Let’s invest like it’s early 2022 again!
Those are the initial vibes I’m getting from US dev Proof of Play’s announcement of its $33 million seed investment.
It’s the largest seed investment into the sector since US studio Azra Games raised $35 million from a16z across two seed rounds in May and December 2022.
There are so many bubbly ingredients. Not coincidentally, Proof of Play’s seed was also co-led by a16z with the co-lead being Greenoaks, a trad VC without much previous involvement in crypto aside from late stage deals into Mysten Labs (Sui) and StarkWare.
The rest of the round — no doubt at a nine digit valuation — was filled out by strategics and angels, neither of whom much care about valuation. They’re in it to be in it.
Strategics included Zynga, institutional crypto platforms Firebase and Anchorage Digital and web3 devtools outfit Alchemy. Angels included two of the most high profile — Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasian — while ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear invested and joins the board.
One of the reasons for all this excitement is that Proof of Play’s CEO is Amitt Mahajan, who previously worked at Epic Games, was a co-creator on FarmVille and also CTO at Zynga Japan. Since Zynga, he co-founded Facebook ad network Toro, which was acquired by Google, and is the managing partner at AR/VR VC fund Presence Capital too. Busy man.
The other reason is debut game Pirate Nation. It might not look too impressive, but described as a fully onchain social game, it’s trying to combine two features that hitherto have been mutually exclusive.
I guess the pitch deck went (even if subliminally) something like “imagine FarmVille on the blockchain” — millions of players with the virality that comes with a mass audience and all the game logic decentralized…
Of course Pirate Nation isn’t FarmVille. It’s a browser-based midcore turn-based ship battler with a deck-building meta. That’s just not social in the way that FarmVille being the biggest app on early Facebook was. That sort of growth is once-in-a-generation, but I hope everyone understands that.
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But, I do think it’s a good concept because I think fully onchain games are the end state. Correctly designed, there’s no reason they can’t be mass market, it’s just that most of the people developing fully onchain games have no idea how to market to and engage mass audiences.
Mahajan clearly does so good luck to Proof of Play and all who invest in it, even if I do think the valuation is likely eye-watering.
However, a slight sleight of hand in this investment is that although the thing we’ll likely focus on is Pirate Nation, Proof of Play’s second string is to open source its tools and also build a platform business.
Now that’s hard. Really hard in open source. Much harder than building a popular onchain game in my opinion, but it is a Plan B that investors like to see articulated in a pitch deck, even if its actuality is more honoured in the breach.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of gaming
Calendar
Star Atlas’ SAGE Labs economic sim launches — 21st September
Square Enix’s Symbiogenesis is launching its Shop — 22nd September
Yuga’s Legends of the Mara launches open beta — 26th September
Angry Dynomites Lab demo #5 launches — 28th September
Fableborne’s pre-sale starts — 29th September
Axie Game Jam 2023 launches — 15th October
Phantom Galaxies goes into early access — 2nd November
Funding news
More funding, this time from Helsinki-headquartered, remotely operated developer Spectarium Games. It’s announced a more modest €5 million seed round, which was led by bedfellows Bitkraft and Delphi Digital with participation from Framework. I’m guessing the valuation wasn’t into nine figures!
In terms of what Spectarium is up to, it’s developing Myths, a cross-platform action RPG, which leans heavy into AI-generated dungeons but is also novel in terms of allowing players to own, level up and breed in-game bosses, which are raided to farm loot. Different bosses drop different items and the more powerful the boss, the better the loot.
It’s a great concept and once that arises from CEO Romain Schneider’s experiences as a whale F2P mobile gamer, spending up to $50,000 on his favorite games. He was then a banker. Entering the game sector, he co-founded mobile developer Janeious, which crowdfunded itself from the communities of likeminded whales in which Schneider swam. That company didn’t work out, however, so the core team rebooted as Spectarium, which was angel-funded by the co-founders of Plarium.
Talking about the reignition of Star Atlas
Additional Links
Roblox is having issues with its new creator IP rules, which is well explained by PocketGamer.biz.
Ethlas is sunsetting its XGEM tokens. Users can sent their tokens to the treasury, gaining the newly launched ELS in return in the ratio 1000:1.
Cool Cats is launching its SideKX NFT collection, which requires users to burn two Cool Pets NFTs.
IMX price popped yesterday as it was added to Korean Upbit exchange. Alongside IMX, AXS and ApeCoin are also being added to #1 Japan exchange Coincheck.
Off The Grid is promoting itself with top streamers Dr Disrespect, Clix and ImperialHal.
Challenge my daily step count in Genopets