More than a year after leaving Sony Santa Monica to “do his own thing,” fighting gamesman Seth Killian has popped up at Radiant Entertainment (Stonehearth) hyping the LA-based studio’s upcoming free-to-play PC fighting game Rising Thunder (pictured).
It’s an unsurprising move in light of the fact that Radiant co-founders Tom and Tony Cannon are, like Killian, long-standing and influential members of the fighting game community.
Most notably, the Cannon brothers are responsible for coding the GGPO networking middleware that many fighting games use for online matchmaking and founding the long-running Evolution Championship Series (EVO) fighting game tournament.
Radiant showed early footage of Rising Thunder at EVO 2015 this past weekend in Las Vegas, and Killian gave interviews to a number of outlets suggesting the game is taking design lessons from popular F2P PC MOBAs as it seeks to offer players a more streamlined entry into high-level fighting game play.
“I wanted to do away with the idea of charging people $60 to begin their six months of suffering, after which they’re allowed to begin playing the game, which they may or may not like,” Killian told Kotaku. “You look around at all the most competitive games and they’ve figured out how to build a business around giving the game away for free. If you make a fun game, a good game, you can give it away or free.”
It’s worth noting that Radiant recently netted $4.5 million in VC investment to continue developing PC games. The studio expects to launch Rising Thunder into alpha testing in the near future.