Foresight Ventures: Looking back at the projects invested in a year ago, now you feel that they are not reliable enough?

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1. Invest in things you don’t understand and look at new markets

Foresight's investment has always been investing in a long-term expectation, not a short-term market. As for the planned market for the next two years, as early as last year, it began to pay attention to the combination of AI and games. Recently, some projects in the market still make people Foresight is very excited. For example, virtual boyfriends and virtual pets. Companionship projects use the core features of AI to interact and compete with players. The application of AI in games can provide players with a richer, personalized and intelligent game experience, and at the same time, it also provides great support for game development. Providers provide more efficient and innovative development methods.

Foresight also considers the investment attitude of the game in this way, not Fomo, invest in your own style.

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2. It’s GDC, where is the end of the team?

I didn't have time to squeeze in on the first day of the GDC scene where the line time was more than 2 hours.

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3. What is Gamefi

At the GDC site, I felt that the popularity of traditional European and American game manufacturers for Web3 games has increased significantly. They no longer regard these games as simple traffic aggregation Ponzi Games. At the Gamebeats 2022 event half a year ago, the topics discussed were limited to games and metaverses, but this time at GDC, I also saw the shadow of Web3 games at several head booths at the scene. With the development of the market in the past two years, the number of developers entering the Web3 game has also increased. Many developers and teams who have completed excellent projects in large game companies have turned to the Web3 market. Pioneers like Xterio under Funplus Those who have already begun to plan ahead.

GDC is far more interesting than Denver. It is a gathering among game developers, game developers and investors. On-site VR equipment and large-screen game panels are displayed between exhibition areas. Generally speaking, GDC is still a grand event for game developers. In addition to the traditional game companies, it is worth mentioning that multiple Web3 ecosystems also have their own exhibition halls and corresponding peripheral activities at the event. The main event exhibition halls are divided into For several major types, the core exhibition halls are large-scale game exhibition halls such as traditional game engines Unity, Pico, etc. It is worth mentioning that Avalanche and Polygon are actively operating this time. A large number of industry expert speeches, workshops, panel discussions, round table meetings and game demonstrations and other forms of activities have just brought great vitality to SF in the current SF.

I also met many representatives of the game industry at some events, such as Dean takahashi, as the number one writer in the game industry, he also appeared at a certain Web3 VC event dinner, and he communicated with me in a rare way His current views on the Web3 game industry and market prospects.

Compared with the FOMO sentiment towards triple-A games that appeared in the market more than a year ago, many investment institutions are now observing the conversion and retention of game users from a long-term perspective. Star Atlas is a 3-A game that has been verified by the market for two years. Although its picture quality is very exquisite and it is used as a high-quality benchmark in the current market, but from the perspective of longer-term user base and retention, the success of Star Atlas It was achieved with the rise of Solana and the relative lack of competing products in the market, and has no future reference value.

Web3 AAA category games still face the problems of high cost and long cycle. Investment institutions themselves will also look at the current market from a more objective perspective. The game itself is very difficult to release, the cost of trial play is extremely high, the production cycle of trial play is too long, and the cost of subsequent marketing and maintenance has also become one of the reasons why it is more difficult for AAA games to raise funds in this market.

At the same time, in this GDC event, I also saw the single-category top projects that I had chatted with online many times and finally had the opportunity to see offline, such as Inworld AI, a worldview created by characters driven by artificial intelligence; Playmint, an early full-chain game; Avalon, a game of a super triple-A film production team, etc.

4. Start this discussion with a passage from each friend you met

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1. Whether the matching degree of the community in the game is consistent

Now, one of the topics that the game team and the investment team are most concerned about is the registered users of KYC on the chain, or the retention and conversion of registered users. More teams are beginning to pay attention to the creation of game infrastructure completed by teams such as Unipass, Web3 auth, and particle network.

Whether the first batch of users attracted by the reward mechanism, that is, the user group attracted by the traffic platform, can become the core users who really remain in the game ecosystem is the core issue faced by many game projects.

According to the analysis of user portraits, for example, the core players of SLG are mainly concentrated in the age group of 20-40, and are mainly distributed in Asia, Europe and North America. These users are highly compatible with Crypto users. Although it is difficult to find these user data on the Web3 chain, in terms of compatibility, the core gap lies in the choice of theme.

How the community matches users, how users are converted and retained at the appropriate stage, this process is the problem that the Web3 or Web2.5 game community is currently facing.

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2. At what stage has the game on the entire chain developed, and what is the narrative after that?

Although at the exhibition, there were not many activities related to games on the whole chain, but for teams concerned about games on the whole chain, more attention was paid to institutions investing in game projects. Most of the investments made by these institutions at this stage are early-stage investments, and even the game teams themselves on the entire chain need to think about their future ecological chain choices.

On-chain gaming has always been regarded as one of the potential core applications of cryptocurrencies, because it can utilize on-chain verification, ownership, and global payment trajectories to build native digital assets and services, and has great potential for development. However, the first batch of full-chain games had some flaws, such as cumbersome experience and too much emphasis on financialization, which blocked many real gamers.

In general, the development of games on the full chain in the future requires high-performance infrastructure and design constraints to achieve development in the direction of full chaining, asset chaining, and on-chain casting. development is full of expectations.

