Now over Q1 2021’s level (that was $173 million), but not close to 2023’s $492 million, and especially not to 2022’s $1,932 million, 2024’s first quarter is ticking up in terms of investment into the blockchain gaming space.
With a few days to go, I’ve tracked $232 million thus far.
But aside from these numbers, two recent announcements highlight something of the weirdness of the deals being announced.
The first is larger and hence will generate the headlines: German-based Gunzilla Games (mainly ex-Crytek) has announced $30 million in funding.
$10 million of this comes from a strategic token round co-led by crypto fund CoinFund and Avalanche’s ecosystem Blizzard Fund. Trad investor Republic Capital and degen Morningstar also participated.
All are previous investors in Gunzilla. It previously announced a $46 million Series B round in August 2022, which was led by Republic, with participation from Animoca, Griffin and Jump Crypto, amongst many others.
The remaining $20 million is imprecisely labelled as “previously unreported equity and validator sales”, which probably means it shouldn’t be included in Q1 2024’s total, but what else can you do?
As well as its console-bound shooter Off The Grid, Gunzilla is also running its own infrastructure in terms of an Avalanche subnet called GUNZ, which it hopes other developers will use. Hence it’s been selling node licenses to interested parties, who will earn GUN tokens for helping to operate the network.
The testnet went live in April 2023 and you can download the GUNZ’s wallet app and mess around with it.
As for the funding round, it’s important to note that the $10 million strategic funding was a token round. This means the companies involved — who already should have had a token allocation from their previous investment — took the opportunity to buy additional tokens.
Tokens are very much back as a funding primitive for all types of investors.
We are no closer to know when the game will be released however, with Gunzilla’s CEO Vlad Korolov merely talking about its “forthcoming launch”. But it feels like it will be fairly soon as it’s stated the funding will be “applied towards the game launch and the initial wave of post-release content for the rest of the year”.
Gunzilla says the game will be released for PC, Xbox and PlayStation, and Microsoft concurs as Off The Grid already has a page on Xbox.
As for the other funding round, it is extremely crypto, and likely not in a good way.
An offshoot of token launchpad PolkaStarter, gaming community Gam3s.gg announced a $2 million pre-sale last week, prior to its G3 token launch in early April.
Ten degen funds and DAOs were involved, as were four known angels — from YGG and Sky Mavis — and 18 influencers.
These included the likes of currently active gaming degens Zeneca (4 deals in 2024), Dingaling (4 deals) and Alex Becker (2 deals).
Plus crypto degens Cryptolark (1.1 million followers on X), AshCrypto (1 million), Pentosh1 (775k), CryptoGodJohn (650k) and IvanOnTech (440k).
Plus a bunch of Fortnite KOLs such as Lazar (2.5 million), Lachlan (1.5 million) and Fresh (1.1 million).
That’s a whole lotta shill coming our way!
In addition, Gam3s.gg is running a couple of token pre-sales on Polkastarter, with a private sale pricing the tokens at $0.03 with 10% available at TGE and everything vested within 15 months, plus a retail sale starting 3rd April, with tokens priced at $0.04.
And it’s running a quest system for the launch of 333 avatar NFTs, the holders of which will get a token allocation too.
Tokens, tokens, tokens. Everyone’s going to get tokens. But some will get them at very different prices to others. DYOR.
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Calendar
Nyan Heroes’ early access starts — 26th March
PRIME token unlock (4.65%) — 30th March
NFT NYC 2024 — 3rd-5th April
Autonomous Anonymous fully onchain game event — 16-18th April
Guild of Guardians’ global launch via app stores — 15th May
Next Project Awakening playtest — 21st May
10x Token news
Apeiron’s APRS token has gone live on the Ronin blockchain. Some of it was sold in a massively over-allocated staking event — $75 million staked for $440,000-worth of tokens — at a price of $0.11. At time of writing, the price on the open market is $1.45, a nice +1,200% markup for anyone who got an allocation, which included early NFT holders (not me either); I think the game is too complex.
Other parties now counting down to vesting include investors such as South Korean outfit Hashed, which led Singapore-based Aperion’s $10 million round in April 2022 plus degens such as Morningstar, Spartan, Infinity Ventures Crypto and DeFi Capital and a lot of guilds, including GuildFi, YGG SEA, AvocadoDAO, Ancient8 and Snack Club.
Which reminds me, are guilds a thing again now?
Tweet Of The Day
Degen Tweet Of The Day
Additional Links
At time of writing, 24% of Guild of Guardians’ Prayer NFTs have sold out; that’s $94,348 in revenue.
1 million wallets will be able to claim Pixelmon’s MON token. TGE TBA.
Not blockchain, but an interesting discussion about how Epic chose its 12% rev share for the Epic Games Store, and how its back-of-envelope business model for EGS didn’t work out as planned.
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