Emerald City Games started in a basement in 2008. Founders Derek and Jamie, cousins who moved in together to make it work, split their time between family upstairs and development downstairs. No outside funding, no shortcuts, just two people building a browser-based Flash MMO called Sacred Seasons and figuring out the rest as they went. At its peak, the basement held eight developers showing up every day to keep the studio going.

That started to become a real studio. Sacred Seasons flopped on Facebook, then found its footing on Kongregate, climbing the rankings on community engagement alone. From there, Emerald City moved into mobile and Unity with a tactical RPG inspired by Battle Nations, then grew into original titles like Dark Moon alongside licensed projects built on names like Star Trek and Tomb Raider. More than a decade and a dozen-plus shipped titles later, they’re still independent, having turned down acquisition offers along the way to keep building on their own terms.

We caught the team’s recent appearance on the Pocket Gamer podcast at GDC 2026 in San Francisco, where they talked about what that independence looks like day to day, and what it’s been like bringing that same studio into the Skillz ecosystem. Watch the full episode here: 

How Skillz supports developers like Emerald City

For a studio that has spent fifteen-plus years building its own tech in-house, the appeal of a platform like Skillz comes down to what it takes off a developer’s plate. Running skill-based competition means solving for things that have nothing to do with making a good game: fair matchmaking, tournament structures, leaderboards, anti-cheat, and the fraud prevention that has to sit underneath all of it. Skillz has spent over a decade building that infrastructure, backed by 90-plus patents, so studios don’t have to build it themselves from scratch.

Payments are the other piece that quietly eats a lot of a small team’s time. Handling secure transactions and prize payouts at scale, across millions of players, is its own specialized problem. Skillz’s payment infrastructure, built on million-plus payment accounts across the platform, handles that layer directly, along with the compliance work that comes with it.

Then there’s the ongoing operational side: analytics and live ops dashboards that give developers visibility into how players are actually engaging with their game, without having to stand up and maintain that reporting themselves. For a studio like Emerald City, that combination means less time spent maintaining backend systems and more time spent on the creative and production work that makes their games feel like their games.

Their story is a reminder that staying independent and building at scale aren’t opposites, they just take the right tools.

Want to integrate your game with the Skillz platform? Visit developers.skillz.com or skillz.com/prosdk to learn more.