Will Wright's memories game can't get funded even after The Sims

Gallium Studios is Will Wright's (The Sims, SimCity) independent studio, building Proxi, a game that turns described memories into an explorable world.

$6M led by Griffin Gaming Partners (announced August 2022) — enough for prototyping, not for launch marketing; the team is at the end of its funds.

Will Wright pitched The Sims inside his own company, Maxis, and nobody believed in it until EA bought Maxis for $125M in 1997 — The Sims debuted in 2000 and sold 200M copies, generating $5B. With Proxi he is in the same seat: a highly original idea that pitch meetings can't price.

CEO Lauren Elliott (a Carmen Sandiego veteran) and Wright raised the limited 2022 round, pivoted away from doing their own marketing to keep the studio alive, and still ran short of runway to launch. One VC agreed to back Gallium only if it found a lead investor. Elliott gave GamesBeat a transparent interview as what he called a last chance to find funding; publishers with 20M-copy thresholds kept passing.

The Sims parallel is structural: Wright's best idea was also his hardest pitch, and this time no EA due-diligence visit is coming.

Proxi's mechanics are genuinely new — memory snow globes, association networks, shared geolocated pasts.

Funding shifted from publisher gatekeeping to tranche-locked VC milestones, which punish slow, unproven originals.

Track record doesn't transfer: the market prices category templates, not people — originality has to buy its own distribution.

As of the April 2025 article, Gallium was at the end of its funds, pitching a VC that wanted a lead investor, and using the article itself to seek funding; no publisher deal had closed.