“Watching People Play My Game Is Like A Disney Movie.”

From playing video games as a child to making his own one as an adult, Robbie Singh talks about his journey from player to creator

As a child, it never occurred to Robbie Singh that people actually had a career making video games. He thought he’d end up working as an investment banker, but decades later, the 31-year old has turned into one of the people he was so blissfully unaware of as a youngster, having become the CEO and co-founder of Omeda Studios, a British developer behind Predecessor, a game built from the ashes of a failed project initially led by one of the world’s biggest developers, Epic Games.

His journey from gamer to creator began outside his local Blockbuster store in Wembley, London. After begging his father for a PlayStation 3 at the age of 14, the pair queued behind five other eager families at midnight on the day of the console’s launch in 2007. Although, the late night adventure came with a damning condition that would crush the dreams of almost every kid. “It was a school night and my dad told me I couldn’t open it until the weekend” Singh recalls, painfully.

He goes on to reminisce about playing a first-person shooter that came bundled with his PS3 called Resistance: Fall of Man, on a big television for the first time. “It was incredible and from there, I developed my love for video games” he says.

That passion continued into his early twenties, where he had a profound experience playing soccer games like FIFA and Half Zone with others while studying at university in east London. “This was the first time I really experienced playing games with friends in the real world” he says. It led him to seek out a likeminded community that played games regularly, and so he started his own channel on the streaming platform, Twitch.

Studying how other content creators used their videos to establish a business kick started an idea. “I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur at some point in my life” Singh says, explaining that his father ran a cosmetic store, selling hair extensions and wigs, while his mother sold henna tattoos to brides for their weddings.

And so, he started streaming games like Plants vs Zombies, engaging with his followers closely to create a community. “In the long term, I needed an audience that would be interested in the things I wanted to pursue, so I created a channel to talk about that” he says.

But it was the 2016 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, Paragon, that really hooked him through its impressive visual fidelity and smooth action. “That was the game that made me fall in love with content creation. I managed to find a community that was new and so I didn’t feel like I was just one amongst ten million – I was part of a small group that was growing everyday” he says, adding that he’s made tons of friends through streaming the game on his channel, many of whom he still speaks with today.

However, in 2018, Epic Games cancelled work on Paragon as it wasn’t connecting with enough players, plus, another of the studio’s projects, Fortnite, exploded in popularity so it assigned more resources there instead. “When [Paragon] shut down, I was devastated as I’d built a community and most of my content was focused around it” Singh says.

Fortunately, Epic made Paragon’s assets, such as artwork, available to be used by the public. It gave rise to a number of independent projects that tried to forge something from the resources left behind. Singh’s passion for the game and its community of players led him to try and make his own version, so he aligned himself with Steven Meilleur who had been live streaming his work on a project that also used the assets. It eventually became known as Predecessor, a MOBA where players fight each other in a colorful fantasy world. “I didn’t realise how hard it was to make a video game” explains Singh. “I don’t think we would have made the progress we did without those assets and the support we received from Epic” he continues.

Joined by designer Andrea Garella, Singh and Meilleur officially created Omeda in 2020 and used several thousand pounds of their own money, alongside donations from the community they built through Twitch, YouTube and Discord, to work on the game.

Eventually, they were awarded a grant by Epic to fund the project further, which Singh says proved to be a turning point for them. “Getting that was like receiving a stamp of approval. Epic was one of the hottest companies on the planet at the time, so when we got the grant, people started taking notice” he says. At the age of 28, Singh’s venture even led him to be inducted by Forbes into its 30 under 30 list where he sits alongside his Liverpool soccer hero, Mohammad Salah.

Inspired by the likes of Unreal Tournament, League of Legends and Call of Duty, Predecessor has officially been in its beta phase for just over six months and since late 2023, it’s garnered more than two and a half million installs in North America and Europe. Singh adds that by the end of 2025, he plans to expand its reach into Asia.

Despite all of the success, Singh still pinches himself that he gets to make video games for a living. To finish, he talks about a recent playtest where Omeda invited a bunch of people who had never played Predecessor to help them with feedback on how to improve the game. At the start of the session, everyone was quiet as they didn’t know each other, but as time went on, they began yelling and screaming whenever they died in the game. “Watching people play a game I made felt like a Disney movie, it was so magical. This is what gaming is about; forming bonds. That was the greatest feeling in the world, I could do this for the rest of my life.”

Predecessor is available to play on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Microsoft Windows via Steam and Epic Games. For more information, visit www.predecessorgame.com.