Shrapnel, a futuristic shoot-’em-up game built on the Avalanche blockchain, has completed a $7 million token sale that includes Dragonfly and Three Arrows Capital. Keith Nunziata of Citadel Global Equities and Jason Zhao of Kleiner Perkins are the angel investors.
Neon, a spin-off from HBO Interactive that is building Shrapnel, received $10.5 million in a seed round sponsored by Griffin Gaming Partners and Polychain Capital in November.
The excitement of decentralised finance (DeFi) is fading, and blue-chip non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are already well established. Now, venture capital is shifting its focus to the GameFi catchall, where players generally earn cryptocurrency and NFT incentives by performing tasks and fighting other players.
However, GameFi is still in its initial stages, with lessons to be learnt, implying the need for a load of new tokenomic infrastructure and more interoperability.
Shrapnel CEO Mark Long, who has worked on blockbuster games for platforms ranging from Sega Genesis to Playstation 4 for clients such as Disney, Ubisoft, and the US Army, said the first generation of play-to-earn suffers from a “particularly egregious form of digital sharecropping,” with low-earners in countries such as Peru and the Philippines grinding away to create returns with characters they can’t afford to own outright.
