in marketing and working with different brands, but I’ve been a gamer my whole life. Getting the opportunity to build a gaming studio of our own was really exciting. 

Hisham Saleh: I was the Founder and CEO of indie development studio Skeleton Hand, and joined Simon and Dan to co-found Fateless in 2023. The opportunity to help build a new studio and game that is completely community-driven was super exciting for me and it’s easily been one of the most exciting ventures I’ve taken on. 

How many staff do you currently employ and where are they based? 

Lockerby: Fateless is mainly based in the UK, with myself and Dan working from here, and Hisham Saleh from Illinois, USA. The studio is fully remote, and we get to meet in-person through events, but otherwise we all communicate through Discord.

Our team has grown to 50 over the past two years, attracting talented professionals from all over the world including members of our team who have previously worked with Microsoft, Riot, EA, Scopely, and more. 

We’re incredibly lucky to have been able to hire talent with such valuable industry knowledge and experience. A large number of the team were actually recommended to us or approached us directly to join the studio and work on Godforge. 

Which is crazy when you think about it, but I think it’s a real testament to not only the amount of networking we’ve been able to do, but also the ethos of the studio and the potential of the game.

People want to come and work on Godforge and are excited by the vibrant community waiting to play it. It’s incredibly exciting for all of us. We’ve learnt so much from the team, and hopefully we can keep growing as a studio. 

You’ve described Fateless as a “community-led studio”. What does that mean in practice, and how does it shape day-to-day development decisions? 

Francis: Being a community-led studio means, really what it says on the tin: we started the studio because of the community and we continue to operate with that mentality of constantly engaging and bringing them along for the ride with us. We gather their feedback and thoughts on playtests, content ideas, and what they hope to see in the full release of Godforge. 

We release regular videos showcasing the latest content from the game, regular podcasts discussing our thought process, and weekly screenshots on our Discord server, all of which allow us to receive feedback from the community without the intensity of maintaining a public playtest.

In short, our community influences the vast majority of internal conversations on gameplay features, UI decisions, and our overall approach, because at the end of the day, if you aren’t making your game for the players, who are you making it for?

In addition to this, we want to make sure that we’re giving something back to community members who have given their time to helping with testing and providing that feedback.

Our most recent Alpha Wave saw over 36,000 players collectively log around 355,000 hours of gameplay. We wanted to reward the top 1000 players with a commemorative Godforge Golden Medal, but we had to extend this to 1,100 due to the sheer volume of players who completed one of the in-game challenges. 

Saleh: Further to that, we’re flying out seven of our stand-out participants to join the team in Vegas next year to celebrate the launch of Godforge. We’re also working with popular YouTuber Squidmar to create a full-scale diorama that will be exhibited in Verko's Vault.

This diorama will commemorate the team with the highest score during the Alpha Wave. It’s a really cool way to celebrate the launch of the game, and we’re super excited to do so with our community.

Fateless has now raised a total of $14m, with community funding playing a major role in your early phase. What lessons did you learn from that experience and would you approach it the same way again? 

Lockerby: It’s no secret that fundraising in our industry becomes increasingly challenging every year, given the number of games released. Major Angel investors are more cautious than ever, and venture capitalists are pushing a lot of their resources into AI-based initiatives.

Despite this, when we released a video to our community stating Fateless was born, we received over a hundred emails asking us about the possibility of investment. 

After seeing us build HH Gaming, a leading resource platform for Raid: Shadow Legends, these individuals were confident in our ability to build something new. Since then, we’ve been working hard with the support of our community in shaping what will become Godforge.

We’ve learned that transparency is key to driving investment and that traction and momentum are important to ensuring the ball just keeps on rolling. These are definitely key factors in what drives our community-first focus.

Talk to us about Godforge. How does this game fit into your studio’s long-term vision? And how do you plan to position the title in a crowded RPG market dominated by more established IPs? 

Francis: Godforge is a turn-based RPG set in a dark fantasy universe, where players can collect iconic Gods, myths and legends, and battle through PVE dungeons and PVP arenas.  They can progress through deep customisation, challenges, and epic boss fights.

We’ve made sure to maintain continued interactions with our community from the very beginning of the development process, in particular through our Alpha Wave testing. As a result, the players themselves have basically helped shape the development of Godforge. 

We also believe that Godforge offers our community members a genuine opportunity to come together and truly connect as they overcome various in-game challenges. People connect when playing games together and that’s something we’re seeing across the board since we started this journey.

That’s what I believe sets us apart, the community that has been with us from the beginning and has seen Godforge grow into something really special. 

We’re really excited for them to be finally able to play the finished game at launch. The long-term vision is to emphasise player agency, immersive storytelling and fair monetisation. While our current focus is Godforge, we are also committed to building a new kind of studio, one where players truly have a seat at the table.

What are some of the biggest technical or creative challenges you’ve faced in bringing the same core experience across multiple platforms? 

Saleh: The versatility and adaptability of Unity as a game engine has made our technical and creative challenges relatively transferable between both PC and mobile.

Our main challenges really lie in the smaller details, which are primarily readability of the UI during gameplay, alongside ensuring performance is smooth and consistent regardless of device.

With launch planned for Q1 2026, what do you think makes your game stand out, and what part of the experience do you most want players to enjoy? 

Lockerby: We currently have an engaged community of over two million players across our Discord, social media platforms and the website. That community existed before the game was even in Alpha, which is absolutely insane and speaks volumes about the belief they have in us as a studio.

Players are regularly testing Godforge and providing valuable feedback, which has really helped the team create some really interesting character designs. 

Some of my favourite designs include Ra, Egyptian God of the sun; Terracotta Warrior; Lamasthu; Medusa; Oda Nobunaga, I could go on; it's difficult to pick a favourite!

Our hope is that through the strategic depth of the game, cinematic visuals as well as valuable community feedback, Godforge helps redefine what is possible in the hero collector genre. 

We wanted boss battles to have an air of nostalgia to them, a lot of our players used to play big MMOs, and we wanted that larger-than-life boss experience to come to Godforge.

Of all our epic boss fights and challenges, I feel the community aspect remains the part of the experience I most want players to enjoy, and find a space to come together as a community and enjoy a game they helped build.

If this sounds like something other players who are yet to discover Godforge want to be a part of, then they will be happy to know that sign-ups for early access are already open!

Beyond Godforge, what’s the long-term vision for Fateless as a studio? Do you see yourselves building multiple games or focusing on one flagship title? 

Saleh: We are fully focused on Godforge right now, without even considering what the next game could look like. We’d love to make another game eventually, but we are completely focused on Godforge right now, and look forward to further supporting the game with new content post-launch.

The whole team can’t wait to bring the game into the hands of our community and the wider world next year, sooner rather than later.