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3. What kind of game infrastructure will be sought after

Now there are many game projects on the market that are looking forward to new narratives, so I don’t think the game chain is the only option for game infrastructure. While there has been a lot of focus on interoperability and scalability of gaming infrastructure, the existing targets in the market seem trite compared to the Treasuredao team’s conversations. Treasuredao has great potential, its recognition in the game community and the loyalty of players, as well as the API Metafab for small game development teams and the internal Treasure Tag as DID, all make it a highly anticipated target. Although the market may lose some users with the release of Arbitrum, from the perspective of long-term in-game ecosystem construction, we still expect Treasuredao to be able to carefully select game teams to join the lineup based on the existing user system and become a large The builder of the game ecosystem, not just a game publisher.

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4. What expectations does the market have for the narrative in the Web3 game field?

Traditional game manufacturers still have great prejudice against Web3 games. However, just as mobile games were once scorned by Western markets, but eventually proved their viability, cultural differences do not determine market prospects. Therefore, the sustainability of the diversified Web3 game market requires the integration of different market leaders.

The global game player community eliminates the restrictions of regionalization, and Web3 games can become a unified standard for in-game asset attribute determination and in-game identity identification. Web3 games can also provide players with global social and economic exchanges, where players can interact and trade with other players in the game. In addition, Web3 games provide game developers with new revenue streams and innovative business models, such as token-based economic models and NFTs.

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5. When I look back at the projects I invested in a year ago, I think they are not good

This is a piece of feedback given by another investor. We discussed the investment thinking logic of several Internet celebrity game targets. We used to be obsessed with the high-quality teams of major top manufacturers, and even used it as the core standard to measure whether the game can be released smoothly. However, in the past year, we have completely slapped our faces. We started to keep thinking, whether it is a high-valued game or not, founders must understand the gameplay of Web3. Game narrative is very core. For example, Digidaigaku Gabriel Leydon, who once opened the player Free to mint, recently announced his cooperation with Free NFT. Even being a mascot and publicity ambassador for a project is a must-have skill for Web3 founders.

In fact, the founding team of the game, especially the European and American teams, will have a lot of people who are very imaginative and have the potential to complete a high-quality game Trailer. Any one will cost nearly 200 W dollars, but from the existing chain Technically speaking, it is very difficult to set up the game smoothly and with low gas costs.

We often introspect. Many of the projects we gave up are Internet celebrity projects, endorsed by high-quality institutions, and have super game teams. why? Because the risk of investing in a game independently is too high, higher than just as a team or individual cognition. This is the difference between Asian and Western gaming teams. The Asian game team is very good at controlling costs and gathering initial game players in the game community to complete the education and conversion retention of top users. The Western Games team put a lot of energy into the idea, presentation and production of a very innovative Trailer.

The base of Asian communities and players is very large. Based on more than 45% of mobile game users, mobile game users still have great potential. This is also the difference between Chinese and Western investors pursuing projects.

In fact, half of the participants in GDC this time are traditional players and half are Web3 game teams, as well as investors who can be seen everywhere at the venue. The surrounding activities mainly focus on A16Z, Bitkraft, YGG, Graffin, and there are also traditional industries such as CAA, Unity, etc. These large-scale events themselves still bring a lot of opportunities for investors and project parties to communicate better.

At this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) that I attended, I was very excited about the future of gaming. Whether it is the technology, content, or market size of the game, it has shown huge potential and room for development.

We have seen the application of many new technologies in games, such as AR games, VR visual delivery, etc. These games are very playable, but the cost control of future equipment will become the core of whether gamers can highly accommodate these types of games reason.

As a Web3 investor, I have a lot of confidence in the encrypted world. This trip to GDC made me even more aware that the game market has a very broad prospect. Based on the layout of Foresight in the direction of the game, coupled with the precipitation of time, we can judge that the game itself must be continuously derived based on the needs of human nature. For future game product categories, we look forward to more development and innovation in terms of AI + human needs, large-scale game ecological construction, popularization of mobile games in the Asian market, and the infrastructure of games on the entire chain.

Foresight Ventures bets on the innovation of cryptocurrency in the next few decades. It manages multiple funds: VC fund, secondary active management fund, multi-strategy FOF, special purpose S fund "Foresight Secondary Fund l", with a total asset management scale of more than 4 One hundred million U.S. dollars. Foresight Ventures adheres to the concept of "Unique, Independent, Aggressive, Long-term" and provides extensive support for projects through strong ecological forces. Its team comes from senior personnel from top financial and technology companies including Sequoia China, CICC, Google, Bitmain, etc.

Foresight Ventures bets on the innovation of cryptocurrency in the next few decades. It manages multiple funds: VC fund, secondary active management fund, multi-strategy FOF, special purpose S fund "Foresight Secondary Fund l", with a total asset management scale of more than 4 One hundred million U.S. dollars. Foresight Ventures adheres to the concept of "Unique, Independent, Aggressive, Long-term" and provides extensive support for projects through strong ecological forces. Its team comes from senior personnel from top financial and technology companies including Sequoia China, CICC, Google, Bitmain, etc.

Website: https://www.foresightventures.com

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Disclaimer: All Foresight Ventures articles are not intended as investment advice. Investment is risky, please assess your personal risk tolerance and make investment decisions prudently.