Earlier this month, the studio secured an additional multimillion dollar funding round to accelerate and bolster development of their debut flagship MMO, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen  The source of the funding was not disclosed, other than chief executive officer Chris Rowan stating in an interview with Game Rant that it's “a group of people who really believed in us as a creative and technical team and wanted to see this happen.”  Upcoming MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen  Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is a classic-style MMO in the sense that it's heavily inspired by the original EverQuest . In fact, one of the original creative forces behind the founding of Visionary Realms is Brad McQuaid, who was famously the lead programmer on EverQuest  For many longtime MMO fans, Pantheon has been regarded as EverQuest's spiritual successor. With a focus on high-fantasy traditional MMO gameplay, an emphasis on party dynamics, and a heavy push towards class synergy helps it stand out from its more fast-paced and action heavy contemporaries.  McQuaid passed away in 2019 , but work on Pantheon continued. The game released into early access on Steam in December of 2024, but it's still unfinished. Theoretically, this infusion of new funding should help the studio get the game over the finish line into a fully launched 1.0 state.  “The investment will fund more artists, programmers, designers, and reinforced project management to allow the team to launch the game sooner with a more complete offering of its planned content,” the company stated in a press release  MMOs are truly some of the most expensive games to make. Not only are the games complex layers of systems and mechanics built upon one another across vast, dynamic landscapes with hundreds of hours of core content, but they're also designed to keep going for years and years.  Then, when you add on all of the server costs for hosting thousands of concurrent players, ongoing development costs for new content, and the herculean effort of managing a community that large, and it's no wonder that even company's as big as Amazon struggle to make MMOs that last  You can check out Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen for yourself in early access on Steam right now.

MMORPG ‘Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen' Just Got A Big Infusion Of Cash

Visionary Realms secures additional multimillion dollar funding to accelerate and bolster the launch of MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.  CARLSBAD, Calif. Nov. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The investment will fund more artists, programmers, designers, and reinforced project management to allow the team to launch the game sooner with a more complete offering of its planned content.  This news arrives amid industry-wide turmoil, including layoffs, studio closures, and investor retreats. "The industry is suffering a terrible storm right now," said CEO Chris Rowan. "We are appreciative of this vote of confidence in our team's vision, resilience, and dedication to crafting a skill-driven MMORPG."  Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen entered Early Access in December 2024, with 2025 having been primarily focused on adding content for multiple level ranges and refining systems, while gathering live player feedback for consideration and implementation.  The funding enables the team to more fully realize the original vision at launch, delivering a more robust experience. "We're in a great position now," Rowan added. "Uncertainty has been removed allowing for improved, meticulous planning and focused project management which gives VR sustained momentum toward a definitive 1.0 release."  The game is available now in Early Access on Steam and via direct purchase on PantheonMMO.com  About Visionary Realms  Visionary Realms is an independent studio fearlessly advancing the MMO genre with the content-rich, challenging, and highly social game, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.  Media Contact  Public Relations, Visionary Realms, Inc., 1 760-557-1607, pr@visionaryrealms.com  SOURCE Visionary Realms, Inc.

MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen secures additional multimillion dollar funding

