Mythical Games raises $75M Series B led by WestCap Group for developing a platform for “playable NFTs” where player-owned game avatars can be bought and sold
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
This round caps a three-year build-out: Mythical's $16M Series A back in late 2018 funded player-owned economies on the EOS blockchain, and the $75M from WestCap is the scale-up bet that turns that thesis into a platform where avatars are assets players buy and sell rather than locked-in cosmetics.
The timing sits inside a funding cluster around player ownership: weeks earlier, Animoca Brands raised $88M at a $1B valuation for NFT item ownership and Big Time Studios exited stealth with $21M. Four months after this round, the thesis paid off again with a $150M raise led by a16z at a $1.25B valuation — the fastest validation of the model among this cohort.
First-order effects
- Mythical gets runway to finish the playable-NFT platform itself, while WestCap's check signals mainstream financial buyers — not just crypto-native funds — underwriting player-owned game assets.
- Players on Mythical-partnered games gain the immediate ability to trade avatars as liquid property, a direct contrast with the sell-or-take-items ownership Animoca is marketing to its own titles.
Second-order effects
- Competing studios like Big Time now face an incumbent with both platform ambition and fresh capital, pushing the whole cohort toward signing game developers faster to lock up supply of NFT-enabled titles.
- The valuation trajectory — from $16M to $75M to a $1.25B round within three years — makes player-owned economies a repeatable fundraising template, pulling more generalist VCs into blockchain gaming deals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, in-game items shift structurally from publisher-controlled licenses to player-held property, forcing every major studio to decide whether to host marketplaces or cede them to platforms like Mythical's.
- A dedicated infrastructure layer between game engines and asset markets would emerge, with the platform operators — not the individual studios — capturing the trading economics across many titles.
The trend: Game economies are being rebuilt around player-tradable NFT assets, with successive mega-rounds turning startups like Mythical into the marketplace infrastructure layer for the industry.