The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has launched a $600 million fund dedicated to gaming startups with a focus on Web3, saying he believes “gaming infrastructure and technologies will be key building blocks of the Metaverse.”.
Baptized as GAMES FUND ONE, The fund will invest in three main areas: game studios; consumer apps, which support gaming communities, like Discord; and gaming infrastructure providers.
The a16z team states that “game companies will build the next Metaverse using gaming technologies” and that the industry has already “solved many of the problems that need to be solved to create the Metaverse.”. He thinks gaming will become the “dominant way to pass the time.”
The a16z move sees nearly $3 billion committed by venture funds and gaming industry giants to Web3 or metaverse game projects since mid-April. Venture firm White Star Capital raised $120 million for its fund focused on decentralized finance (DeFi) and gaming, along with a $200 million allocation to blockchain gaming projects by Framework Ventures, both in April 2022.
The metaverse projects have also won massive sums from the titans of the gaming industry.. Last month, Epic Games, creator of the popular title Fortnite, raised $2 billion to create a metaverse with funding from Sony and LEGO.
The a16z team pointed to the billions of dollars in revenue that games like Minecraft generate, using the open-world game as an example of a title that has retained a long-term active community that works more like a social network.. Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time and has had an average of 173 million monthly players in the last 30 days, according to figures from the gaming statistics platform ActivePlayer, despite having been released almost 11 years ago.
The fund is a16z’s first dedicated exclusively to gaming, but the firm has backed successful gaming-related projects in the past.including virtual reality (VR) company Oculus and game developer Zynga, saying the investments “cemented our belief that gaming requires a specialized approach.”
The fund was joined by founders of game development companies and popular games, as the co-founder of Riot Games, Marc Merrill; co-founders Aleks Larsen and Jeffrey Zirlin of Sky Mavis, the company that owns the popular blockchain game Axie Infinity; and Kevin Lin, founder of gaming company Metatheory, which received $24 million in a funding round led by a16z.
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