Ready Games Raises $3M to Bring Web 2 Gaming to the Web 3 World

A traditional gaming startup is trying to bring Web 3 gaming to the frontlines of crypto skepticism – the Apple App Store.

Ready Games raised $3 million in a sale of its new AURA token to develop a Web 3 mobile gaming arm, the company announced Friday.

The raise was led by Bitkraft and Hashed and included participation from Tribe, IOSG, Spartan, Mapleblock Capital and Polygon.

Ready Games’ Web 3 division will focus on “incentivizing Web 2 game programmers to explore and switch to Web 3, while distributing games ‘as normal’ through traditional app stores,” according to a press release.

Founded in 2016, the company believes it has all the expertise needed to solve the challenge of mobile GameFi adoption, leaning on existing relationships between both long-time game publishers from the old world and the gaming guilds of the new.

“In a sense, we’ve unblocked for thousands of game studios the ability to be like a testnet,” David Bennahum, CEO of Ready Games, told CoinDesk in an interview. “Through Ready they can very quickly, in sub-30 days, take an existing Android or Apple game and bring it on-chain.”

VCs’ big bet on Web 3 gaming

The raise gives shades of C2X’s $25 million token sale announced in March, which was also backed by Hashed with a special emphasis on mobile GameFi adoption.

This new genre of funding comes prefaced by hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into blockchain gaming from various funds in the past year, with the Terra and Solana ecosystems being the leading destinations for investor cash flow.

Funding taken care of, the industry is still staring down some sizable obstacles on its path to mainstream success. Many crypto-native game publishers have steered clear of App Store involvement because Apple (AAPL) takes a 15% to 30% cut of all in-app purchases, which would apply to NFTs and in-game digital assets as well.

Then remains the stigma against NFT gaming integrations by the anti-crypto crowd, which was on full display during Ubisoft’s first foray into the tech last December.

Bennahum, like many in the space, sees the adoption of blockchain into mobile gaming as more of an inevitability than a gamble.

“You need to really educate people on the best practices, that’s how we solve these problems,” Bennahum said. “How do developers ultimately become owners of the blockchain piece of their game? I’ll just say the Ubisoft thing is really a separate issue, that’s the pitfall of going on-trend with something and not really fully thinking through the long-term value.”