Mythical Games, which is developing a game platform with “playable NFTs”, raises $150M led by a16z at a $1.25B valuation, four months after raising $75M
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Mythical had already moved from a blockchain-based player-owned-economy plan to a $75M Series B for its playable-NFT platform four months earlier. The new round sharply accelerates that financing arc while putting Mythical alongside NFT-game infrastructure efforts from Animoca Brands and Big Time Studios.
The significance is less a single game launch than the capital now available to build a platform around player-owned avatars that can be bought and sold.
First-order effects
- Mythical Games receives $150M to continue developing its playable-NFT platform, at a reported $1.25B valuation.
- a16z takes the lead in Mythical's new financing round, strengthening its exposure to a game platform built around player-owned digital assets.
Second-order effects
- Animoca Brands and Big Time Studios face a better-funded Mythical in the contest to persuade game studios and players to adopt NFT-based in-game ownership.
- Mythical's rapid follow-on financing raises the funding benchmark for developers building platforms, rather than only individual games, around tradable player assets.
Third-order effects
- If successive financings continue to favor platform builders, blockchain gaming may concentrate around companies that provide the ownership and marketplace layer to multiple games rather than around standalone titles.
- The pattern points to player-owned virtual economies becoming a core product architecture for a subset of game companies, with capital flowing to the firms able to make those economies usable across games.
The trend: Blockchain gaming is attracting larger platform-level investment as developers build systems for player-owned, tradable in-game assets.