Published 18 minutes ago
Katelyn has been a writer since they learned to hold a pencil, but was a latecomer to the world of gaming, gradually falling in love with video games over the course of high school and college. They first game they ever played was Dance Dance Revolution EXTREME. During their time teaching English in Japan, during which they lived in the real-world equivalent of Pokemon's Pastoria City, gaming got them through the long cold Sinnoh...er, Hokkaido...nights. Katelyn has been a professional writer and content creator since 2017. They got into game journalism in 2020, fell in love with it pretty much immediately, and hope to continue in that field for as long as they have ideas for articles and the ability to write them. Most days, Katelyn can be found with a controller or handheld console in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and at least a half dozen or more in-progress articles on their computer. Give me a lighthearted recap
MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has had quite the journey over a decade-plus of development. The game has seen funding struggles, team members needing to wear multiple hats, the loss of Visionary Realms founder Brad McQuaid, and more. The team has persisted, however, and is now to make an exciting announcement: they have secured a seven-figure funding deal, allowing them to expand the team and add exciting new content as Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen continues in Early Access. Pantheon's New Funding Allows For Expansion And Efficiency
An investor passionate about Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has agreed to fund the MMORPG . "We're not being taken over by a studio. We're not having some big heavyweight coming in and suffocating us," Visionary Realms CEO Chris Rowan confirmed in a conversation with Game Rant. "It's a group of people who really believed in us as a creative and technical team and wanted to see this happen." The funding means that Pantheon developer Visionary Realms is able to expand its team, adding more artists and programmers as well as a dedicated project manager. "We remain frugal and scrappy and resourceful," Rowan said, "[but] we have a moment to breathe, step back, [and] people can wear fewer hats....We can get a lot more done, deeper, richer, sooner, without distractions." As Visionary Realms expands and adds more members to the team, it can focus on new content for Pantheon, which launched in Early Access in 2023. Creative & Programming Producer Chris Perkins is particularly excited about some of the updates coming to the game in the near future, which include the addition of the Wildblood faction, updates to the Wizard and Summoner classes, and a mount and taming system. "We've got a ton more stuff coming up that's really exciting and important to the game's growth," Perkins promised. At a time when many studios are faced with layoffs and downsizing, Visionary Realms is proud to be a success story of a passionate team with an equally passionate fanbase. Rowan and Perkins were particularly excited to share the good news with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's Early Access players . Perkins had this message to share with the game's fans:
"The community has a sense of ownership in the game. We listen to them sincerely and authentically, and they're invested in it. It's kind of their world too. And I think anything that contributes to it being deeper, richer, bigger, ready sooner will get them excited." Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's players can look forward to many exciting new updates and announcements regarding the game as Visionary Realms puts the new funding to good use. New players interested in getting into this unique MMORPG can check it out on PC via Steam.

Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen Secures Major Funding Deal

CARLSBAD, Calif. Nov. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The investment will fund more artists, programmers, designers, and reinforced project management to allow the team to launch the game sooner with a more complete offering of its planned content.  This news arrives amid industry-wide turmoil, including layoffs, studio closures, and investor retreats. "The industry is suffering a terrible storm right now," said CEO Chris Rowan. "We are appreciative of this vote of confidence in our team's vision, resilience, and dedication to crafting a skill-driven MMORPG."  Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen entered Early Access in December 2024, with 2025 having been primarily focused on adding content for multiple level ranges and refining systems, while gathering live player feedback for consideration and implementation.  The funding enables the team to more fully realize the original vision at launch, delivering a more robust experience. "We're in a great position now," Rowan added. "Uncertainty has been removed allowing for improved, meticulous planning and focused project management which gives VR sustained momentum toward a definitive 1.0 release."  The game is available now in Early Access on Steam and via direct purchase on PantheonMMO.com  About Visionary Realms  Visionary Realms is an independent studio fearlessly advancing the MMO genre with the content-rich, challenging, and highly social game, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.  Media Contact  Public Relations, Visionary Realms, Inc., 1 760-557-1607, pr@visionaryrealms.com  View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prweb.com/releases/mmorpg-pantheon-rise-of-the-fallen-secures-additional-multimillion-dollar-funding-302604004.html  SOURCE Visionary Realms, Inc.

