Yesterday Forte announced a new partnership with Kongregate. It’s been nine months since Ripple’s Xpring announced a $100 million gaming fund to be managed by Forte. The aim was to target gaming economies with more than 50,000 active users to incorporate Ripple technology.
Kongregate is best known for its portal featuring thousands of indie games and is one of the most popular gaming sites on the web. But it also develops and publishes games and has a PC games platform. The combined community amounts to 8 million players.
Blockchain has numerous potential benefits for gaming. Perhaps the biggest is the ability to empower better ownership and frictionless trading of in-game assets. Another is to enable cryptocurrency payments or rewards for players, which is the crux of the latest deal.
Meanwhile, Forte is building developer tools and services to make it easy to incorporate blockchain into new games. One of its missions is to reward developers, players and publishers who commit to the Forte network’s health.
And it aims to help Kongregate do the same. A blog post explained: “Kongregate will be using the Forte platform to create an engaging community program that lets players earn rewards by completing unique challenges, playing games on their portal, and more.”
“These blockchain-based rewards will be fully controlled by the players, and will help strengthen Kongregate’s developer and players communities in ways not possible until now.”
But Forte isn’t the only player in the blockchain gaming sector. Recent venture capital deals include Immutable raising $15 million from Naspers and Galaxy Digital, and wallet provider Blockchain investing in games platform Enjin.
That’s apart from the numerous digital collectible deals such as CryptoKitties creator Dapper labs raising $11 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Warner Music. And EOS VC investing $2 million in collectibles firm Upland.
