Indie developer Meteor Entertainment has raised 10 million dollars to fund development of Hawken, the mech combat game in development at their subsidiary Adhesive Games, reports VentureBeat. They say the benefactors in this case is FirstMark Capital, the same group that funded Riot Games' development of League of Legends. “We are seeing the rise of the direct-to-consumer model, where all is downloadable and free-to-play,” Rick Heitzmann, founder and managing director of FirstMark Capital, told VentureBeat. “You can disrupt the business with a free-to-play title. Gamers are willing to pay via virtual goods to do that. League of Legends is a fantastic title, but it is just one game and one genre that has blown up. We think it’s possible to produce very high quality games that have huge audiences that are willing to pay.”