Dragon Snacks Games is coming out of stealth today to craft joyful, community-centered gaming experiences where players can both play and create their own social hubs.
The company was founded by industry veterans Jen MacLean (Xbox, Amazon, IGDA), Michelle Menard (Oxide Games, Zynga, Firaxis), and Chris Nemcosky (Scopely, Backflip). I talked with them in an interview. Dragon Snacks Games aims to innovate and redefine the way we play, with inclusive worlds and third places designed for connection, collaboration, and creativity.
Dragon Snacks was created in response to recent dramatic shifts in the game industry landscape. Mass layoffs continue to hit major studios, mid-sized developers are vanishing, and generative AI is dominating the conversation and reshaping how games are made. At the same time, a new problem for the industry is emerging: younger players don’t always see games as their entertainment of choice.
As industry veterans behind billion-dollar titles and partnerships, the cofounders see this environment as an opportunity, not a crisis. With small, sustainable teams, an emphasis on player-driven content, and a belief that games can be the next generation of social hubs, Dragon Snacks is embracing the future of game development in ways that larger studios cannot. It is focused on multiplayer, co-op and social gaming experiences.
After witnessing firsthand industry trends as developers and leaders for decades, the Dragon Snacks founders are in a unique position to solve many of the biggest challenges in gaming today:
- The AI wave: How GenAI will impact game creation, why smart studios are leaning into human-driven collaboration, and how Dragon Snacks is approaching tech without sacrificing creativity or humanity.
- The rise of mega corporations and layoffs: There’s no “safe” studio size or company any longer, and small, efficient, agile teams can make games that compete with nine figure budget titles. Dragon Snacks builds success not by worrying about technical superiority or outspending the competition, but by focusing on player needs that aren’t being met today, and involving players at every step of the process.
- Games vs. Social Media: As Gen Z and Alpha spend more time on TikTok and Discord, how can game studios evolve? Dragon Snacks is betting on collaborative, player-led creation as the key to not just making games competitive with social platforms, but co-opting those other entertainment platforms to drive growth. By involving players as active co-creators, and providing experiences they share with
their “found families,” Dragon Snacks aims to meet emotional needs that drive engagement on every platform and device. - Console wars: Dragon Snacks’ founders believe they are irrelevant. Today’s player needs and wants are profoundly different from audiences the games industry used to serve. Gen Z and Gen Alpha players expect to be able to play on any platform, at any time, with any friend. This audience demands immediate fun and engaging entertainment, and they want to feel like their time is respected by developers.
By building experiences that are natively cross-platform, with cross-play and crossprogression, and actively involving players in meaningful creation from the first moment of the game, Dragon Snacks is building a uniquely focused new entertainment experience.
“We need to stop building games for the players we had five years ago, and concentrate our creativity on the players of today and tomorrow. Gen Z and Gen Alpha demand entertainment experiences that meet their needs, and they’re not interested in an outdated industry playbook,” said MacLean.
“Our vision is to create social game experiences that can expand or contract to fill any available amount of time, and that connect players to the people that matter most to them. We know that playing in a safe, trusted space, with high-quality content, and with meaningful interactions with other players are non-negotiables for this audience,” said chief creative officer Michelle Menard.
“By adapting game development to a player-focused methodology, with rapid iteration, always-playable builds, and early and ongoing community feedback, we’re making games the way they need to be made for the future. We’re delivering games tailored for the players of today and tomorrow, and we see our vision as the path forward to successful, sustainable games and companies,” notes cofounder and CTO Chris Nemcosky.
In an era where gaming needs to adapt or be left behind, Dragon Snacks isn’t just starting another indie studio – they’re building games for where the industry needs to go next.
MacLean said the team showed a prototype that it built in six weeks and was able to show behind closed doors at the Game Developers Conference. They got good feedback and decided to come out publicly. But the company doesn’t expect to show off the game really soon.
A big disconnect for big games
At Microsoft, MacLean’s team managed Xbox’s, largest third party partnerships like EA, Epic Games, Roblox, Riot Games, Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive.
“It became really obvious to me that the way large companies make games, that the way we’re thinking about growing the games industry as a whole, wasn’t resonating with the needs of Gen Z and Gen Alpha,” MacLean said. “We were focused so much as an industry on how we’ve done things over the past five, 10, 20 years — and not enough on how player needs are changing at the same time.”
MacLean said she has kids who are eight, 12 and 20, and she has seen how their gaming life cycle has evolved. She reviewed the research on them and found that graphics differentiation doesn’t matter is much to people who got their start in the industry on Roblox and Minecraft.
