AO Labs, a virtual game company raised $4.5 million in a seed round for Spacebar, its first blockchain game. Yield Guild Games (YGG) led the round together with 70 investors, including some of the biggest names in crypto and GameFi.
Some of the Investors making the rounds
Gabby Dizon, CEO of YGG, Balaji Srinivasan and Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon, Jeff “Jiho” Zirlin of Axie Infinity maker Sky Mavis, and Kyu Lee of South Korean video game company, Com2uS were some of the investors in the round.
Joony Koo and Christy Choi, both of whom had worked in tech and games before, started the studio. Koo used to be the COO of the South Korean company BiNAREE, Inc., which made mobile games. He is also the Co-Founder and Head of Business Development of the South Korean company Block Crafters, a digital asset company. From 2018 to 2020, Choi was the Founding Director of Binance Labs. He is now an advisor at YGG.
Koo told VentureBeat,
“I think gaming will probably be the piece that brings all these different building blocks of crypto together. That’s why I’m so sure about making this game because it could be the key to getting a lot of fans to use it. Not just because it’s fun to play. It’s because you’ll use all the different tools being built in this space while you play the game.”
The goal of this Project.
The goal of AO Labs is to make Spacebar, an open-source blockchain game that is run by the community. It is a casual game with a space theme that uses Web3 tools like a decentralized ID system, DeFi, NFTs, and game guilds. The studio is yet to disclose the blockchain support for the game.
Choi told VentureBeat that AO Labs chose to get funds from Web3 founders instead of venture capital firms because they “want to empower the community and build a game by the community” This is why they went to people they trust in the Web3 gaming space.
CEO Gabby Dizon said, “YGG is excited to support the AO Labs team in their goal to speed up the ownership economy and composability through games in Web3.”
The team involved in the Project
Spacebar will be released next year. It was created by a group of former employees from Binance, Kakao, Coupang, Com2uS, Disney, and venture-backed startups. The company has a team of six people right now, but they want to hire a lot more people to speed up the development of the game.
AO Labs is making a prototype of Spacebar right now. This prototype will change as the game’s release date gets closer. Spacebar will be an arcade-style game with simple leaderboards. It will take ideas from esports and user-generated content. Users will be able to make money by selling in-game items and taking part in major changes to the game.