Seattle startup Live Aware raises $4.8M for new AI-powered game developer feedback system
Seattle-based startup Live Aware Labs raised $4.8 million in a seed funding round to continue work on its self-titled feedback management platform for game developers.
The round was led by Transcend, with participation from A16Z GAMES SPEEDRUN, Lifelike Capital, and angel investors Patrick Wyatt, Luis Villegas, Michael Evans, Chacko Sonny, Eden Chen, Seth Sivak, Brendan Mulligan, Curt Bererton, Brian Vesce, and Todd Hooper.
Live Aware’s management platform is designed as an all-in-one set of tools for video game creators, focused heavily on processes that let developers get better feedback, iterate faster, and work in close communication with a community of players and testers.
“Audiences are diversifying tremendously,” co-founder and CEO Sean Vesce tells GeekWire, “and more developers are realizing [the value of] building a game in lockstep with an audience from the earliest stages of development. If you can get versions of your game and your vision in front of real people and have them play, that information is really helpful.”
Vesce is a longtime game developer who worked for Crystal Dynamics on several games in the Tomb Raider series. More recently, he was the creative director on Never Alone, a critically and commercially successful 2014 indie video game that’s based upon real-world Native Alaskan folklore.
“Some people call this ‘player-first’ development, or ‘community-driven,’” says Vesce. “We got our taste for it early on in the Never Alone project. We built that game almost entirely along with the Alaska Native community… we were constantly sharing our work and soliciting ideas and getting their input.”
Vesce continues: “In the same way, game developers working on the next action game in development with their community have a much higher chance of success.”
The other co-founders at Live Aware are head of product Nathan Wheeler, a former Seattle teacher who went on to work at the Seattle indie studio very very spaceship, and CTO Dave Berger, the co-founder and former engineering director of Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries (now Halo Studios).
Live Aware arose from the realization by Vesce and Berger that the tools did not exist for other studios to take the same player-first approach that had previously worked with Never Alone. The Live Aware platform is designed to allow developers to put their games in front of their community, get feedback, and implement the results “almost in real time.”
One of its primary tools for doing so is AI. In a typical test session for a video game, testers and volunteers will generate mountains of data and footage, only a relative fraction of which is at all useful.
With Live Aware, game testers will record themselves as they play, in a setup that looks a little like a YouTube reaction video. Their vocal reactions to what they’re experiencing give Live Aware’s LLM something it can lock onto, so it can scan through all that footage, archive it, and provide all the most useful information to developers as a plain text file. It’s an all-in one solution for a process that’s more typically done as a kludge of multiple, non-interactive processes.
“I wish I had this while I was making Halo,” Berger tells GeekWire.
Other services provided as part of the Live Aware platform include automated translation in 30 languages and integration with other game development tools, such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Slack, Discord, and as of last month, Monday.com.
Live Aware is currently in use at several studios worldwide, including Krafton (PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds), GSC Game World (the forthcoming STALKER 2), and the recent Los Angeles startup Believer. According to Vesce and Berger, the company plans to launch a pay-as-you-go plan for Live Aware in 2025, in order to make the platform accessible for developers at all levels of funding.