Image Credit: Ravenheart
Visionary Realms is an ambitious game studio that recently launched early access for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen , a massively multiplayer online role-playing social fantasy game. The December 13 launch on Steam was a bittersweet moment for the team, which had been run by EverQuest game pioneer Brad McQuaid . McQuaid died at age 50 in 2019, in the midst of the game’s development. But the team carried on and after years of development, the company was able to launch early access for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, a social high-fantasy MMO game for the the PC. It is available for purchase on Steam for $40. In an interview, the game leaders said they were honored at the reception it received for bringing back the classically spirited challenge, discovery, awe and social experience to MMOs, and it hopes sharing the story inspires other indies. “To get to this point is very proud and humbling experience,” CEO Chris Rowan said in an interview with GamesBeat. “But we’ve got it out on early access on Steam and the reaction has been spectacular, with mostly positive reviews, great sales. We’ve been finding our way around this concept of open development, doing things with the doors and windows open and inviting the community to be part of that, and sharing what’s happening, and taking their feedback and including them in testing from an earlier stage than is has ever really been done.”
Chris Rowan is CEO of Visionary Realms. He said there were ups and downs to that process, but the net was positive. The game is still in development but now it can earn revenues through early-access payments. The early access build contains six zones, six playable races and 12 playable classes. Players can level up to level 40 and more content will be added throughout the early access period. So far, the game has reached 40,000 unique players and more than 6,000 have logged in on early access. “The numbers are great and the concurrency on Steam is strong,” Rowan said. “The concurrency has been better than expected and quite healthy. It did really well on the first day and has been steady since then. We actually got into the top 10 on day one, which was exciting for a small studio like us.”
Gameplay features
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is a classic social fantasy MMO. The features available include “adventure together,” where players form adventuring parties and guilds with friends to overcome greater challenges to receive greater rewards. It also has a “climb everywhere” feature where players can climb nearly any surface in the game for adventure in every direction. It also has discover with perception, where you can uncover clues, dialogues and outcomes that enrich the story and your travels using the perception system. And you can plunder the depths, where you can delve into copious dungeons with other players where every cavern may lead to treasure, battle or a new friendship. Players can fight a menagerie of monsters in challenging combat where strategy, knowledge and teamwork make the difference between victory and defeat. Players can adopt roles such as the Tank, Healer, Damage or Support and choose from a variety of class skills to customize their loadouts. Players can also acquire powerful and iconic equipment and rare abilities that boast of the places you’ve been in the game and the battles you’ve won. These things can empower your character with enhanced attributes and unique effects. The denizens of the world Terminus have wide variety and can spawn with a multitude of different behaviors which alters their actions and strategies, ensuring no two adventures are alike. Origins
A community screen from Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
The team started contemplating the game back in 2015 , in the days of casual games, pay to win, and other kinds of new business models being tested. World of Warcraft had had its good run and the team wanted to do a classic MMO that set a really high bar for quality. “Brad and I had worked together, and he felt like it was felt very passionately that it was time to kind of bring back the spirit of MMOs, what really made them great at the core, in the very beginning and and there were a lot of people who were into the idea,” said Rowan. “There were a lot of people who felt they had been orphaned from what made MMOs so great. That momentum built. And before we knew it, Visionary Realms was launched, and was time to build Pantheon.”
The game was a slow burn at the beginning and was very thinly funded. The ideation happened and the first serious funding came in 2017. That helped bring on more people and help accelerate the company. But then tragedy struck. “With Brad passing in 2019, people thought the project was going to die,” Rowan said. “Maybe counter intuitively, it got the community and the team even more charged up. You know, when you believe in something, when you’re building a game because you want to play it yourself, when you’re really passionate about it, then people are going to see it through. We’ve been largely driven by passion and sacrifice and creativity and hard work. And to be perfectly honest, resourcefulness and grit.”
Overcoming challenges
A community screen from Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
This is the work of a small indie studio which had to overcome numerous very serious challenges along the way while watching other efforts not make it to the finish line, Rowan said. Along the way, the company stayed independent and true to its vision through grit, persistence, plus some angel and crowdfunding. Visionary Realms challenged the boundaries of dev transparency– with a lot of openness, interactivity and honesty with the community. That eventually became its path to success, Rowan said. The team peaked at about 30 people, and now it has around 18 to 20, some of them part-timers who have other jobs. The company has raised less than $10 million through a combination of investors and crowdfunding. “The amount of effort and commitment and passion and sacrifice has just been astonishing,” Rowan said. Asked how the team held together after McQuaid’s passing, Rowan said, “I would credit everybody involved in the project — their commitment, their passion, and that goes as for the community as well. People wanted to see this game built. We were building it because we thought the world needed a game like this. Again, we were building it because we wanted to play it. Just like Sven Vinge said at The Game Awards.”
