The crypto market has been quite volatile in recent months, but users are still holding out and investors are not holding back.
Solana is the last to bring money into the system. Solana Ventures and Solana Foundation have set up a $100 million investment and grant fund to put capital into South Korean web3 startups, Johnny Lee, general manager of games at Solana Labs, told Vidak For Congress. The fund will target gaming studios, GameFi, NFTs and DeFi in South Korea.
According to Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs, the fund is backed by capital from the Solana community’s treasury, in addition to the venture arm’s capital pool.
“Much of the Korean game industry is moving to web3,” Lee said. “We want to be flexible; there is a wide range of project sizes, team sizes, so some of [our investments] will be checks the size of a company.”
Overall, gaming and NFTs account for most of the activity Solana sees in South Korea, making the sectors a natural fit for web3, Lee said.
There have been many critics in the past about earning gaming, such as Axie Infinity which exists only for users to make money, not really enjoy the game. However, a number of game studios have focused on improving gameplay over the past six months in hopes of expanding their reach beyond crypto-native gamers.
Lee predicts that more “high-quality and fun games” will be launched on the Solana blockchain in the second half of 2022. These games could change the current perception that earning games aren’t fun, he said.
“We are convinced that this will change.”
In the long run, Lee thinks that web3 games will be adopted as much as free-to-play games on mobile devices. “There was a lot of pushback from gamers and developers on web3,” he said.
But given the prolific growth of the Web3 industry, timelines have been shortened significantly, he added.
“Free-to-play adoption has probably taken eight years, so if we say it will be four years for web3 games to be the dominant revenue model, I’m pretty comfortable with that.”