Web3 game developer Block Tackle announced Tuesday a $5 million seed funding round led by Cadenza Ventures and Play Ventures to help launch its massive multiplayer skateboarding game, where players buy their boards as NFTs.
The announcement coincides with the Game Developers Conference, held this week at the Moscone Center, where blockchain-based games are making a big debut and raking in funding from investors hoping to capitalize on the buzz.
Based in San Francisco, Block Tackle plans to release a demo of its first game SkateX in April and the full game this summer.
To play, users must buy an NFT of a one-of-a-kind skateboard that they can then virtually ride around the game or sell to other players, and eventually bring into other games and virtual spaces that partner with Block Tackle.
NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are singular digital objects purchased with cryptocurrency where the ownership of the token is documented in the blockchain. The NFT space has exploded in popularity in the past year, as companies try to find ways for people to spend money and feel a sense of ownership of the things they buy in emerging virtual worlds, known as the metaverse.
“There’s been a lot of experiments around games in the early days of NFTs, but they weren’t built by people with professional experience building games,” said Block Tackle co-founder Ben Topkins, who previously worked at mobile game developer Kabam. “Our core team is people that collectively built dozens of games.”
Topkins says the problem the company hopes to solve is how to make ownership of items in games "a better value proposition" by allowing them to be transferred to other games or sold for cryptocurrency.
“Free-to-play gaming players could spend 5-plus hours a day playing a game and when they move to the next one, they have no way to capture the value they generated,” he said. “Developers control the entire economy, and it's against the terms of service to sell the assets in a lot of games.”
Gamers have been buying and selling in-game items for years, just under the radar on sites like eBay, he says.
Larger game companies have attempted to integrate NFTs into their games with varying results. Ubisoft received widespread backlash from fans online when they tried to incorporate the tokens into some of their biggest franchises like Rainbow Six: Siege, seeing it as a cynical cash grab.
Topkins says his game is different. By building the game with web3 and NFT elements at its core, instead of tacking them onto the game later, it creates a more natural use case for the new technology.
“The tech tools to integrate games and the blockchain are starting to mature and there’s a lot more attention along with the money to help build these games,” Topkins said.
