The American venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz or a16z announced the $600 million ‘Games Fund One’ dedicated to the development of the next generation of the game industry and metaverse .
The company stated that the $600 million Games Fund One will be used for the Game Studios, enhancement of Games and consumers’ interaction as well as the development of the essential tools for the metaverse.
- Game Studios – to provide adequate online services for multiplayer and user-generated content
- Games x Consumer – for the development of the app to connect consumers and game creators similar to Discord
- Infrastructure – to build tools and services needed for virtual worlds and metaverse
The company believes that games infrastructure and technologies will be an essential part of the development of the metaverse. Even in its infancy, the metaverse market holds over a $300 billion game industry.
“Today, we are proud to announce GAMES FUND ONE, a16z’s inaugural fund dedicated to building the future of the games industry. Having been investors in this space for more than a decade, it’s clear to us the industry has entered a new era, and there is no better time than now to build a fund focused on supporting the next generation of games builders,” wrote a16z team members Andrew Chen, Jonathan Lai, and James Gwertzman in a blog post.
In this fund, famous investors will participate including David Baszucki, founder of Roblox; Jason Citron, founder of Discord; Marc Merrill, co-founder of Riot Games; Mike Morhaime, co-founder of Blizzard; Aleks Larsen and Jeffrey Zirlin, co-founders of Sky Mavis; Kevin Lin, co founder of Twitch; Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga; and Riccardo Zacconi, founder of King.
In the announcement, the company stated that the next generation of the games will define socialization, play, and work over the next century.
In a very short span of time, the games industry changed its course from simply being packaged entertainment to online services for social networks. Also, the modern games are also integrating new innovations with them for the users’ engagement and monetization, including microtransactions, battle passes, and web3 tokens.
The latest investments show a16z’s overwhelming interest in emerging technologies such as web3, instant games, and VR/AR. Recently, a Web3 development, Mysten labs raised $36M in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
