Sim City Game Designer Joins Web3 and Fundraising Lessons From Web2

Happy Wednesday morning to all of you out there! Before grabbing your mid-morning get-me-up we have some intellectually stimulating news. Let's roll right into it.

Will Wright Enters The Web3 Stage

Revered Game designer Will Wright (creator of Spore, and Sim City) has decided to throw his hat into the Web3 ring. With no major releases since "Spore" in 2008, he's back and working on something called "VoxVerse".

Here's what we know

• The game checks all the boxes of last years "meta" for blockchain games. You can build stuff, mine stuff, and of course walk around with a "voxel" character in an open world.

• The game was designed at Gallium Games, a studio founded by both Will Wright and Lauren Elliott (Co-creator of Carmen Sandiego).

• The "Vox" characters are an existing line of NFTs with some big licensed names including "Trolls" and "The Walking Dead".

• The "Vox" characters are sold by Gala Games, who have spent around $25 million in funding on "VoxVerse"

When interviewed by Axios Will Wright seemed hesitant to express love for the game's connection with NFTs.

“I don’t really want to be in the business of selling NFTs,” stating that the purpose of the blockchain integration was “I want to have secure transactions for content creators.”

Much remains to be seen on how this project and its team will manage to find a balance between their Web2 mindset, and the evolving Web3 space.

Want to know more? Check out the whole article here.

Fundraising Momentos From Web2

Earlier this week we caught a thread on Twitter from Simon Davis, (@simon#1337) the CEO of Mighty Bear Games. The thread analyzed the current funding situation surrounding Web3 game studios.

There was a lot of meat in this but here are the key takeaways from Simon's discussion.

• Web3 gaming studios have found themselves in a similar funding state as many mobile game developers did in the 2010's "Raising not enough money to succeed, but just enough to fail (<$5M)".

• Web3 gaming studios face many of the same issues as their mobile developer predecessors, from extremely limited talent pools to funding issues.

• The cultural separation of the Web3 space from the norm contradicts what was generally considered a "structured" studio environment.

• Building in the Web3 space not only faces a slew of problems seen in the previous developmental generation but a whole new host of issues, including a much more difficult build path and an extremely increased risk to in-game economies and currencies.

Simon points out that no company or individual has yet built a sustainable game in the Web3 space. While hiring talented individuals with relevant experience has always been the play, in the current state of Web3 it will only bring you insight into "what doesn't work".

F2P (Free to Play) Web2 games have a pretty clear user acquisition playbook, but as Simon points out the equivalent does not exist for Web3 game studios (yet), causing overspending by already strapped game companies on ideas and growth strategies that "may not move the needle at all" in an effort to build their communities.

So what is a Web3 startup to do? With the current fundraising environment in Web3 complicating an already frustrating process? Simon expects to see this trend of "just enough money to fail" continue in the short to mid-term. If the trend continues to follow the path of the mobile game's boom of the 2010s fundraising will become more and more difficult and many will fail to raise at all.

However, it's not all doom and gloom. These trials eventually led to higher valuations on those that did raise, and investors that were focused on teams with a clear focus and product. Although this thread may strike some as not so optimistic, we found it to have valuable insight into a trend that is clearly shaping up in the Web3 gaming industry, and even if the road ahead is challenging the space will have a brighter future for it.

Read the full tweet thread here.

Until Next time...

That's it for today, I've got to hit the gym, all this desk work is making me fat.

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