AO Labs raises $4.5 million for its community-driven Web3 gaming platform Spacebar

AO Labs has raised $4.5 million for its community-driven Web3 gaming platform Spacebar through a token sale. Its sponsors are the who’s who of Web3 games.

AO Labs is a virtual studio started by gaming and tech veterans Joony Koo and Christy Choi. They believe the games will pave the way to Web3, the vision of a decentralized Internet envisioned by blockchain believers. They’re making a casual game that the community can help build, but they’re not saying much about it yet.

Yield Guild Games led the round, with participation from 70 investors including some of the biggest names in crypto and gaming. They include Gabby Dizon, CEO of YGG; Polygon’s Balaji Srinivasan and Sandeep Nailwal; Jeff “Jiho” Zirlin of Axie Infinity Sky Mavis maker; and Kyu Lee of Com2uS.

The studio’s mission is to build a playground for Web 3 communities. AO Labs is committed to building a community-owned, open-source gaming platform called Spacebar, Choi and Koo said in an interview with GamesBeat.

“I think games will probably be the piece that really engages all these different building blocks through cryptography,” Choi said. “That’s why I’m extremely optimistic about building this game because it could be the gateway to driving mass adoption. It’s not just because the game is fun. It’s because while you’re playing the game, you’ll be interacting with all the different tools that are being built in this space. We will act as a point of interaction for all these crypto people.”

Spacebar is a space-themed casual game that integrates Web 3 tools such as a decentralized ID system, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and gaming guilds. The company is not yet saying what kind of blockchain technology it will use.

The investors in the seed round are all angels and are leaders in Web3 of some of the largest protocols, networks and funds in the world other than YGG.

“Spacebar truly believes that a fun, community-built game can lead to mass adoption of Web 3 and crypto. Spacebar’s builder-only boost is an important first step in building a compostable game of community ownership,” Koo said.

Choi said: “We are committed to building a game that is sustainable in its growth and fun for users, not only from the game itself, but also from the fact that users are truly involved in the creation of the game and its governance “.

YGG’s Dizon said in a statement: “YGG is excited to support the AO Labs team in their mission to accelerate the economics of ownership and composition through games on Web3.”

Spacebar will release its first game in the coming months. The team includes alumni from Binance, Kakao, Coupang, Com2uS, Disney, and venture-backed startups.

I first met Koo years ago as a judge for the International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA). Koo was the president of the IMGA jury, and he got to see a lot of good mobile games in that position. He also served as COO at Binaree and Head of Business Development at Block Crafters in South Korea. Choi was a founding director of Binance Labs, which invested in a wide variety of early-stage crypto and blockchain startups. He was part of the boards of directors of several companies.

“Joony had been talking about building this game for quite some time, and that’s how we got started,” he said. “We were thinking about the best fundraising model for us. We wanted to empower the community and build a game where we built it with the community. At first we thought we shouldn’t go to the bottom. We went to all the founders of the Web3 space, people we trust, and asked them for money.”

Although they managed to raise a round, they are not yet ready to talk about what kind of game they are playing. But the company is hiring

Choi and Koo said they know startup valuations drop during a bear market, but the best things with cool technology can still raise money. Companies that make real games can thrive, and that’s what AO Labs wants to do.

“There has to be a reason why users want to play a game,” Choi said. “It’s going to be a different kind of fun. Users are going to have fun building the game and controlling how they define fun. That’s an angle we’re trying to address.”

AO Labs has a prototype it’s working on and will change in the coming months, Koo said.

“We’re gathering a lot of different ideas around what this means,” Koo said. “To me, it feels like redefining what blockchain games are, like going back to 2009 when the definition of all mobile games changed. We think of it as a native blockchain game. The genre itself is very difficult to define”.

They are borrowing some ideas from sports and user-generated content, combined with Web3. But the core team will curate assets to offer players. It will be arcade-like, with simple leaderboards.

“The subtlety is that we do it very well and we don’t just follow what users tell us to do,” Koo said.

Players will be able to earn money by selling in-game assets. It will have major updates and users will participate in those updates. And it looks more like a mobile game than a triple-A title. As with mobile games, Koo doesn’t think you can make a great blockchain game by turning a triple-A game into a block chain game. He believes that native blockchain games will succeed. They want the game and its technology to be interoperable with other games and have composability. They want a good user experience where players have the power to use tools to make the experience more fun.

So the company starts from the base of crypto enthusiasts who are already part of the community. The company now has six people spread around the world. The company hopes to hire aggressively and possibly come up with something next year. Looking for people versed in both blockchain technology and game development. Ultimately, they hope to release a token that can be used for the government or give players some sort of say in updating the game.

As for critics of blockchain games, Koo remembers the beginning of free-to-play games, when everyone criticized the games as crap. The same is true now, but that doesn’t mean all Web3 games are bad, Koo said.

“We’re in between now,” Koo said. “If we’re like Supercell making a game in 2010, then we’re trying to become the blockchain-native game company that understands the ins and outs of making a blockchain game. The transition is what we need to work on and to understand”.