The Dallas-Fort Worth metro is already home to offices from the studios behind popular video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Black Ops. Now, North Texas is home to another promising game developer, and this one hopes to build the future of gaming on the blockchain. With $3 million in seed funding, Farmers Branch-based Worldspark Studios is taking the first step toward this goal.
Blockchain technology is a fast-growing industry. Having been adopted across several industries, like finance, government, healthcare and media, the market for blockchain tech is expected to be worth more than $39 billion by 2025. Since this tech has an abundance of potential applications, Worldspark is capitalizing on the opportunity to incorporate it in the gaming sector. The development studio aims to foster social connections through gaming and augment the player experience with blockchain capabilities.
“Worldspark is games first, blockchain second,” Chandler Thomlison, Worldspark’s CEO, said in a blog post. “We’ve seen many projects roll out with fancy tokenomics graphs and grand plans about blockchain economy, all of which are accompanied by a short gameplay video or a couple sentences about what you do in the game. These games make design decisions based on blockchain, rather than making blockchain decisions based on game design.”
It’s pursuing this vision with the creation of Edenbrawl, an online multiplayer fantasy game that will allow players to trade NFTs linked to in-game items like character and weapon designs. This funding round, co-led by investors Animoca Brands and Shima Capital, will go toward creating this inaugural game as well as the larger ecosystem it will be part of. This ecosystem will be based around the company’s metaverse world, Eden.
“Our hub world is the connection between our games, creating a shared economy and shared sense of purpose,” Thomlison said.
After bootstrapping up until this point with no full-time employees, Worldspark is also investing its seed funding in expanding its team with experts in the AAA gaming sector. The company’s chief creative officer Edmundo Sanchez hails from Riot Games and its CPO Sebastian Cardoso also worked at Riot and Electronic Arts, as reported by Dallas Innovates. With the help of its expanding team, Worldspark is focusing on improving Edenbrawl’s gameplay and building out its virtual world.
Additional investors in the funding round included AAG Ventures, Alameda Ventures and Double Peak Group.
