F2P game Hawken wants 10m players

The firm behind upcoming free game Hawken has scored an extra $18m in VC funding.

And it says it can use the money to quickly build an audience of over 10m players.

The PC?title from Meteor Entertainment is due for a global roll out on December 12th, and this week closed a second round of funding.

Hawken is the antithesis of blockbusters like Call of Duty. New studio Adhesive built it using the Unreal engine and paired with an equally new publisher to launch the game.

The results have impressed gamers, with preview videos scoring millions of YouTube views for the last year with little marketing.

When the title goes live next month, the developer hopes to build the same size audience as retail hits like Call of Duty and F2P giant League of Legends.

We’re our own publisher and our own developer – we answer to nobody except the consumer,” Khang Le, creative director and Adhesive co-founder, told MCV.

There is no middle man. It’s great. The free-to-play model solves piracy,

and while there’s a stigma around it in some quarters, that is changing.

We’ve spent a long time polishing the game and building it to be very satisfying from the off.Free means you can start small but get very big – just look at Minecraft."

To find out more about the booming free-to-play sector, check out this week’sFree-to-Play Special Editionof MCV Magazine. In celebration, we’ve made it free to read online!Check it out here.