What kind of new miracle will an entrepreneurial genius who leads the F2P farming game create in the field of blockchain?

In the autumn of 2023, it seems that the discussion of chain games has long been gone, but there are still people who brave the cold wind to open up thorns forward.  

Proof of Play is one such non-believing blockchain gaming startup, which recently closed a $33 million seed round led by legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm a16z and Greenoaks Capital 。 In December last year, the company released the beta version of its first blockchain RPG game, Pirate Nation, which is considered by many industry insiders to be the top full-chain game for its exquisite art and interesting gameplay.  

When a16z announced its investment, it was unabashedly praised Proof of Play as a way to build a gaming future with composability, interoperability, and persistence at its core.

01 Genius Scholar, Game Farmer and Entrepreneurial Genius

a16z points out that Amitt Mahajan, the founder of Proof of Play, is an insightful entrepreneur with an unusually knowledgeable knowledge of both gaming and crypto. He is an investor and advisor to more than 50 companies and the founder of four companies 。  

Amitt's life story has been varied. Born in Chicago to immigrant parents from India, he grew up studying computers and games, learning programming at the age of 9 under his mother's tutelage and making mods for his favorite shooter games Quake and Doom.

After graduating early from the University of Illinois (UIUC) with a degree in computer science, Amatt became one of Epic Games' veteran engineers and contributed to Gears of War. But he was not satisfied with this, and resigned to co-found MyMiniLife, a virtual social app company with his college classmates.

Four weeks after making the Facebook game, Zynga acquired MyMiniLife. Six weeks after writing the first line of code, the Farmville project was developed.Maybe you haven't heard of Amitt Mahajan, but you've definitely played Farmville's casual vegetable farming game, one of the most popular games on Facebook。

In just 24 hours after its launch, Happy Farm had nearly 30,000 daily active users. After 48 hours, it reached 100,000 daily active users, then more than 1 million players in the next five days, and finally reached nearly 32 million per day, which was an astronomical figure in 2009.

According to Zynga's questionnaire survey of players at the time, Happy Farm was the first game that many people came into contact with, and it was also the first game that attracted the attention of the mainstream crowd。 Happy Farm was hailed as a turning point in the gaming industry's history, and although many industry insiders scoffed at it at the time, the nascent market of billions of gamers attracted the attention of venture capital, and also promoted the rise of the F2P (Free To Play) model and paid gacha mechanism.

Amitt's entrepreneurial pace hasn't stopped. He left Zynga to start an online advertising service called Toro, which he sold to Google four years later. He then founded Presence Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in AR and VR companies.  

But he also suffered a waterloo in his life, encountering a setback at Rare Bits, the third blockchain NFT marketplace company。 Amatt fell into anxiety and insomnia, and he kept asking himself: Are me and my product just a flash in the pan? With the help of friends and colleagues, he gradually changed his thinking and regarded failure and vulnerability as part of life's gifts and challenges.

Amatt attributes it all to the fact that he discovered his passion for life at an early age – to create something new on the market and get value from it , and he will continue to lead the new boom in the Web3 field for a long time to come.  

02 Make chain games fun and easy

However, enthusiasm alone is not enough. Even a legendary figure like Amatt cannot escape the common problems of the blockchain game industry: P2E (Play to Earn) is difficult to balance with the fun of games, and the complex technology of blockchain also has a certain threshold for ordinary users. But at the end of the day, most gamers just want to enjoy a fun and autonomous gaming experience.  

Based on such considerations,The concept of Proof of Play took shape, which was to create on-chain games that were both fun and accessible, and in the process to develop new technologies that would make it easy for more people to develop and play on-chain games。 Thus, Pirate Nation was born.

Pirate Nation is a pirate-style game made with voxel technology, with art reminiscent of Lego, but with a different sense of Lego cubes. A voxel voxel is a data structure that uses a fixed-size cube as the smallest unit to represent a three-dimensional object, which is commonly referred to as 3D pixels, which can also be understood as digitized Lego bricks.  

As a fully on-chain role-playing game (RPG), Pirate Nation's main activity is all about exploration。 Players take on the role of a pirate lord and assemble their pirate crew to go on an adventure that will earn them personal experience, gold, and other items when they complete the mission.

At the same time, you can collect crafting materials, explore treasure and mint gold as you sail, earn experience upgrades through multiple adventures, and compete with other players on the leaderboards.Fully on-chain means that the game does not have a server to deploy, but rather a blockchain that guarantees durability, interoperability, and composability。

Seamless gaming experience

The advantage of Pirate Nation is that players don't need to have a deep understanding of blockchain to start playing.  

Through seamless integration with blockchain technology, players can use their primary wallet to authorize the game wallet once, and this secondary wallet is able to perform in-game operations completely independently, such as tasks, crafting, etc., support transactions that are free of fees, no pop-ups, and do not need to be signed.

