More Web3 Activity By CCP Games

And why do you boost a message about a meeting between the CEO and some crypto investors on that account?  Because crypto is coming to EVE Online maybe? (Edit: The EVE Online twitter account has since undone this retweet.)

- Wilhelm Arcturus, The Ancient Gaming Noob, 29 March 2022

I have to admit that the recent announcement of a $40 million round of funding for CCP Games' next project caught me by surprise. Not that the funding happened. Instead, that the entity making the announcement was CCP Games in Reykjavik and not Pearl Abyss in Anyang. 

I was under the impression Pearl Abyss, through its financial subsidiary Pearl Abyss Capital, was handling all Web3/blockchain/NFT investments. I was wrong. I did a little more digging and found two more transactions involving CCP Games and Web3/blockchain/play2earn gaming. But instead of receiving money, CCP Games was part of the investing groups.

One of my favorite gdc moments was this private session with @HilmarVeigar to talk about @EveOnline with the @YieldGuild, @Delphi_Digital and @BitkraftVC teams. pic.twitter.com/6Eb4gi9a0k

— ED3N (@eden_holdings) March 29, 2022

The first transaction occurred in April 2022, when CCP took part in a $20 million initial coin offering for Civitas. Civitas is a 4x strategy game built on the blockchain. The game was supposed to go into beta this quarter, but Directive Games appears on pace to miss that target. But the more interesting fact, at least for this post, is the list of investors and strategic partners buying tokens.

Going back and reading Wilhelm's post from one year ago and he did a very good job identifying some of the investors. The reaction to the tweet was so bad MassivelyOP reported on the outrage. But the tweet that upset EVE players wasn't about EVE Online. It was about investing in another company's game. 

CCP was not done yet, though. In June, CCP Games became involved in a round of $22 million in investment funding for Clockwork Labs. The company is designing a game called BitCraft, a "community sandbox massively multiplayer online role-playing game.'

In the VentureBeat article, the author named some of the investors.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round to further develop their community sandbox MMORPG, BitCraft, alongside a new unannounced database technology that powers the game.

David Baszucki, Roblox founder and CEO, also participated in the round as a private investor. A16z and Baszucki join an existing list of investors and games industry legends and leaders, including Supercell, CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson, and Unity cofounder David Helgason.

Andreessen Horowitz. The same company that led the $40 million funding round announced last week. I'm guessing some networking occurred around the organization of the funding round.

One interesting note. While the author notes the involvement of Hilmar, Crunchbase indicates the funding Hilmar was associated with came from CCP Games, not his personal funds.

One final note. I wish I was writing an anniversary post for a fairly infamous tweet in the EVE community. But until the $40 million round of funding, I was blissfully unaware of everything happening. Once I knew which threads to pull, however, following the trail was fairly simple. And in some ways, the story is a lot better than the alternative.