Web3 games marketplace Tegro on May 17 announced a $1-million grant for Web3 game developers, as the space gathers up steam amid the growing adoption of crypto and blockchain-based applications.
Developers can apply for the grant to get up to $25,000 a project. Shortlisted applicants will receive guidance on developing better Web3 games from a team "with deep experience in making games and designing marketplaces with high liquidity", the company said.
“Game development and publishing are in itself complex processes. Developers may not be completely conscientious of the slate of activities behind these words, let alone the complexities involved with building Web3 games with economies that are sustainable and can stand the test of time" Tegro co-founder Siddharth Menon said.
Web3 is said to be the next iteration of the internet, which will be decentralised and run on the blockchain.
"Through the first Tegro grant, we hope to bring users a new class of games worthy of actually being games, rather than a collection of poorly cobbled together websites and weak economies that eventually end up being rug pulls," he said.
Menon, who co-founded cryptocurrency exchange WazirX, teamed up with Pune-based game development firm SuperGaming to launch Tegro in February 2022.
Tegro is building a game-asset marketplace for players, traders and institutional investors, enabling them to trade, hold and play with game assets. It will also provide asset stats to help them trade and invest better.
The startup's roadmap also includes providing market software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interface (APIs) to developers, helping them make games and design "economies for a global audience".
‘Tegronomics’
Apart from the grant, Tegro said it recently unveiled a set of economic frameworks called Tegronomics that developers can leverage to build a sustainable and scalable economy in their games.
Existing Web3 games tend to have poor game economies that are not designed for sustainability, which means they don't survive for a long time and provide zero visibility into asset activity, Menon recently said on Twitter.
The company said these games also suffer from low transaction volumes due to the inherent difficulties of buying and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs are digital assets that exists on a blockchain, a record of transactions kept on networked computers.
The framework proposes the use of fungible tokens (FTs) as a core element of economy design based in the belief that game economies should be built on top of these tokens as opposed to NFTs to increase both frequency of trading and liquidity, and also making it much easier to deploy large funds.
Unlike NFTs, fungible tokens are not unique and have the same value as other units of the same token. Each unit is also not stored separately on the blockchain.
"NFTs are not completely unusable in a Web3 game, however. The key is to find balance between fungible and non-fungible assets for a successful game," the company said in a blogpost.
Among others eyeing the Web3 gaming space include Dream11 parent Dream Sports that led $120 million funding into Cricket NFT platform Rario through its corporate venture and M&A arm of Dream Sports.
nCore Games recently raised $10 million funding to expand its properties into metaverse and NFTs as well as launch new games in the Web3 and play-to-earn space.
Mobile gaming and sports media platform Nazara Technologies is also foraying into the space through its freemium gaming business, by building a cricket offering in Web3.
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