ec gaming

How Metafy founder Josh Fabian caught the attention of 776 by building in public • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in ec gaming, EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Gaming, Katelin Holloway, metafy, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

In over a decade of investing in startups, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has only once offered to fund a founder on the spot. That founder was Josh Fabian, CEO of Metafy, a video game coaching platform. “We were able to just engage and talk like humans, and Josh told us his story in a very different way,” said Katelin Holloway, a founding partner at 776, where Ohanian is general partner. “Not only was it incredibly compelling from a business perspective, it was incredibly compelling from a human perspective.” As Fabian explained at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Metafy has a pretty fun founding story. Once a competitive Yu-Gi-Oh player in his childhood, Fabian was working as a lead designer at Groupon when he became obsessed with mobile gaming. “I would spend my bathroom breaks very productively playing a game called Clash Royale,” Fabian said. He eventually became one of the top 20 players in the world and streamed for up to 4,000 viewers on a daily basis, but he wasn’t making much money — that is, until fans started asking him to pay him for private coaching. In just six months, he made $40,000. When Fabian’s children wanted to get better at the Pokémon Trading Card game, he hired one of the best players in the world. “He offered to teach them for $20-an-hour, which is less than what we pay our babysitter,” Fabian remembered. He said he asked the player if he did Pokémon full-time, but the player said he worked a minimum wage job at a warehouse. That got Fabian thinking about building a business to let people in similar situations make a living off their gaming expertise. This past February, Metafy raised a $25 million Series A round, co-led by 776 and Tiger Global. Building in public

Immutable onboarded more web3 games in Q3 than any other quarter, co-founder says • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in blockchain, Crypto, EC Blockchain, EC Cryptocurrency, ec gaming, Gaming, Immutable, web3No Comments

Earlier this year, Immutable, a web3 gaming firm with its own layer-2 chain, Immutable X, launched a whopping $500 million fund to boost gaming on its platform. Fast forward a few months and the company says things are going according to plan. “It has been super busy,” Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable, said to ZebethMedia. “In the last quarter, we’ve onboarded more games than the rest of the company’s lifetime combined. As far as we know, it’s been more than any other layer-1 or layer-2 [blockchains] in the world and nearly half of those games came from competitors in migrations.” In Q3, Immutable onboarded about 50 games and has over 1,000 games being built in a “testing environment,” Ferguson said. “These are ones we’ve actively gone after.” Some games, like Delysium and Ember Sword, were initially developed for the layer-2 blockchain Polygon but switched to Immutable X, the company’s NFT platform and layer-2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain. Other games, like Deviants’ Factions and Undead Blocks, migrated over from the defunct Terra ecosystem after it imploded in May. Today, Immutable X launched GameStop’s NFT marketplace out of beta, which will provide GameStop players and customers across the U.S. access to NFTs tied to games on its layer-2 chain. This announcement follows GameStop and Immutable X’s partnership and $100 million joint grant fund from February. “The attraction we’ve already seen and interest from this community has been insane,” Ferguson said. “We recently shared something on Reddit and had 100,000 people sign up for Guild of Guardians’ waitlist in under two days, just from a single post. So the strength of this community is enormous compared to existing user bases in crypto.”

5 tips for launching in a crowded web3 gaming market • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Column, Crypto, EC Blockchain, EC Column, ec gaming, Gaming, play-to-earn, Startups, web3 gamingNo Comments

The first wave of the play-to-earn (P2E) gaming boom seems to be coming to an end. There are still plenty of blockchain studios staging successful multimillion-dollar raises around the globe, but competition for funds has tightened to the point where only standout projects are winning backers. With great strategy more important than ever, here are a few tried-and-true steps you can take that will help set you apart when you’re seeking capital and preparing for liftoff. Leverage experience in the traditional gaming studio sphere The blockchain gaming market is full of builders who are experienced in crypto but haven’t built traditional games. I’m a prime example. Pegaxy was the first game I worked on and the first I launched. Like many other web3 games of its time, its mechanics and graphics were fairly basic at the start. But while simplicity was fine with the web3 gaming crowd, it has become increasingly clear that P2E will need to attract traditional Web 2.0 gamers if it is to scale, and these gamers demand much more. To please this demographic, builders will need games that have it all: superb graphics, strong mechanics and rich lore. You can have the best team and the best game, but without a solid monetization strategy, those mean little. That’s why a founding team that pairs an understanding of web3 fundamentals with experience in building and monetizing Web 2.0 games for mobile, desktop and console platforms will set you apart in this market. It’s also why, after Pegaxy was launched, we founded Mirai Labs. We wanted to assemble an expert team to build games that appeal to the traditional gaming community. Develop a clear, straightforward monetization strategy Most traditional P2E games have fairly simple revenue models that rely on users buying and holding the token that serves as the in-game currency. This means that when large groups join and play a game at once, token prices and revenues rise in tandem. But when market conditions change — or when players just lose interest in a game — there can be a mass exodus of users. This is bad for revenue and can be catastrophic for token prices. Therefore, building a game that succeeds in the long term means developing monetization strategies that can weather market ebbs and flows, those that couple the best of web3 tech with proven Web 2.0 revenue models.