Although technically shifted one month in 2022 due to Covid-19, Pocket Gamer Connects London is always an introspective time for me.
For, much like a classic religious conversation experience, I can exactly remember where I was when blockchain gaming clicked for me: sitting in a small underground conference room during PGC 2018 and hearing about the power of this magical new technology for the first time.
Some of those same people will be there today: Robby Yung from Animoca Brands; Shaban Shaame from EverdreamSoft; Tony Pearce from Reality Gaming; Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua.
Others have risen to more rarified positions. Peter McCormack still runs the What Bitcoin Did podcast but finally fulfilled his dream of buying his local football team, Bedford FC off the back of his crypto hodling.
Meanwhile Alex Amsel has become a key global NFT collector; kickstarting the entire PFP investment craze by selling his Covid Alien CryptoPunk at auction for $12 million in 2020. And there are others I could talk about who went from small things to hitting the big time, but that would just be doxxing.
My own trajectory has been more modest but my takeaway from that afternoon four years ago remains much the same.
For years, game companies have been running fake money economies, and making it up as they go, but now they get the opportunity to run real money economies.
Not all of them will manage to make the transition. It’s a non-trival change. Handling real money requires rigor — both legal and regulatory, and reputational. It also requires them to make some difficult decisions and doubledown on those decisions in the face of toxic opposition.
Equally some game companies just won’t want to become banks, which is what integrating blockchain will effectively make them into. We’ll have to see which way the likes of Valve, Epic and Nintendo decide to jump.
But not only will becoming banks make game companies incredibly more valuable than they already are — a minimum 10x — it will also only happen unless they enrich their players.
Where it works it will be a classic win-win and I’ll be boring people in the pub that I got it in 2018. Yawn!
Funding news
If you thought Animoca Brands had pretty much done everything it could do, you’d be wrong. It’s just announced a two-year $30 million Guild Accelerator Program with Brinc.
You may remember Animoca recently announced a $50 million metaverse accelerator with Hong Kong-based Brinc but this is different — obviously, it’s about guilds not metaverse.
Of course, the question could be asked, with over 10,000 guilds in existence, do we need any more, particularly as Axie Infinity no longer offers the easy extraction economy that it once did?
I guess that’s the question the accelerator will attempt to answer. It will offer up to $500,000 in investment into early stage guilds.
Online applications are open at brinc.io/guild until 27 February 2022, and the first cohort is scheduled to start in May.
Product news
Despite launching its first product with Forte — I’ve got the video to prove it — Kongregate has now switched, announcing that it’s partnering with Immutable X.
I had heard some rumors that it was re-evaluating so this is decent win for the Australian-based Ethereum-centric scaling solution, which recently also gained the support of GameStop for its NFT marketplace.
Kongregate hasn’t mentioned exactly what it will be doing, other than talking generally about “fun, innovative, and blockchain-first games” which will “utilize NFTs in innovative ways”, also ensuring “these games will be enabled with gasless and fully carbon neutral NFTs”.
Flow-based Pokemon-inspired RPG Chainmonsters is now live on iOS (via Testflight) and Android (Early Access). However you will need a closed beta key to access this closed beta.
Despite being an original Kickstarter supporter, I haven’t played Chainmonsters that much, but my perception is that it’s shaping up pretty well, which is good news for Flow, which continues to lack decent content.