He added, “Sven said that the game of the year [for 2025] is going to be built by a studio. It might not be us, but it can be built by a studio that’s building a game that they want to build, that’s not designed by the marketing department, but designed by passionate game designers. And after the shock wore off to a person, everybody said, “We’ve got to do this. We got to do this because the world needs this game. We got to do this for Brad. We got to see this through.’ Our resolve was renewed.”
The company also successfully changed the art style to be more timeless and speed up development. It also made a significant shift in management style that resulted in faster production, iteration and progress. Chris Perkins is creative director of Visionary Realms. “There’s a trend for a lot of Souls-like games now. I would describe our game as a classic MMO,” said Chris Perkins, creative director, in an interview with GamesBeat. “There’s a classic genre of MMOs when the genre itself first got started. It was very different and unique in style than modern MMOs. They were very social. They weren’t holding your hand a lot. They could be even pretty punishing in some cases. One of the ways I think we differentiate ourselves is with that classic style.”
Perkins added, “We’re bringing it into 2025 and we’re not interested in making a really cumbersome, like a fossilized game that’s really difficult for people to get into. We recognize a lot of the advancements in quality of life that have been made over the years. We want to make a game that’s more accessible, but we want to make a game in the modern era that really taps into that classic formula that has kind of been lost.”
To the team, classic means games that were expected to be more of a shared experience among players. There’s more of a social element. The game wasn’t as on rails. And the goal was to make a more challenging MMO in the mechanics, but also where there was a risk-reward in that there is some sting from a death, Perkins said. “This may be the last chance we have. In fact, this might be the last studio that is really leaning into believing this can be a style of MMO that has legs today,” Perkins said. “There’s an opportunity to to do something here that may not have another chance. There’s a lot in that that’s driving us.”
For good or bad, the latest AI tools didn’t arrive in time to be really useful in the development of the game. The team is still experimenting with AI but Rowan said it’s not quite there yet. “We got to EA before the AI tidal wave hits,” Rowan said. The roadmap
Visionary Realms is working on its next addition to Pantheon. The current aim is to take in the massive amount of feedback coming in now and polishing the game that has been released. The team thinks of the current offering as a slice of the game. Then the next task is to ramp up the next part of the world, which his massive. On the tech side, the company plans to upgrade to the Unity 6 operating system with new optimizations and better performance. “It’s been a real journey, against many odds, with many bumps along the way,” Rowan said. “We’ve seen a really tough year in the past year in the industry, with a lot of studios falling by the wayside. I’m just pleased that through our community support and the passion of the team and the support of customers that we’ve been able to make it here, and we plan to get even stronger from here.”
Brad McQuaid of Visionary Realms. He died in 2019 but would be proud of Pantheon. The team was small but it made good choices about focusing on easy-to-use, accessible game-building technology. The team built its own platform with a focus on low code and no code, using Node Graph technology. It allows designers who aren’t programmers to get content into the game without having to interact with the programmers, Rowan said. “It is really quite amazing that a team of this size, with this budget, has managed to pull this off,” Rowan said. “The proof is in the pudding. It’s out there.”
“People are loving it, our passion and long hours, combined with really good, accessible technology,” Rowan said. Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily
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Visionary Realms’ Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen sees success in early access

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Gaming companies are defined as those developing technologies for the PC, console, mobile, and/or AR/VR video gaming market. 

Gaming

Visionary Realms specializes in the development of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) within the gaming industry. The company focuses on creating gameplay experiences that are social and varied, targeting gamers looking for online multiplayer experiences. It was founded in 2013 and is based in Carlsbad, United States.

Date	Round	Investors	Valuation Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.	Revenue	Sources
11/4/2025	Unattributed - II	Undisclosed Investors	$XXM	0 FY undefined	4
1/19/2021	Unattributed	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10
4/26/2017	Series A	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10
9/28/2015	Seed	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10

Date	11/4/2025	1/19/2021	4/26/2017	9/28/2015
Round	Unattributed - II	Unattributed	Series A	Seed
Amount
Investors	Undisclosed Investors	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Valuation	$XXM	$XXM	$XXM	$XXM
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	4	10	10	10

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