A profile of blockchain gaming pioneer Yat Siu, who founded Animoca Brands, valued at $5.9B in September 2022, as he copes with the crypto winter and regulators
Context & Ripple Effects
Animoca Brands' arc is one of the fastest boom-bust curves in web3 gaming: a $1B valuation in May 2021 doubled by October, hit $5B on a $359M raise in January 2022, and peaked at $5.9B that September. The Financial Times profile lands just after the turn — Siu had already gone public with his case against platform gatekeepers like Meta and Microsoft in an August interview, and by September the company was raising via convertible notes led by Temasek, Boyu Capital, and GGV instead of priced equity.
That shift matters because Animoca is both a game maker and one of the sector's most prolific investors, so its own funding terms are a barometer for every NFT game studio it backed during the mania. The company also carries a structural scar: delisting from the Australian exchange four years before it re-explored public markets.
First-order effects
- Siu must defend a $5.9B paper valuation through a token-price collapse while regulators scrutinize the play-to-earn model his company popularized — the convertible-note structure itself signals that new investors refused to mark the old price.
- Portfolio studios that took Animoca money at peak valuations now face a lead investor with less dry powder and falling marks on their tokens, tightening follow-on funding across the web3 gaming ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- State-linked capital like Temasek entering at trough pricing sets a template: the next round of web3 gaming financings will likely come from sovereign and crossover funds dictating terms, not retail-driven token treasuries.
- Rival publishers still running closed-item economies gain a counter-narrative window — Siu's 'digital dictatorship' framing only sells if player-owned assets demonstrably hold value through the downturn, making Animoca's surviving games the proof case for the whole ownership thesis.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web3 gaming consolidates around a few capitalized platforms — Animoca-style holders of portfolios and IP — while thinly funded token-first studios exit, mirroring how earlier gaming cycles concentrated distribution power.
- Regulatory pressure plus the Australian delisting history points toward jurisdiction arbitrage: crypto-native gaming firms listing in Hong Kong or the Middle East rather than Western exchanges, fragmenting where this industry becomes investable public equity.
The trend: Web3 gaming is moving from speculation-funded expansion to survival-of-the-capitalized consolidation, with sovereign funds and friendly jurisdictions replacing retail token demand as the marginal buyer.