NPC Labs raises $18M to bring mainstream games to Web3

NPC Labs raised an $18 million funding round led by Pantera Capital to help players discover Web3 games and help developers scale their games across numerous blockchain networks.

NPC Labs aims to accelerate the onboarding and development of gaming onchain as a core contributor to B3.fun, a discovery-focused gaming ecosystem built on Coinbase’s L2 blockchain network, Base.

Founded by a trio of founders who worked on Base’s former business and ecosystem development team, NPC Labs is poised to supercharge gaming on Coinbase’s L2 network, accelerating Base’s ambitious mission to bring a billion users onchain and restore economic freedom for game creators and enthusiasts.

The investors also include notable investors Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund. Together with an earlier round, NPC Labs has now raised a total of $21 million.

NPC Labs CEO Daryl Xu said in a statement, “In today’s hyper-competitive gaming world, developers are having a difficult time bringing their games to market. After spending years creating a game, developers are beholden to publishers to deem their games worthy of support, marketing, and distribution. And when they do, developers give up 70% of the proceeds with the risk of the publisher pulling the game if it’s not generating sufficient revenue.”

Xu added, “On the flip side, players who grind for consumables, cosmetics and badges are at risk of losing it all should publishing studios say they’re done. Our mission here is simple. We want to help build fun games for the mom in Nebraska while making it dead simple for developers to benefit from being onchain. In other words, we’re placing control back in the hands of game developers and gamers.”

Viktoriya Hying, COO of NPC Labs, talked to me about the company’s plans in an interview.

“Our core mission at the end of the day is to restore economic freedom to game developers and players,” Hying said. “We are the core contributors to B3, which is a horizontally scaled gaming ecosystem that we’re launching at the L3 level on top of Base,” Hying said. ” And we’re launching on top of Base specifically because most of the team came from Base.”

While Coinbase’s Base is definitely late, it has potential to link the wallets of Coinbase’s 100 million-plus users for wallets with features like Telegram access. That’s why more companies are turning to support Base, Hying said.

“A lot of the tech that was necessary wasn’t really there in the very early days” of blockchain gaming, Hying said. “There’s a massive opportunity here to provide these retail users with fun, simple games.”

The company is is making its own gaming ecosystem for players with a discovery system that supports games on Base.

“It’s really meant to be a simple and easy experience,” Hying said. “We just want a user to come to B3 and just start playing the game.”

When the player is some rounds into a game, they can be prompted to create a wallet so they can join the leaderboard competition. They can participate in the Web3 economy and sell their assets at some point, but that’s not the main point of playing the games.

Simplifying the complexities of Web3

While Web2 game developers understand onchain gaming’s promise, many underestimate the complexities of building a protocol with sufficient liquidity and user base, while simultaneously juggling the infrastructure demands for seamless gameplay, Hying said.

“In reality, what happens is that — once a game-specific app chain is launched — gaming developers end up siloing their users on an island, creating a fragmented experience with high barriers to entry,” said Hying. “Imagine if every published game had its own console and infrastructure. It’s impractical. Every gamer just wants one place where you can play many games. B3 is that console, and the B3 ecosystem solves these issues by running the chain and providing the infrastructure needed so that developers can focus on providing the best experience for their players.”

“We’ve worked closely with gaming developers and studios to understand where their point pain points are. Because of our chain abstraction tech, a user never has to switch networks or bridge to a chain they want to interact with,” Hying said. “The setup is unique in that way. And that’s for developers, we really want to meet them where they’re at. For devs, we want to make sure that they have the flexibility and ability to use any tools they want on B3.”

With this kind of infrastructure, there will be no need for bridges between chains, as those have proven to be a vulnerability.

“We want to make it safe and simple, with everything that comes with crypto that is a little intimidating for the retail user,” Hying said. “We want to eliminate what makes it hard to have an easy and fun experience.”

The target for the moment is web and mobile games. There’s also support for a Telegram game, Pinball, a retro pinball game from the early 2000s.

“Telegram is really ramping up. This is amazing because it it’s doing exactly what everybody wants to do, which is meeting users where they’re at and bringing them onchain in a way where users don’t even know they’re coming onchain,” Hying said. “A lot of our games at launch on Mainnet are going to be Telegram games and instances and we’re looking to simplify the flows and make it this sticky, fun experience.”

