Strategic Investment
ClanPlay, a community app for online gamers, has entered into a strategic investment with Bicameral Ventures. It is set to launch Good Game (GG), a marketplace for upcoming tournaments in the massively popular gaming genre known as the battle royale. Games featured on the marketplace include mega-hits such as Fortnite, Clash Royale, and PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds). GG will enable players to monetize their skills through a variety of means, including participating in massive-scale tournaments.
Meet the Players
Co-founded by Asaf Semo and Leonard Frankel in 2016, ClanPlay is a popular social platform for gamers with nearly 2 million users. The ClanPlay App is the highest rated gamer app in the world, offering a wide variety of gaming communication tools like messaging and chat. Its GG venture is also one of the first to leverage the Aion Network’s interoperable blockchain, a decentralized application development platform that boasts an advanced smart contract execution engine and an ecosystem of accelerator tools.
ClanPlay’s €2.5 million seed funding strategic investment from Bicameral Ventures funds the building of the GG marketplace, set to launch in Q4 2018. As part of the investment, Kesem Frank, co-founder of Aion and Alex McDougall, CIO at Bicameral, will be joining the ClanPlay advisory board. Kesem Frank (CEO of Bicameral Ventures, co-founder of Aion and Nuco Inc.) is bullish on the investment, stating, “ClanPlay’s choice of the Aion blockchain is a testament of the network’s capabilities. We’re excited about their work which is pioneering real world usage of mass-user high-throughput applications. We are proud to welcome the ClanPlay team as adopters of the Aion network and both Alex and I are delighted to join the platform’s advisory board.”
Leonard Frankel, ClanPlay’s CEO, has also expressed his enthusiasm about the strategic investment, stating, “ClanPlay’s blockchain-enabled platform aspires to facilitate an exchange of value and to allow any gamer to earn money by playing awesome games.” He adds that, “The low cost of transactions, speed of the network and the ability to seamlessly integrate several blockchains into our platform were all differentiating factors in choosing Aion to develop our platform on and collaborate with. Aion’s blockchain platform has given our ecosystem the ability to let gamers profit from their favorite games, without requiring offline bank accounts.”
Asaf Semo, ClanPlay’s CTO echoed Frankel`s statement, saying, “At ClanPlay, we designed a scalable platform to support millions of active users, and in-line with our lean approach that prioritizes time to market, Aion posed an unparalleled opportunity. The Aion platform solves many of our requirements around currency management, security and ease of transactions. Their interoperability offering (bridging between blockchains), gives us valuable flexibility in an ever-changing future of blockchain diversity.”
Insert Token
The GoodGame marketplace has its own cryptocurrency, a fungible token that powers transactions and uses Aion’s wallet to stash payouts and winnings. Per Alex McDougall, CIO at Bicameral Ventures, the marketplace provides a new take on advertising. Developers can get the word out on their creations by paying users in crypto to play new games.The deeper the user delves into the game, the higher the compensation.
Additionally, the blockchain allows GG holders to set up their own tournaments on the network. Goals can range from the traditional winner takes all approach to literally anything the users decide to compete on. They could, for example, vie for who can create the most rare items in a crafting game, using the blockchain to keep track of the progress of all participants.
Tournaments will go live in Q4 of 2018, with player vs player (PvP) challenges following suit, and trading of in-game services is pegged for an early 2019 rollout. The latter involves players trading in-game items with other users, or even auctioning off their elite abilities to the highest bidder.
By incentivizing talented gamers in a myriad of ways that benefit both consumer and creator, ClanPlay is reifying its philosophy that gamers deserve to be rewarded for their time, effort, and passion. It’s time for developers and advertisers to view them as the uniquely skilled individuals they are.
