Raising during a funding drought
Lessons from Soccerverse
Without going all Packy McCormick — he of Substack-to-VC fame — I thought it might be a useful exercise to drop some data about current investing sentiment in the blockchain gaming sector.
One reason for this — more symbolic than anything — is that by my reckoning the sector has finally reached the $1 billion mark during 2023.
Of course, this is a significant decline compared to 2022, in which $1.2 billion of funding was announced during January 2022 alone. Indeed, since September 2021, there have been five months with cumulative announced deals of more than $1 billion, with May 2022 being the last: marking the end of that bull run.
A comparison between the cumulative totals of 2022 and 2023 to-date is below, which makes it clear there will need to be a considerable — and unlikely — change in sentiment in the coming months for 2023’s total to get near to the $2 billion-mark.
But this isn’t to say that blockchain games and related tech aren’t getting funded. For example, we’re already seen $45 million of new investment announced in September — as noted below — and there’s also a $33 million deal to be revealed next week.
Which brings me to the second reason for this discussion.
In my role as an advisor, I’ve been involved with the seed raise from Soccerverse, the UK-based fully-onchain soccer management game, which is based on the successful online Soccer Manager Worlds now with all the true ownership and decentralized features you’d expect from a deep integration with blockchain.
“Know your players. Own your success” as we like to say!
Despite having written about game investment for decades and more recently having been being pitched by hundreds of companies as the blockchain gaming specialist at Hiro Capital, it’s been eye-opening helping someone to raise investment.
Unsurprisingly it’s not been a case of investors asking “where to send the cash?” before the pitch is completed — as oft repeated in likely apocryphal stories from 2022’s boom months. There’s a range of those who understand the sector asking very detailed questions to those who struggle to get to grips with the basics, whether that’s soccer, blockchain (or both).
This is something reflected in time spent reviewing the pitch deck; a typical Pareto distribution. For the record, the average session time was 5:35 minutes with a median of 2:23 minutes.
Investment is progressing at a reasonable pace, unsurprisingly with those funds whose sessions times are towards the right hand side of the graph!
If you’re interested, you can check out a shortened version of the pitch deck via Docsend, which contains all the contact details to find out more, and access the new closed beta version of the game going live next week!
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of gaming
The Week’s News Recap
Zynga launched its Sugartown NFTs as a free mint. The floor price is now $300
Wreck League went live but only 8% of a total 10,000 mechs minted on day one
MMORPG Life Beyond will be running its in-game economy on Bitcoin
Extraction shooter Shrapnel isn’t going to let US players cash out
Polygon social farming game Pixels is moving to Ronin
NFL Rivals is the first web3 game to be an Apple Game of the Day
Japanese gaming blockchain Oasys launched its mobile wallet
Sony is building its own web3-focused blockchain with Startale Labs
Animoca issued $20 million more shares to build out its Mocaverse
GamePhilos raised $8 million for its BNB-based 4X game Age of Dinos
Mythic Protocol raised $6.5 million for some mad web3 caper
Or you could just sit back and watch Mr&Mrs Jordan discuss the news.
Additional Links
Sky Mavis has announced its Axie Game Jam 2023, starting 15th October
You can now log into Sui using web2 socials such as Google and Twitch
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