Here’s to Onchain Gaming Summer 👉🎮☀️😎
Why Press Start Capital, early investors in leading onchain gaming projects, is getting serious about play.
The "New Golden Age of Entertainment" has arrived! Web3 will unlock epic opportunities for devs, creators, brand/community managers, gamers, and fans.
Onchain Games are the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge
Video games have historically provided fertile ground for tech and business innovation:
Atari consoles brought the arcade experience into homes
Zynga’s casual games introduced free-to-play
Pokemon Go integrated location into the gameplay
Game developers have always been eager to embrace new technologies that provide novel gaming experiences.
At its most fundamental core, blockchain technology is a value measurement, transfer, and coordination tool. This makes crypto the best sandbox for financial engineering experiments, where novel incentive designs are tested daily with real money and instant feedback.
What happens when you combine the most engaging medium (games) with the most degenerate incentive-driven platform (crypto)?
You get the most interesting real-time lab on human behavior, motivations, and financialization. We expect many of the lessons tested and proven at the intersection of games and crypto to bleed over to the rest of Web3 and beyond.
New, novel experiences and business models
While it’s still early, we can begin to anticipate crypto-native gaming experiences and models.
How would tradeable, un-nerfable in-game items change the gameplay?
Early iterations of play2earn quickly revealed drawbacks, but should we not trust that subsequent iterations will solve these problems?
What if game developers better rewarded the modders - Mod2Earn anyone?
There’s always been an inextricable feedback loop between new business models and new consumer experiences.
For example, Zynga’s ad-driven business model revolutionized casual social games.
Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) empowers creators to unleash an endless supply of new games and content.
Pixar's technology created a new genre of animated films never seen before.
It’s not yet clear which novel gaming experiences and new business models will prevail. There’s plenty of experimentation going on, and every new “space” needs brave adventurers who are willing to charge headlong into the unknown (e.g. California’s gold rush).
Press Start Capital is not looking for skeuomorphic implementations of web3 and gaming - we are looking for the brave Adventurers who will forge new experiences and models.
👉🎮Press Start on your next Adventure
Press Start Capital has been at the forefront of supporting groundbreaking onchain gaming, web3 entertainment, and related infra projects:
& more in stealth
We consider ourselves “Adventure Capitalists” ready to partner with visionary founders embarking on ambitious new adventures.
As former founders with exits, we pride ourselves on boldly writing the first check and providing support at the earliest stages of the founder journey.
THE pre-accelerator Fellowship
Press Start Capital pioneered the web3-native pre-accelerator Fellowship back in 2022 - providing hyper early stage founders with first checks, mentorship from OG founders, and a bridge to top accelerators.
Now on our 5th cohort, we’re committed to supporting hyper-early founders:
💵 US$50,000 SAFE, no program/advisory fee, no upfront equity, potential follow-on funding: simply put, the most founder-friendly program in web3!
🧙♂️ Mentorship from Superstar Founders: previous speakers and mentors include Arthur Hayes, Luca Netz, Kevin Lin, Justin Waldron, Keone Hon, TN, Benny Giang, Richard Garfield...just to name a few
🌉 Bridge to top accelerators: this Fellowship prepares founders for the top accelerators. Fellows from every cohort went on to join Alliance, a16z CSX and/or successfully close pre-seed rounds.
Onchain Gaming Summer 2024 Demo Day
This latest cohort, in collaboration with Sanctor Capital, is dedicated to onchain gaming and autonomous world projects. As early investors in fully onchain games like Primodium and Force Prime, we're dedicated to helping FOCG builders speedrun from 0 to 1.
Join us for Demo Day on September 10, 2024 to meet the teams pushing the bleeding edge of the industry - from onchain casual games, to fully onchain MMOs, to gambleFi, to FOCG infra.
As “Adventure Capitalists,” our role is to support these ambitious founders who are building a New Golden Age of Entertainment.
Happy Onchain Gaming Summer!