Xsolla is a leading international payment company providing game developers and publishers with payment, billing, distribution and marketing tools. The company was founded in 2005 in Russia. The main office of Xsolla is located in Los Angeles, the company also has representative offices in Perm and Seoul. Among Xsolla partners: Steam, Twitch.tv, Epic Games, Gaijin, Xiaomi, Neople, Ubisoft, PUBG Corporation, etc.
2021 was a record year for investment in the gaming industry, with game deals exceeding $85 billion across 1159 announced or closed deals. This year the record was broken, with the total volume of investment transactions in the first six months of 2022 alone amounting to more than $107 billion.
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According to the coufander and CRO InfiniGods Owen O'Donoghue, it's still hard for indie games to come into the light and get the support they need in an already competitive market.
Why do investors need a cohesive team?
In the mobile gaming industry, VCs want to see more progress, including MVPs, user engagement, proven monetization, potential for scaling, and more. However, the strength of the development team is becoming more and more important to the advancement of the company.
Investors are primarily looking for experience in the industry, focusing on whether they have been able to scale the business, especially if it is a gaming company and their success in hiring teams in the past. They want to know that the team members were not only able to successfully release the product, but also kept up to date with updates, bug fixes, player feedback. Investors expect the game and business plan to change over time, especially in Web3, with the ability to invest in the right team to ride this wave. While the idea is still paramount, investors are looking closely at the team's ability to change based on changes in the market or as new metrics emerge after the game launches.
Why is the team a key factor for Web3 investors?
Blockchain is gaining momentum, investors regularly invest in crypto games. In Q1 2022 alone, crypto gaming companies invested $2,5 billion, and analysts predict that this figure could grow to $10 billion by the end of the year. Game developers regularly close rounds worth more than $3 million, based on their ambitious plans not only to create a game, but also to create a platform or an innovative cycle of tokenomics.
Investors keep pouring money into infrastructure; for example, third web, which provides NFT as a service, recently raised $24 million in a third round, with Shopify. VCs are starting to slowly move away from pay-to-earn games focused primarily on the tokenomics cycle, as many of the pay-to-earn cycles they have invested in have proven difficult to scale.
Even in Web3, investors are going back to basics. They are not interested in complex pay-to-earn tokenomics models, but they want to see the team experience and understanding of the genre that the developer is striving for.
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