Mino Games Jumps into Web3 Gaming with Massive $15M Series B Funding for Dimensionals
Character-driven gaming pioneer Mino Games officially reported it had raised $15 million in Series B funding from investors including Boost VC, Collab Currency, Earl Grey Capital, and Konvoy Ventures. The round was led by Standard Crypto. Andreessen Horowitz and SYBO Games have both invested in the past. Bing Gordon and Don Mattrick, two giants of the video game industry have also joined as important investors and mentors. The funding for Mino Games has already reached more than $25 million overall. The money will help Mino Games, the next big player in Web3 gaming, expedite the release of Dimensionals, an innovative project series.
Mino Games CEO Message
Sasha MacKinnon, CEO, and co-founder of Mino Games talked about how the platform is transforming user experience and striving to launch new Web3 games: “Every game we have made is built around its lovable, collectible characters. We’ll be using this funding to double down on our core mission — to become the next household name in gaming through a multi-platform, multi-channel approach”. He further added: “Web3 allows us to work directly with our community to design new gaming experiences that we didn’t think were possible just a few years ago. We’re sparing no expense in building this ambitious franchise, and we think the fast-growing Web3 gaming community will love it. Expect Dimensionals to take everything we’ve done up a notch”.
According to MacKinnon, gamers, content producers, and developers should all share in the profits. The business wants to use Web3 to fundamentally change market distribution by fostering a direct link between developers and the audience. It’s not unusual for game producers to give large tech corporations up to 80% of their income as platform taxes and user acquisition expenses.
Mino Games was founded by Sasha MacKinnon and his co-founder Josh Buckley in 2011 and made use of the new mobile platform’s exponential growth to create four games. Cat Game and Dog Game are the company’s two most well-known games at the moment. With players from over 90 countries and 60 million downloads now, the company’s games have collected millions of dollars in revenue.
The margin squeeze in Mobile
The squeezing in margin and profit has posed a lot of challenges for free-to-play gaming studios. MacKinnon also acknowledged that the margins are getting squeezed despite spending 80% of their revenue back to the platforms and backers. The intriguing part of Web3 is that it doesn’t require centralized distribution, in addition to creating a unique ecosystem where the game receives support up front. Mino Games can avoid the major marketplaces’ costs.
The Transition to Web3
Web3 technology can enable people to take part in decentralized networks and platforms, as well as provide them with more control over their data and assets. Enhanced social and economic independence for studios may result from web3 development.
The company decided to transform into new technologies after ten years of experience with Web2 ecosystems and characters. In 2016, the business relocated from San Francisco to Montreal due to the region’s high operating costs. They would hire 50 people in Montreal for the same price as just 10, making Montreal five times more cost-effective. However, the business expanded during the epidemic and went entirely digital. Before leaving the business a few years ago, Buckley was a successful investor.
Dimensionals
Dimensionals is the project that pushed Mino Games to hunt one of the biggest fundings of all time. The recently raised $15M belongs to the development of Dimensionals Web3 game. MacKinnon says: More ambitious than anything the business has produced to this point is the Dimensionals web3 game. It has the power to carry this product into the future, the way that Pokemon has grown, MacKinnon said, by continuously bringing in new characters and material, just like the business did with Cat Game and Mino Monsters.
From the outset, Mino Games has made significant investments across a variety of mediums, including automation, NFTs, and games. The technologies that will be feasible in the Web3 space excite MacKinnon.
Getting past the haters
MacKinnon has observed that businesses have avoided addressing items like NFTs, which have been linked to frauds or worse, in response to the criticism. These businesses place a strong emphasis on player property and the freedom to market the equipment they acquire via gameplay. MacKinnon said: “I think what will happen is, once we just have some fun games with good user experiences, where people can after a month of playing go and buy and sell and trade it on the market, then it will be understood”.
Apart from all this, the market conditions appear to be just perfect for the launch of crypto winter.
“The worst thing that we could have done probably would have been to launch right before the crash,” he continued. “Reputational damage screws over annual holders of your assets. And so now we get to launch and we give it away for free. We’ll hopefully see it sort of a slow growth of the financial value of these things.”
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