Forte's $185 million Series A is logical nonsense
Call that an investment bubble? Hold my beer say blockchain gaming
Even in a cycle when common-or-garden game companies get connected with $100 million headlines, and failed IPO candidates just flip the SPAC switch to unicorn, Forte’s $185 million Series A round is surely surprising.
Or maybe not.
To be honest, I doubt if any readers have heard of Forte.
It emerged as a blockchain game platform in 2018 and then sank without a trace until today’s performative GamesBeat re-reveal.
A triple-digit-million raise for a unicorn valuation can’t be a surprise: who’d be surprised about something they knew nothing about?
Maybe it’s not a case of surprised so much as bemused.
That’s harsh though if only due to company’s pedigree, or - better put - the pedigree of co-founder Kevin Chou, who created PC/mobile gaming outfit Kabam.
Kabam rode the F2P wave, successfully splitting itself into bitesized acquisitions for FoxNext (since Scopely) and Netmarble.
Since departing, Chou been busy, launching Overwatch esports team Seoul Dynasty and then blockchain-based creator token plaform Rally.io.
But Forte has always been the big play — hence the $185 million raise.
And in terms of fund raising, this is very big.
Certainly this is an incredibly early stage Hail Mary bet from lead investor Griffin Gaming Partners. Its partners will either be buying Bezos-scale yachts or looking for new jobs in the next couple of years.
In comparison, the only bigger raise to-date has been Dapper Labs’ $305 million, but that was a Series C to scale its already successful Flow blockchain.
While Forte has its own tech, it’s chain agnostic (based on Interledger) and - unlike Flow - is yet to gain user adoption.
Which isn’t something you’d understand from the GamesBeat article that throws around numbers such as “10 live games, 10 million wallets created and five million NFTs minted”.
Now I’m not calling this BS. Not quite.
What I am saying that if this were the case in terms of actual gaming activity, I think we would have heard a lot more about Forte.
Maybe that what’s $185 million retrospectively buys.
Still I’m happy to be proven wrong. If nothing else, Forte makes clear that blockchain gaming is now the funding froth on leading edge of the next tidal wave of game disruption.
And that - I think - is entirely appropriate given the scale of the opportunity.
There’s never been more cash sloshing around in terms of game investment, and blockchain is going to grow this and take the lion’s share.
In other words, Forte won’t be the only blockchain game company you’ve never heard of becoming a unicorn.