a16z's Chris Dixon sees community builders as future of web3 gaming

Chris Dixon, founder and general partner of a16z, is excited for where web3 gaming could go over the coming year. 

"There's a whole bunch of launches within the next 12 months that I'm excited about," Dixon said during an exclusive interview on The Block's podcast The Scoop.

Dixon described how, within the past three years, most teams building web3 games were "crypto people who were game enthusiasts." But now, "top tier gaming teams" such as those in Blizzard, Riot and Valve "have decided that they want to either build traditional games that include games with NFTs, or in the more extreme case [...] build fully on-chain games" that would allow for things like "modding on steroids; who can take the game and fork it and add to it."

"The game becomes built by community instead of built by a company," he said. "And I think that's really exciting."

a16z launced a $600 million fund to build out the web3 game industry in May. The firm has since invested $23 million in the collectibles and NFT gaming platform Cryptoys, led a $56 million round in the metaverse avatar platform Ready Player Me and led a $150 million raise for the blockchain gaming startup Mythical Games. 

Web3 gaming is presently dominated by two entities, according to The Block's Data Dashboard. The first is Axie Infinity, the game that popularized the play-to-earn web3 gaming model before its economic instability spurred its decline. The next is Yuga Labs's metaverse gaming project Otherdeed, which launched in May of this year.

In addition to games, Dixon thinks of NFTs "as taking crypto out of the financial world and into the media world, which is a just a bigger world objectively. There are more people in the world who are more interested in media than in finance."

"I think a path to get us to a billion people actively engaging with crypto will probably goes through media in some way."