B3 was created with built-in chain abstraction, eliminating the need for users to bridge or switch networks. Currently in testnet, B3 initially supports games built on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM chains. With its proprietary and highly-scalable technology stack, B3 can easily onboard games from other chains such as Solana. What users get is a completely seamless experience — they just come in and play, Hying said.

“Given the success and traction of Base, we were naturally excited to partner with NPC Labs on their vision to elevate the Base ecosystem with B3,” said Franklin Bi, general partner at Pantera Capital, in a statement. “While at Base, Daryl and Viktoriya championed many of the best teams building in the Base ecosystem today by understanding their needs deeply, especially in gaming and consumer applications. B3’s infrastructure and tooling will bring a new dimension to Base by empowering developers to build great games and onchain experiences for consumers.”

Origins

The founding trio at NPC Labs was part of the core team on Base at Coinbase. They left at the end of March and started NPC Labs in April. They launched their testnet in June.

“Now we were base Day Zero contributors,” Hying said. “We helped launch the site. We really saw a massive opportunity in gaming, and which is why we’ve got to do this. We’ve got to grow gaming. This is going to fuel the next bull market. And we can really support Base and really grow the overall pie by launching.”

Hying said they came up with that name not because they’re focused on AI characters. Rather, the name refers to their own roles. They see themselves as enabling characters for the real heroes, the game developers who make outstanding games that will exist on NPC Labs’ platform, Hying said.

“Non-playable characters are one of the most important components of a video game,” Hying said. “They’re the ones that that help you along your path, keep the hero going with support and help. They’re the merchants, the traders. And so they help the hero succeed. And in a mission without NPCs, it wouldn’t be possible. And so that’s how we view ourselves. The gaming studios and the players are the heroes. And we’re just here to kind of shepherd them along and provide them with whatever they need to succeed.”

Currently in testnet, B3 initially supports games built on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM chains with additional chains to coming in the near future. B3 is connected with over 350 non-custodial wallet providers, leading data dashboard and data providers, on-ramps, and oracles to provide game developers the easiest way to build onchain games. Using B3, brands and NFT communities can also engage and build loyalty amongst their followers.

The head of the B3 Foundation is in Seoul, South Korea. Meanwhile, the team is spending a lot of time in Singapore, where support for blockchain games is strong.

Raising a lot of money

As for raising the funds, Hying said, “We’re incredibly grateful to our investors. The the amount that we raised is really meant to to make that we can hire in the folks that we need. We are going to need a few more engineers to make sure that everything runs smoothly and we build out the products that we want.

The company has a lot of projects to undertake and it needs to make sure it’s easy to use payment systems that everyone is familiar with. Hying said the company may have enough runway for four or five years, and it wanted to raise all of the money it needed at once to make sure it could weather bear markets.

The company is staying lean, but Hying said, “We’re making sure that we can sustain ourselves and build out the vision that we have. And so that’s what the funding is for. So we can be around when the next bear market hits. We don’t have to do any further fundraising.”

Web3 competition

As for competition, Hying said that in Web3 gaming right now, there’s enough room for everyone to win.

“It’s a collaboration over competition mindset for us with Base and B3.fun. Outside of having the games that B3 has deployed on it, we want to index all of our Base games of other chains. Because if one of us wins, we all capitalize on the influx of users and we can all win.”

Much of the greenfield for new studios is in Southeast Asia, and the company wants to get those companies to make games for B3. And it wants to make things easier for players.

“B3 is a home page. Right now, as a user, if I want to go play Base games, there’s no single surface for me to find those. I have to go to the ecosystem page and scroll through to find maybe one game. We want to change that to aggregate everything, even if it is not on our chain. “

The company will index games and make its own site easy to use and improve discoverability for games by tagging them and categorizing the games.

Players are adding wallets now to the testnet, even though the company hasn’t done any marketing yet. The company is dedicating most of its work toward launching the Mainnet.

“All of the partners that we’re talking to are in their development stage,” Hying said. “It’s going to take a while. Then once we put out really clean experience, there will be a period of getting in front of users. So hopefully, the goal with is to have 100 games within the next 12 months live on B3.”