With the belief that “Games infrastructure will be critical building elements of the Metaverse,” Andreessen Horowitz has announced a $600 million fund specifically for Web3 gaming firms.
Titled Games Fund One, this fund will put money into game developers, consumer apps that help player communities (like Discord), and companies that build and maintain gaming infrastructure.
According to the a16z group, the gaming industry has “fixed many of the challenges that need to be addressed to construct the Metaverse” and “the future Metaverse will be developed by games businesses, employing games technology.” Video games, it predicts, will soon overtake television as the “primary way individuals spend their time.”
Metaverse: About The $3 Billion Move
Since mid-April, a total of over $3 billion from venture capital firms and industry for gaming behemoths has been invested in Web3 gaming or metaverse initiatives, including a16z’s latest move. As of April 2022, White Star Capital had raised 120 million dollars for its DeFi and game-focused fund, while Framework Ventures had allocated $200 million to blockchain gaming companies.
The game industry’s heavy hitters are likewise putting significant resources into metaverse initiatives. Epic Games, makers of the wildly successful Fortnite video game, just secured $2 billion from Sony and Lego to build a metaverse.
The a16z team mentioned the enormous sums of money earned by games like Minecraft, citing the open-world game as a great example of a product with a devoted and engaged fanbase that has persisted through the years to become more like a social network. Even though it was published about 11 years ago, Minecraft is still the best-selling game of all time, with 173 million average monthly players over the previous 30 days, according to data from game analytics platform ActivePlayer.
