Bringing 200M gamers onchain? This studio might pull it off...
GAMING CHRONICLES 131
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TLDR :
What’s the SUP Foundation?
YGG Play announces its first publishing partner
Aria secures $5M in funding
🗞️ NEWS
WHAT’S THE SUP FOUNDATION?
Just yesterday, the SUP Foundation came out of stealth. The initiative behind SuperGaming (SG) aims to bring 200M+ of its lifetime players onchain, launching this fall
In February, SG announced it’s building its own GameChain in partnership with B3. B3 is building “the open app layer3 on Base”, an onchain infrastructure play, built for gaming
The Gamechain will allow them to bring their players onchain at scale. Players will be able to own and trade their in-game assets
SG is a completely self-published studio, focused on the Indian market, that publishes games across several genres. Its hit games include (by downloads):
Maskgun (100M+), Silly Royale (20M+), Tower Conquest (25M+), Battle Stars (10M+), and Indus (8M+)
The studio raised an estimated ~$6.8M across multiple rounds, and makes an estimated of $40M in annual revenue, with around 150-200 employees
SG was founded by Roby John, a Y-Combinator alum W12 (Y-Combinator directory). Before SG, he had a company named “Tap to Learn”, a set of apps focused on education through interactivity and fun
Dith and Haitzu will be the lead advisors to bring SG’s effort onchain. And with this, the two also announced Pylon Capital, a new advisory and investing firm focused on GTM and growth. Starting with their flagship partners, Mythical Games and the SUP Foundation
As part of their launch into crypto, they’re releasing a Lotus Vault collection, scheduled to release somewhere in the next 2 weeks
Lastly, we’ve seen a couple of large mobile gaming studios try crypto, dabble a bit, and dip (e.g., Voodoo and Homa Games). Both of these studios failed to leave behind anything meaningful in crypto, so it certainly means being successful in Web2 doesn’t automatically translate to Web3 success
However, with lead advisory like this, I have a lot more confidence that the SUP Foundation will make the right decisions in their GTM
YGG PLAY ANNOUNCES FIRST PUBLISHING PARTNER
Last Thursday, YGG Play announced Gigaverse as the first third-party game partner. This adds a 2nd game to the “casual degen” publisher’s library
The partnership kicked off with a cross-game integration, wherein LOL Land released a Gigaverse-themed board and Gigaverse released LOL Land-themed in-game skins
So far, the activation seems rather successful, at least on LOL Land’s side, as the team just reported a daily revenue of $176K (that’s $640M in decennial revenue)
I’d also be curious what the game’s RORS is. This Dune Dashboard tells us almost 10M $YGG tokens have been transferred out so far
Additionally, through the success of LOL Land, YGG bought back $518K (135 ETH) in $YGG tokens over 36 hours, which started on July 31st
YGG announced YGG Play back in May this year, with a focus on “lighthearted, addictive games that embrace the chaos and culture of crypto degeneracy”
In the Medium article, YGG Play says it’s positioning itself as the publisher of “the best streamable, social-first experiences in Web3 gaming”
Interesting to see how streaming has taken more of a prominent role in crypto (gaming) with the come-up of Abstract, and various other platforms with streaming integrations, like Pump Fun and Sidekick
As a result, clips have become a more important part of distribution
Furthermore, the article speaks of how Gigaverse is entirely self-funded, with no marketing spend and KOL campaigns, and instead adopted an internal creator program
When it comes to organic community building, I believe it’s essential. You can’t buy credibility through KOL deals alone. Gigaverse earned its community’s trust through the GL:HFers collection and Dith, not marketing spend
It’s a model that aligns closely with YGG Play’s ethos of building communities authentically from the ground up
YGG Play’s publishing model will enforce a smart-contract-enforceable revenue share between the publisher and the game
Lastly, they also allocated 50M $YGG (worth ~$7.5M) to an ecosystem pool under the leadership of a new onchain guild. The funds will be subdivided under multiple guilds, which are tasked with exploring yield-generating strategies
The aim of this initiative is “to generate returns on treasury assets to strengthen YGG’s operational sustainability, token economics, and support YGG-led ecosystem initiatives over time”
ARIA SECURES $5M IN FUNDING
Last week, Aria announced it secured $5M in funding in a round led by Folius Ventures, Spartan, the Beam Foundation, and followed by Animoca and Galaxy Interactive
This round seems to follow their seed round (amount undisclosed) announced in May 2024, in which we saw a similar set of backers. Additionally, the game was part of TOP’s Telegram growth accelerator (Jan 2025)
Aria is an anime-RPG (gacha game) that launched on Twitter in 2024 and is a rebrand of the Web2 game Manasis Refrain (MR). 3 years ago (in June 2022), MR announced the end of its service, after 8 months since its official launch in Japan (and China).
Of course, this wasn’t well received by the Redditors
No official statement was made on why it was shut down, but it seems they might have had problems with the IP
Originally, the game was also co-published by Tencent, which presented the game at TGS2021. Plus, its Pitchbook page claims (emphasizing “claims”) Riot Games was an original investor
As part of the game's venture into crypto, the game has launched various initiatives:
They launched 3 Telegram games, and onboarded “3M+ casual gamers”
Including campaigns with Gate.io, Mantle, and OKX
They launched an NFT collection, which achieved over 1M mints
And when it comes to the main game, they have released a couple of closed beta tests
Lastly, they partnered with Smart AI to develop ARIA Character AI Agents
On another note, I remember that Roxi announced he was appointed the CMO of Aria (somewhere last year). However, after certain shenanigans, I think he might have lost his role, or he simply “retired” as his profile now says
Overall, Aria looks like a quality anime RPG, but the reason why it failed in the first place remains vague. Whether the game can succeed in crypto instead remains to be seen…
FLASH NEWS
Risk to earn is coming to Fishing Frenzy through a new diving mini-game
Sparkball is financially struggling after its investment deal fell through
Ronin introduced the Ronin Forge Innovation grant: a $300K fund for builders
Oh Baby Games is releasing a new roguelike deck-builder called Pawker
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