NPC Labs raises $18M to bring mainstream games to Web3
NPC Labs raised an $18 million funding round led by Pantera Capital to help players discover Web3 games and help developers scale their games across numerous blockchain networks.
NPC Labs aims to accelerate the onboarding and development of gaming onchain as a core contributor to B3.fun, a discovery-focused gaming ecosystem built on Coinbase’s L2 blockchain network, Base.
Founded by a trio of founders who worked on Base’s former business and ecosystem development team, NPC Labs is poised to supercharge gaming on Coinbase’s L2 network, accelerating Base’s ambitious mission to bring a billion users onchain and restore economic freedom for game creators and enthusiasts.
The investors also include notable investors Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund. Together with an earlier round, NPC Labs has now raised a total of $21 million.
NPC Labs CEO Daryl Xu said in a statement, “In today’s hyper-competitive gaming world, developers are having a difficult time bringing their games to market. After spending years creating a game, developers are beholden to publishers to deem their games worthy of support, marketing, and distribution. And when they do, developers give up 70% of the proceeds with the risk of the publisher pulling the game if it’s not generating sufficient revenue.”
Xu added, “On the flip side, players who grind for consumables, cosmetics and badges are at risk of losing it all should publishing studios say they’re done. Our mission here is simple. We want to help build fun games for the mom in Nebraska while making it dead simple for developers to benefit from being onchain. In other words, we’re placing control back in the hands of game developers and gamers.”
Viktoriya Hying, COO of NPC Labs, talked to me about the company’s plans in an interview.
“Our core mission at the end of the day is to restore economic freedom to game developers and players,” Hying said. “We are the core contributors to B3, which is a horizontally scaled gaming ecosystem that we’re launching at the L3 level on top of Base,” Hying said. ” And we’re launching on top of Base specifically because most of the team came from Base.”
While Coinbase’s Base is definitely late, it has potential to link the wallets of Coinbase’s 100 million-plus users for wallets with features like Telegram access. That’s why more companies are turning to support Base, Hying said.
“A lot of the tech that was necessary wasn’t really there in the very early days” of blockchain gaming, Hying said. “There’s a massive opportunity here to provide these retail users with fun, simple games.”
The company is making its own gaming ecosystem for players with a discovery system that supports games on Base.
“It’s really meant to be a simple and easy experience,” Hying said. “We just want a user to come to B3 and just start playing the game.”
When the player is some rounds into a game, they can be prompted to create a wallet so they can join the leaderboard competition. They can participate in the Web3 economy and sell their assets at some point, but that’s not the main point of playing the games.