At Lightspeed, we believe that supporting creators is one of the best ways to help democratize the Internet. The more people who can share in the financial benefits of technology, the stronger the entire ecosystem becomes, especially during turbulent economic times.
It’s why I’m happy to announce our support for Soba, an open-world web3 platform where people can create games for any device using easy no-code tools. We are leading a $13.6 million seed round, with participation from a number of other venture firms and individual creators.
Our investment in the Berlin-based company is also another example of our increased commitment to the European market.
Easy, fun, and profitable
Soba’s mission is to allow anyone to express their ultimate creativity through game creation, and to inspire more gamers to become creators themselves. Essentially, it’s hoping to make building games as easy as creating websites using Squarespace or Wix.
This is not a new concept. There are already successful platforms that let people build and monetize their own games. But they’re hard for noncoders to use, and they usually take the lion’s share of the revenue, leaving creators with few ownership rights.
There are also a number of web3 game startups that aim to compensate players using tokens or allow for ownership of in-game assets via NFTs. But those games are often not that fun to play.
Soba is built around two fundamental principles:
1. Games are supposed to be fun. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how big a community you’ve built around them or how brilliant your crypto strategy is.
2. It should be easier for people with good ideas but limited programming skills to create games, monetize them, and be compensated fairly for their work.
A passion for gaming
These are things Soba founders Juha Paananen and Dr Florian Odronitz are passionate about. With their backgrounds at AAA game makers (Nonstop Games and Wooga, respectively), they understand the difficulty in creating compelling gameplay and the need to reward people who do it well. Personally, I’ve known Juha for a while now. He’s a serial founder who’s already experienced one successful exit and knows how to build a game studio.
As someone who’s worked on the other side of the gaming industry at Dots, I understand just how hard it is to make a good game. You spend 90 percent of your time trying to make it fun, and the rest figuring out how to make money from it. The team at Soba gets it, too.
Right now Soba is in alpha. It’s free to everyone, and runs on mobile, PC and Mac platforms. That already puts the platform ahead of other creation tools like Unity that require a Windows machine. The ultimate plan is to help creators get their games into the right marketplaces and promote them.
The global gaming market is growing at nearly 11% per year, and the creator economy is on the verge of exploding. By living at the confluence of both, Soba promises to be — quite literally — a game changer.
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