Few people know that I was quite involved in the gaming industry. Early in my career, I worked at ATI Technologies, one of the world’s largest graphics card companies, before it was acquired by AMD. During those days, game developers always had the opportunity to work directly with the software team at ATI. It allowed them to leverage the greatest graphics accelerations and other features on the graphics chips so that they could focus on building the best games. 

When I first heard about Horizon Blockchain Games, I saw the value in it straight away. Virtual in-game economies are already huge as gamers are already spending $30 billion a year on virtual items. It makes sense for game developers to focus on building the best games and leverage the best gaming infrastructure such as a common platform for their virtual economies. More importantly, today most of the in-game economies are walled gardens that are completely controlled by developers. Horizon has created a full digital wallet, Arcadeum, which is a great blockchain technology infrastructure for game developers. Arcadeum makes it easy for players to buy and sell their collectibles earned in games like cryptocurrency because Arcadeum is built on the Ethereum network and will provide players with secure wallets to store their assets. It essentially turns the individual in-game economies that are locked up behind walled gardens into open economy, which greatly increases the network effects. Horizon’s first title, SkyWeaver, a trading card game, is developed to showcase this. 

Horizon just secured $3.75 million in seed funding led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital with participation from Golden Ventures, Polychain, Coinbase, Digital Currency Group, iNovia Capital, Two Small Fish Ventures and many other investors.

Look forward to seeing how Horizon leverages Blockchain to democratize in-game economies.