The $200 billion gaming industry is rapidly becoming a key point of interaction between Web2 and Web3. In recent times, a growing number of gaming companies have integrated digital wallet support and nonfungible token (NFT)-based reward systems and even launched their own metaverses.
The growing prominence of GameFi in the Web3 economy makes the likes of Animoca Brands believe that it will become an onboarding point for the Metaverse. During the Future Blockchain Summit fireside chat hosted by TDefi CEO Gaurav Dubey, Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu said that its focus is on the gaming industry, as it’s closer to a metaverse than any other industry. He noted that GameFi would become an “onboarding point for metaverse and introduce people to digital ownership.”
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Siu noted that currently, a large chunk of the $200 billion gaming ecosystem doesn’t go toward the gamers or even the gaming companies but mostly toward promoters and advertisers like Facebook and Apple. He added that the advent of Web3 could end that monopoly and bring the power back to gamers and gaming companies.
“More than half of the value that is generated in the gaming industry goes to Apple, Facebook and Google. How much of that goes back to the gaming industry? Zero. This is the issue today, and it makes the ecosystem unhealthy.”
Siu noted that the Metaverse won’t be a single or central entity but a combination of several metaverses. He said the Metaverse will be a “construction of new economies and is all about digital ownership.” He explained further:
“Metaverse to us is a whole economy. We don’t want to measure the future of these companies using PNL, we want to measure it in terms of GDP. Just like we can’t define Ethereum’s value by how much gas it generates but rather its utility as a whole, in the same way, the metaverse is an all-accomplishing picture. So, thematically, it’s a metaverse; but practically, itu2019s digital ownership."
Animoca Brands is a Hong Kong-based game software company and venture capital firm that has invested significantly in metaverse projects. Earlier in July of this year, the firm raised $78 million to advance its “open metaverse” concept.