Author: Jiawei (Twitter: @Elegy4TheArctic)
This article provides a brief overview of Forte, Enjin, and Roco Finance, based on Messari's classification of GameFi Layer 1 in Explain it Like I'm 5: GameFi.
(The latter three are game studios, of which Sky Mavis is the development team for Axie Infinity; Dacoco developed Alien Worlds based on WAX chain; and Dapper developed CryptoKitties, NBA Top Shot, and Flow)
Forte
Forte received a huge funding of over $900 million in two rounds in 2021. Investors include traditional publishers such as Sea Capital, Big Bets, Overwolf, Playstudios, zVentures and Warner Music Group, in addition to crypto world giants such as a16z, Solana Ventures, Polygon Studios, Cosmos and Animoca Brands.
Forte is a blockchain gaming platform that supports multi-chain interoperability and aims to build a full suite of technology, tools and services for developers, communities, and players, covering the full lifecycle of games, which includes market making, compliance, tool development, player services, game development and economic model design. It aims at removing any barriers to combine blockchain technology with games.
With Forte's suite of solutions, developers don't need to be experts in economics, blockchain and compliance, but can instead focus on a better player experience.
Forte also offers grants for developers and game creators, which are given without any shares being exchanged.
It is now in a closed internal beta phase, open only to partners, and no further details are available currently.
As seen above, Forte introduces in-game DeFi and NFT to the platform, creates new revenue streams for existing games, builds and integrates a scalable token economy. It also offers marketplace and trading services, a seamless digital asset wallet experience and built-in compliance components (including AML and KYC, among others).
In terms of team background, Forte was born in 2019 and co-founded by Kevin Chou and Josh Williams.
Kevin is the former CEO of mobile game publisher Kabam, a company with over 1,000 employees that grew from $300,000 to $400 million in annual revenue under his leadership. It was eventually sold to Netmarble and FoxNext Games for $1 billion. He’s also the co-founder of the famous esports club Gen.G, with multiple gaming divisions including League of Legends and Overwatch.
Forte now has over 200 employees and 40+ game development partners, as well as over 15 million partner gamers. Employees come from industry companies such as Unity, ngmoco, Riot Games, Electronic Arts, Sony, and Rockstar Games. Over 20+ games integrated into Forte by the end of 2020, spanning a variety of game genres including competitive, role-playing, simulation, strategy, sports and more.
Enjin
Enjin, as an well-known NFT platform, has components such as wallet, development platform, marketplace, and expansion solution JumpNet, providing common SDKs, APIs, and development tools, as well as complete developer documentation and interoperability of tool layers, and has built a relatively complete ecosystem and partnership so far.
The development platform provides API and SDK integration for token distribution, wallet linking, and built-in transactions in applications, and currently more than 27,000 projects are connected to Enjin's development platform. Games using Enjin's platform include 9Lives Arena, Lost Relics, Age of Rust, and Forest Knight, among others.
In addition, Enjin has launched Efinity recently, an NFT blockchain based on Polkadot.
Efinity has made some optimizations in its design for NFT interoperability and transaction experience. One of the key features is that all ERC-20, ERC-721 and ERC-1155 compliant tokens can be imported into Efinity via a cross-chain bridge, thus enabling cross-chain of NFT. The 6th Polkadot Parachain Slot Auction was successfully acquired by Efinity at the end of December 2021.
Efinity is able to achieve 6 seconds block time, 20 million NFT mints per second and 120 million NFT mints/transfers per block.
In terms of funding, Efinity closed an $18.9 million private placement round in March 2021, led by Crypto.com Capital, DFG Group and Hashed.
On the ecosystem development side, Enjin announced in November of the same year the creation of the $100 million Efinity Metaverse Fund, which is designed to support metaverse projects, games, infrastructure-based projects, NFTs and other pioneering projects on Enjin and Efinity.
Roco Finance
Roco is a decentralized GameFi platform on Avalanche designed to provide blockchain services to the game developer, content creator and player community.
Roco's main solutions are:
- Providing NFT services for managing, distributing, and trading virtual items.
- Creating staking and farming pools.
- Providing the IDO/IGO platform.
- Providing open-source SDKs, APIs, game add-ons, virtual item management applications and payment system platform services.
In September 2021, Roco Finance announced a $3.6 million funding round from a seed and private round with investors including Alameda Research, Huobi Capital, Avalaunch, X21 Digital and others.
Closing Thought
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Forte provides game economic model design and compliance business, which sounds more like a service for migration of traditional games to GameFi, or GameFi integration of existing games.
In the process, it aims at achieving "Blockchain Agnostic" for developers and players, i.e., to support multiple chains on a single platform without any perception of switching between them.
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Enjin, founded in 2009, has accumulated deep experience in the gaming field, and entered the blockchain field in 2017. Later on, it became the main promoter of the ERC-1155 standard.
Its recently launched Efinity has a vision to become a cross-chain NFT highway. Efinity is currently under development and is said to have already processed 120 million tokens in a single transaction. But as an NFT blockchain, Efinity also has two formidable opponents: Flow and ImmutableX. So, it remains to be seen if it can run some good games in the future.
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In contrast, the threshold of staking, farming and IDO/IGO made by Roco is not so high. The payment gateway, mobile wallet, SDK/API, and other services mentioned in the documentation are still under development and may not have a great competitive advantage against Forte and Enjin.