The podcast machine continues to whirl, with episode #145 of Blockchain Gaming World seeing me finally catch up with Kevin Chou; someone whose activity in the game space I’ve been following for over a decade.
As the co-founder and CEO of Kabam, Chou was in the vanguard of the mobile F2P gaming explosion in the early 2010s, originally with titles such as The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth, then peaking with the excellent Marvel: Contest of Champions, which nine years on from launch is still generating around $250 million annually for current owner, South Korean publisher Netmarble.
Post-Kabam, Chou got busy in esports, launching the Gen.G Esports team and also original Overwatch team Seoul Dynasty.
More significantly for our purposes, he also got interested in blockchain, being involved with the launch of social platform Rally and gaming publishing platform Forte, before setting up Superlayer; a web3 investment and incubation company, which is launching various projects including the main subject of the podcast, Trophy.
Currently live and testing in India, Trophy is a mobile app that eventually hopes to be the layer for players to generate rewards by downloading and playing games, both web2 and web3.
Of course, the web3 aspect is the more important as it enables users to share their data with advertisers and get rewarded for their level of interaction and spending with the games that are promoted to them.
Indeed, Chou says that Trophy will give 98% of the revenue it’s generating back to users who take their rewards via its own WINS token. Alternatively, users can choose to get rewarded with the likes of Amazon or Google vouchers.
The reason for what seems to be this insane level of revenue sharing, he says, is to ensure players and Trophy’s management team and investors are totally aligned in terms of their incentives; players to get the most rewards and everyone else to ensure the WINS token becomes the flywheel for Trophy’s success as an important channel for gaming UA.
Of course — as pointed out in last Thursday’s email — Trophy is not the only project attempting such a trick. US outfit Forge announced a $11 million funding round to do pretty much exactly the same thing, although it’s currently browser-based and seems to take a more open approach, at least from my initial experience.
There are also a lot of pivoted web3 gaming guilds doing similar things.
Either way attempted, it’s a good concept but a tricky one to scale in a market that as well as these web3 experiments also includes a bafflingly large number of real-money reward competitors — Mistplay and all the rest.
As ever, you can read a transcript of my conversation with Kevin at BlockchainGamer.biz.
And, for avid followers of the podcast, #146 is already in the bag. I spoke to David Johansson from Metaking Studios about Blocklords, a PC strategy game I’ve been following since 2019. That should be out next week with two exciting future episodes already pencilled into the diary.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital:
leading the $12 million Series A into US dev Noodle Cat.
Calendar
Peter Molyneux’s Legacy launches — 26th October
Ember Sword’s “ultra deep playtest” goes live — 27th October
Eternal Dragons’ Clash of Dragons tournament — 28th October
Parallel launches presale for Planetfall expansion — 28th October
Cosmik Battle opens its technical Alpha — 30th October
Phantom Galaxies goes into early access — 2nd November
Dogami Academy launches early access — 7th November
Champions Ascension ends early access alpha — 8th November
Funding news
Neon Machine — the developer of highly anticipated PC extraction shooter Shrapnel — has announced a $20 million Series A round, which follows its $10.5 million seed round announced in November 2021.
The Series A was led by Polychain Capital (Horizon Blockchain Games), which also led the seed round. Other investors included Griffin Gaming Partners, Brevan Howard Digital (Horizon Blockchain Games), Franklin Templeton (Azra Games), IOSG Ventures and Tess Ventures. They’re an interesting collection of what I’d describe as thoughtful deep-pocketed investors and some degens.
Additional context was provided in a GamesBeat interview with CEO Mark Long who stated: “I’ve had a couple of colleagues who have not been able to raise their next round, or they’ve had to make a significant change in their valuation. But we’re very fortunate. We benefit from the perception that we’re one of the top projects in blockchain games.”
Of course “significant change” is a nuanced term but taking Long at his word, it would certainly be a good signal for the sector if Shrapnel had managed to maintain its valuation. Investment remains at low levels, despite high profile announcements from the likes of Proof of Play ($33 million).
More concretely, Neon Machine — which now has a headcount of 70 — expects to have a paid first playable of Shrapnel out before the end of 2023, with a free-to-play version to follow in 2024.
It then plans to release new builds of the game in an interative manner, also rolling out the item marketplace, which alongside UCG creation tools, will be a significant milestone for a game which plans to mainly monetize via the sale of cosmetics and player-generated maps.
Additional Links
Polygon has deployed its new POL token on Ethereum; the first stage of upgrading the current Polygon PoS mainnet to zkRollups.
Mythical CEO John Linden has joined the advisory board for crypto payment app Oobit.
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