Big Time Studios is Hoisting $21M to Bring NFTs to Game Economies

Big time studio is going great this week with a funding round of $21 million to get nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to the major game economies.

The funding is split into two parts: $10.3 million in a round led by FBG Capital as well as North Island Ventures, OKEx Blockdream Ventures, Alameda Research, Digital Currency Group, Circle Financial, and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures.

And Big Time Studios is also in the process of closing an $11 million fund that it will utilize to invest in game companies that accept its technology. It’s a multiplayer action RPG where you can get your team with up to six people and go into dungeons where you slay monsters, some of which are going to be dropping precious loot.

And the way the game is intended, people with zero blockchain skill are going to start gathering NFTs that have real-world value without having to have any prior knowledge about what blockchain technology is regarding.

So eventually, we’re trying to make fundamental technology unseen and just keep the value proposition for the users.”

Big Time Studios’ team contains alumni of Epic Games, Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games, Electronic Arts, and Decentraland. They desire triple-A game companies to take on cryptocurrency and NFT technology.

But to show that their model works, they are first creating their own action role-playing game that will facilitate players to obtain, hold, and trade NFT-based virtual stuff without the barriers present in most blockchain applications.

The NFT boom

NFTs are a hot product now, surrounded by the craze around cryptocurrency. NFTs can distinctively recognize digital items as real and rare via blockchain technology, the apparent and protected digital ledger.

NFTs have blown up in other applications like art, sports collectibles, and music. NBA Top Shot (a digital take on collectible basketball cards) is one instance.

Developed by Dapper Labs, NBA Top Shot has exceeded $500 million in sales, five months after going public. And an NFT digital collage by the performer Beeple sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million.

As the creator of Decentraland, Meilich was an open-up of NFTs. After that company became a decentralized self-directed organization (DAO, run by the owners who purchased its tokens), he left and investigated what to do next. He commenced Big Time Studios in April 2020. “After we decentralized the project, Thor and I started functioning in this new company with the expectation of taking blockchain gaming to a mass-market audience,” Milich said.

“The learnings we’ve had over the preceding few years is that NFTs appear to have a lot of demand, but from a very niche, very technical audience. Scaling to millions of users — we learned there was no method we could do with the present user experience that needed setting up wallets, having people modify their assets, and perhaps lose them forever if they mislaid their private keys.”

Making NFTs secure for big game companies

Investors are giving money into NFTs, but it’s a first-class question as to whether NFTs will become a slight wave that gets your feet wet in the game industry, or they will be a tidal wave that will brush through it.

Milich aspires it will be the latter, but he observes obstacles that have to be confronted. Travis Scher, a managing partner at North Island Ventures, told in a statement that the market for in-game assets is enormous, but players don’t have the right to possess and trade the items they buy, for the most part.

In-game NFTs can provide players true ownership and that will bring the metaverse a step closer to the final result, he said.

“It’s a stage for other gaming companies to bring in NFT’s into their economies,” Milich said.

In favor of the audience that has been playing first-generation blockchain games, we see that they’ve been spending up to six times more than people do on conventional free-to-play games.

It’s a very convincing business case. It’s not only fine for the players, because they have more control over their items, but it should also be fine for the economy of the game studios because the items are moveable.”