32-Bit Ventures

Party Icons, a mobile-first gaming platform with three playable modes, said it has raised $9 million in funding despite market headwinds. venturebeat.com/games/party-ic…

✨ It's a big day at Moku! ✨ We're pumped to announce that we've secured a $5.35MM investment, led by @SkyMavisHQ and @a16zGames @speedrun, with strong backing from @arca, @hiFramework, and @32bitventures. We're also honored to have the support of incredible angels like @jihoz_axie, @trungfinity, @whatslukedoing, @gabusch, @irfreak, @coco__bear, and many more. We're on a quest to put the power of publishing into the hands of those who truly drive the gaming world: gamers and creators. Moku HQ is just the beginning; we want to create an entire ecosystem where our global community isn't just an audience, but co-publishers who share in our success. This isn't an easy task, but we're on a mission to build a cutting-edge distribution ecosystem that enables gamers and creators to bring the next wave of engaging games to market alongside us (and with the magic of web3 ✨). A heartfelt thanks to our investors, partners, and community for believing in our mission. Together, we're not just making games—we're creating a new way to think about the game industry. Play. Share. Get Rewarded. #TheMokuEffect

📢BREAKING!! 📢 It’s about time we celebrated the VCs and angels making @SuperGlitchX a reality to build the next big IP in gaming. Prepare for @vectorshiftgame, the fastest mobile racing game, where players, guilds, influencers, and brands compete for ownership of resources, tracks, vehicles, and status! We bring web3 to the masses with seamless onboarding by putting players and gameplay first! Free to play with no pay-to-win or unnecessary crypto complexity. Just. Great. Games.

How To Build Product-Community Fly Wheels Founders lose a great deal of sleep thinking about how to build community when they start. So, we spent the past month with the founder of a portfolio company to understand what it takes to build communities to scale. Our latest article covers how to build a community with millions of users, using insights from @robytj of @SuperGamingNPC, one of the firms we advise. Super Gaming is a studio with over 100 million downloads and 20 games to its name. The answer has a lot to do with core human motives. Humans are tribal beings, and products can tap into our behavioral instincts to make us want to use them more often. Technical jargon aside, this is how it works. Most products that take off gain legitimacy through effort or aligning partners. For games, this could mean tapping into a larger IP. Building games for household names like Marvel could be a strong distribution engine. You could also raise money from a strategic publisher that helps you position alongside their games in digital stores. Be it sneakers, apps or games - being in the right place, at the right time, with a large name supporting you can be crucial for discovery. B2C products often engage influencers through paid campaigns. But they are one-off events that help with distribution. They do not meaningfully translate into a relationship with a user. So, what do you do once you crack distribution? Let your users express themselves. Products like @layer3 and Dune do a brilliant job of discovering and highlighting their top users. You build a sense of loyalty when using a product confers status. Unlike Veblen goods (like Gucci bags) that can be purchased, the status conferred from usage is meritocratic. It leads to users competing among themselves for rank and, by extension, leads to higher product usage. Twitch was famously a product where Justin Kan ran a live-stream of his own life. Expanding it into user-generated content where streamers shared their game-play helped it scale. Focus on the users. Give them avenues to express. . This is a two-way street. Conferring status can aggregate users. But users, in the aggregate, may have opinions that may or may not be in favour of a product. Teams building at this stage should be listening to user feedback or risk annoying large groups of core believers. The final stage is transcending rank and collaboration to build one’s own culture. Apple is synonymous with “Think different.” Sneaker culture redefines cushions for the foot into aspirational products. It is rare for a firm to create its own lore and culture, but we have seen it happen in the past. Carefully placed art and shared rules for interaction define culture. Twitter’s Fail Whale is a beautiful instance of a product owning its failure through wonderful art. If users have a product they’d miss, they would rally around the art and express it in their forms. Culture is the bits of art, rules of community, and shared identity that a product is able to facilitate among its users. Taken to the extreme, products build cults in these phases. Sounds like a lot of abstract advice? Possible. We took apart SuperGaming’s approach to building community in today’s issue to explain how this works. A decade’s worth of expertise in scaling communities, distilled to 15 minutes of reading. Article, in the link below.

Holograph is thrilled to announce a strategic round led by @MechanismCap & @SeliniCapital bringing total funding to over $11 million ✨ Read more about the latest financing round & plans to advance omnichain gaming thedefiant.io/news/press-rel…