In addition, the game is committed to decentralization, aiming to empower players by eliminating the intervention of external servers and creators. Pirate Nation is the epitome of that commitment as a "timeless game." The game runs without relying on external infrastructure, guaranteeing longevity and sustainability, while promoting player initiative and control and fairness by exposing all players' actions and achievements.  

In line with their vision, Proof of Play plans to open source their technology framework in the future and further decentralize the gaming ecosystem, meaning that players will be able to create derivative works directly into the game.

They want to redefine the gaming industry by seamlessly integrating blockchain technology into the gaming experience. In the company's view,The best way to build a mass-market game is to be a "great game" in the first place, not to design it with a "great crypto game".。 They believe that this is a big step forward for the blockchain gaming ecosystem.

03 Can it set off a chain game revolution?

So, can Proof of Play really inject new vitality into the blockchain game market as they envisioned? Is chain swimming obsolete? Who is the most suitable user portrait in the market?  

The legend of the "obsolescence" of chain games

From the Happy Farm saga to the standout of Pirate Nation, Proof of Play seems to be taking blockchain games by storm again in 2023. It's just that when it comes to chain games now, many investors will think that this is an "outdated" track. However, do they really clarify the essence of blockchain games and GameFi?  

The core concept of blockchain games is to store game data on the blockchain and convert game assets into Crypto assets, such as NFTs, to achieve decentralized transactions。 Compared to traditional Web2 games, blockchain games can raise a series of interesting questions. For example, do game assets really belong to the user? When a game reaches the end of its lifecycle, can the game data be carried over to the new game product? Therefore, the core of the chain game lies in the on-chain of game data, and earning tokens is not the main premise.

In contrast, GameFi is a model that combines games with decentralized finance (DeFi). In GameFi, users can earn money by participating in games or use game assets for financial transactions. Compared to traditional financial instruments, GameFi just uses games as its coat, providing a more fun and interactive experience.While both leverage blockchain technology, blockchain games focus more on decentralized experiences and data ownership, while GameFi focuses more on economic models and financialized gameplay。

In the past few years, blockchain games have attracted a lot of attention and investment, and the rise of NFTs has brought chain games to their peak. For example, games such as Axie Infinity and MIR4 have performed well in the blockchain gaming space, and Axie Infinity, which seized the early stage, achieved a whopping $670 million in trading volume as early as July 2021.

Therefore, some researchers believe that the narrative of the metaverse is all based on chain games. According to Sensor Tower's report data, metaverse games accounted for more than 90% of revenue in 2022 。 According to the concept of "BAND" in the metaverse (Blockchain, Game, Network, Display and Imaging Technology), it seems that a traditional Web2 game can be called a chain game as long as it is added with "blockchain" elements.  

However, due to the current pain points of blockchain games, such as the processing speed of the blockchain, frequent asset transactions, and the playability of the game, most players are discouraged. Whether Proof of Play can continue the miracle of Happy Farm remains to be considered.  

Game Brick Mover Spring?

As the craze changes and the market revamps, the blockchain gaming industry is gathering strength. Proof of Play's raising tens of millions of dollars is a hint at a megatrend in the blockchain gaming industry. MarketsandMarkets, a consulting firm, predicts that the global blockchain gaming market will grow from $4.6 billion in 2022 to $65.7 billion by 2027 。  

Despite the funding winter enveloping global enterprises, according to data released by market research firm Crunchbase, the amount of Web3 financing in the third quarter of 2023 was the lowest in nearly three years.However, DappRadar's January 2023 report shows a 1.31% increase in on-chain gaming activity, while the market cap of the top gaming tokens has increased by an average of 122%。 The surge in funding is driving the development and launch of breakthrough projects, and gaming companies like CCP Games and Hyperplay are also receiving significant investment support.

Everything seems to indicate that on-chain gaming is starting to regroup. While "classic" chain games have their own unique charm, Pirate Nation brings players a new experience with its unique and innovative concept, while also establishing a strong connection with Web3. Whether it is active gameplay and a low threshold for understanding, it makes it easier for ordinary players to participate to a certain extent. This kind of "player-friendly" design is rare for chain games.

04 Explore the gold of the Web3 space

The ups and downs of the blockchain gaming market are a norm, especially for the younger ones. Web3 is expanding from finance to many other industries, such as social governance, carbon markets, art, real estate, gaming, and more. As a part of Web3's decentralization, blockchain games may really have the potential to subvert the existing landscape.  

Proof of Play's vision is to realize a blockchain gaming world like no other, and their team is like pirates looking for gold in the digital world。

Exploring the unknown digital ocean of blockchain travel will surely be a battle for endurance.

This article is from the WeChat public account"MetaverseHub" (ID: MetaverseHub), Author: MetaverseHub, 36Kr is published with permission.