Animoca Brands, which lets players own in-game items through NFTs, enabling them to sell or take items if they leave the game, raises $88M at a $1B valuation
Did you miss GamesBeat Summit 2021? Watch on-demand here! — Animoca Brands has raised $88 million at a $1 billion valuation …
Context & Ripple Effects
This May 2021 raise is the opening datapoint of a steep funding curve for Animoca Brands: five months later the company nearly doubled its price with a $65M round at a $2.2B valuation, then kept climbing through a $359M January 2022 round at $5B before topping out at $5.9B that summer.
The thesis being funded is player-owned NFT items that survive outside any single game, a direct strike against what Animoca frames as the 'digital dictatorships' of Meta and Microsoft. The money validated the category fast enough that Mythical Games followed four months after this round with a $150M raise at a $1.25B valuation for its own playable-NFT platform.
First-order effects
- Animoca converts an $88M war chest into its stated role as Asia's biggest investor in blockchain ownership projects, making it simultaneously the category's largest backer and a beneficiary of every project it funds.
Second-order effects
- Rival Web3 platforms like Mythical Games get their own nine-figure validation, pulling VC attention away from conventional game studios whose items remain locked inside publisher-controlled servers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, game economics shift from publisher-owned item catalogs to tradable player assets, pressuring incumbent platforms like Meta and Microsoft on the interoperability question they have so far controlled.
The trend: Web3 gaming is compounding through successive mega-rounds as investors bet that portable, player-owned digital items will redraw the line between game publishers and players.