Quick take:
Merit Circle primarily looks at founder mentality to decipher who is in it for the long-term and who is looking for a “quick buck”.
The company’s treasury grew by $94 million in the first quarter, with its studio arm among one of the main drivers.
Although the blockchain gaming industry is widely viewed as a genre, Marco thinks in five years, the technology may not be as widely advertised as it will be used in games.
Although blockchain gaming has been one of the most resilient categories of the Web3 industry, over the past several months, there has been an emerging trend. More Web3 gaming startups are beginning to focus on the technological side of the industry rather than launching new blockchain games.
Companies are now looking at ways to bring more scalability and interoperability to Web3 gaming, while others are looking at ways of leveraging artificial intelligence to create sustainable gaming ecosystems driven by user-generated content.
The industry seems to be evolving towards a future that perhaps Marco van den Heuvel, co-founder and chief gaming officer at Merit Circle expects in five years. “I don’t think that long-term we should see ‘blockchain technology’ as its own genre of games. There will be games that use blockchain technology and there will be games that don’t,” van den Heuvel told NFTgators in a Q&A.
The Merit Circle co-founder sees blockchain gaming evolving towards the underlying technology side of the industry where developers may choose to integrate the technology into their games, rather than a standalone category promoted as a unique genre.
“Today many studios advertise the usage of blockchain technology, in five years from now they’ll hopefully just advertise a game and it’ll feel natural enough for people to interact with the blockchain elements when available. Just like games today don’t advertise heavily which data, cloud, server solutions etc. they use.”
The focus has switched from merely building blockchain games to enabling game developers to integrate Web3 gaming elements in their games.
Van den Heuvel discusses more about how blockchain technology is transforming the gaming industry in the Q&A below.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in Web3.
I discovered Bitcoin in early 2017, after which I immediately went down the rabbit hole so to speak. I started investing in stocks at a young age and have always been a big gamer, so digital economies and currencies made sense to me. It was when I discovered Ethereum and smart contracts that I got more excited though. While learning more about cryptocurrency myself, I started educating others by writing and talking about it online. Through this, I landed my first clients as a community manager in 2018. Throughout the years I’ve worked with numerous projects on the community and marketing side.
When I discovered Axie Infinity early on, I became involved in its economy and with that combined my passion for gaming and web3. Through this, a small guild came into existence, which turned into Merit Circle.
Your organisation is building the Beam network, which it describes as an open-source blockchain focused on gaming. There are quite a few other chains that have chosen to specifically focus on gaming. What makes Beam so unique that developers would choose to build on it over others?
First and foremost, we are big gamers ourselves. Second, we started building Beam based on the feedback and experience we’ve gathered by investing in and working with over 65 (now 100+) studios in web3, throughout a now 3-year time period. Besides this, we have co-launched our own studio developing the title Forgotten Playland and have launched an NFT project named ‘Edenhorde’. That to say, we know the industry and pain points of developers inside out and were eager to contribute to the industry beyond our investments.
The Beam ecosystem is game-first and we’re eager to take blockchain experiences directly inside the game, in a way that feels natural to gamers. Rather than taking them out of the gaming experience into heavy blockchain front-end experiences.
I noticed that your portfolio of projects — though dominated by gaming-related projects — stretches beyond that. Which segments of your portfolio have benefitted the most from the current crypto bull market, and why is that?
Our treasury incl. all investments/positions may be found at: https://treasury.meritcircle.io/. Looking at the purchase value versus current value there, the treasury has most benefited from 1) its studio arm (Forgotten Playland, Castle of Blackwater, Snackclub) and 2) general investments. It’s hard to pinpoint it to one category, as various investments have performed very well.
What are the three most common characteristics of Web3 projects that Merit Circle has invested in?
We mainly look at the founder mentality. In an industry where many projects are looking to raise funding on a daily basis, and many projects fail on a daily basis, one of the main criteria that has done well for us was the founder’s background and mentality, whether they’re actually here to stay or rather as they’d say are looking ‘for a quick buck’.
Other than that, we’ve mainly invested in either game studios or gaming infrastructure. With exceptions of e.g. some AI investments.
What is the biggest challenge that blockchain games must overcome to — as you say— “revolutionize gaming”?
This is the golden question, that many would like to have a direct answer for. In my personal opinion, it is a mix of things. First of all, developing a proper game takes time. Gaming in web3 is still relatively young and it makes sense there haven’t been any sustainable big hits yet. As the core gameplay wasn’t sticky/fun enough for players to discover it and keep playing, without incentives added into the mix.
Second, many games to date are taking the gamers out of the gaming experience by adding blockchain elements into the mix in ways that don’t feel natural to gamers, e.g. requiring them to purchase NFTs before being able to access a game or requiring them to navigate out of the game, onto a browser marketplace to transact. We’re now getting into a phase where wallet solutions and other types of tooling are much more convenient to use, where this experience can be much improved upon.
Is your recent collaboration with Immutable part of that vision? If yes, how does it fit into your overall strategy?
It certainly is. I always like to say ‘We want to be where the gamers are, we want to be where the games are’. The Beam SDK is in essence chain agnostic. We want to enable developers to implement blockchain inside their game. We started on Avalanche with a subnet, because this was the first battle-tested solution we saw that made sense to enable the creation of a game-first ecosystem for multiple studios. This was the perfect breeding ground for us to start developing and testing our tooling. The Immutable zkEVM collaboration enables us to cater to even more studios, given Polygon and Immutable serve a large portion of all studios within web3 gaming. We’re incredibly excited to work together with these studios to further improve the overall experience of blockchain technology within games.
Where do you see the blockchain gaming industry in five years? Do you see it replacing traditional gaming structures with new economic models? Or could it be a new vertical that grows parallel to Mobile, Console gaming, etc?
I personally don’t think that long-term we should see ‘blockchain technology’ as its own genre of games. There will be games that use blockchain technology and there will be games that don’t. Today many studios advertise the usage of blockchain technology, five years from now they’ll hopefully just advertise a game and it’ll feel natural enough for people to interact with the blockchain elements when available. Just like games today don’t advertise heavily which data, cloud, server solutions etc. they use.
There will be different aspects within gaming:
– Creators earning money by making content they enjoy making
– Gamers earning money by playing the games they enjoy playing (or being able to take money out of game economies again after they’re done playing)
It’s not new, gray markets have existed for a long time now. Runescape Gold, League of Legends accounts, you name it, have been bought and sold for years now. Blockchain technology enables this to happen more transparently, (cost) efficiently and safely, in a way where game developers now also earn money through secondary sales fees.
Besides blockchain gaming, what other segments of the digital asset space are most exciting to you in 2024?
I am incredibly interested in AI and RWA. AI simply because it’s a fascinating technology that is advancing so quickly and is applicable in almost anything you can think of. Whereas real-world assets on the blockchain make sense to me like virtual currencies do. Taking things like real estate, loans, etc. onto the blockchain feels like a no-brainer.
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The post Marco van den Heuvel: “We want to be where the gamers are, we want to be where the games are.” appeared first on NFTgators .