“We have crafted these hundreds of millions of dollar experiences that don’t resonated with an audience that dips in and out of entertainment experiences in 30 seconds or 90 seconds,” MacLean said, “For our audience moving forward, we have to think differently.”
She reached out to Nemcosky, whom she had worked with before at Big Huge Games on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and also talked with Menard.
“We really came together around the idea that to make games that resonate with the future audiences, you have to look at the needs that aren’t being met, and you have to build those creative cooperative, collaborative experiences built from multiplayer from the ground up,” MacLean said. “And do it in a way that is sustainable, that doesn’t rely on features that mattered a lot in the past but don’t matter in the future, and that really is crafted to understand the needs of our player base.”
Starting up
They formed the studio on October 11, and now the team has six people in a fully remote workplace. They raised a significant angel investment and are looking at more funding ahead.
For the first project, Menard said the team is focusing on a game that is also a social platform.
“It isn’t just about gaming. It’s about really a space that they can hang out with their friends, with people they’re already connected to in real life, and bringing that also to their virtual life,” Menard said. “It’s really meeting them there and trying to build them a whole experience that meets them across both of those boundaries, so they can hang out with their friends in real life, jump into a game at Dragon Snacks and keep hanging out with their friends there in both longer periods of time.”
The experiences can last shorter times, like maybe 30 seconds or five minutes. MacLean said the company isn’t talking about the genre or game details yet, but you can tell something from the kind of art.
Menard said the company embraces a visual theme that is similar to “solar punk,” which has more of an environmental and nature focus, with some elements of high tech.
“You’ve got that mix of the fantastical and the technological,” Menard said. And it has an optimistic view of the future, with problem solving, physical materials and ecosystems that are self-sustaining, Nemcosky said.
The team will likely grow to about 20 people, but it will remain nimble, MacLean said. It won’t be a hundred-person studio in part because it will be able to tap co-development resources, or external development firms like Keywords or Virtuos, which have thousands of employees who do development for other game studios.
As for AI, Nemcosky said, “It should be a tool to take the stuff that isn’t fun about development out of development. It is not for making the game, right? I want to make games. That’s why I got into games. That’s why I’ve been in the industry this long, the juicy, good technical problems, or the really neat art that’s pushing something. I don’t want that to go away.”
He added, “But what I do want to have go away is like writing boilerplate tests in code. I definitely want AI to do that for me, or deal with blank page syndrome, where I’m wondering how do something Or I want to get some representative styles to understand how I what resonates with me, and then put that human touch back into it. So we’re using it as an accelerator, but nothing we will release will be completely AI generated. We will always have it be touched by a human and made by human, but we will use it to take some of the administrative out of development and accelerate our speed.”
MacLean said it’s a very challenging time right now to raise money.
“There is a lot of uncertainty, but at the same time, we’ve got new platforms launching, which are super exciting,” MacLean said. “We know that more and more people are going to be looking to sign content for 2027 and 2028 and we’re also seeing more talent available at a more reasonable price than ever. So it is both the worst of times, but also the best of times.”
And she said, “We think there’s a huge opportunity for us to rethink, as an industry, how we make games, who we’re making games for, and especially why we’re making those games.”
The well of inspiration
All of the leaders said they admired Supergiant Games, a small studio that has made gigantic hits like the Hades series of games.
Menard was previously design director at Oxide Games, while Nemcosky was VP of Studio and led the team at Scopely that helped created Monopoly Go.
“When I think about the future of the industry, I think we have to be focused on removing barriers to play,” MacLean said. “I would agree with Supergiant that I think there’s an opportunity for games that are not full priced titles, no matter what that price might be, whether it’s $70 or $80, and also thinking about how we leverage a lot of our competition in terms of social media networks, Tiktok, YouTube shorts, Discord and co-opt them so that they become player acquisition platforms for us.”
In the long run, MacLean said the company envisions moving to its own platform. She said Dragon Snacks is like hanging out with your friends after a long stressful week. It’s about creating something or engaging in storytelling or building something.
“For us, we think that transcends platforms,” she said.
While Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox are creating fun initial experiences, they’re not providing the next steps in maturity or taking players into a multiplayer co-op experience.
“We think that there’s an amazing opportunity, particularly because when you look at what’s going on at a larger society level, if you’ve watched Adolescence on Netflix, which is incredibly harrowing, or read the Anxious Generation, this audience defines themselves by the validation they get from other people,” MacLean said. “We want to reshape that to give them a place where they get validation from their friends, from the people who matter most to them.”
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