Horizon Blockchain Games Raises $5M, Creates Own Blockchain Game

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Photo: Horizon Games / Medium

Development studio Horizon Blockchain Games has raised $5 million in new funding as it continues to work on its ‘SkyWeaver’ digital trading card game.

Development studio Horizon Blockchain Games shared last week a few “updates” it had. The company said that from January 2018, it had a mission to “pioneer a new dimension of gaming that belongs to its players and creators,” and that it grew to 24 full-time members.

The first big news is definitely raising $5 million in a round led by Initialized Capital. Among the new investors are also ConsenSys, CMT Digital and Regah Ventures, and among the old ones are Golden Ventures, DCG and Polychain.

The whole point of raising this amount is trying to bring an idea of ownership in games in life.

Horizon Blockchain Games Creating Ethereum-Powered Platform

Horizon here is working down two paths together. First, they are trying to create an Ethereum-powered platform dubbed Arcadeum for handling in-game items. That means that players (investors) will be owners of some specific instances of an item, and will be enabled to trade, sell or give this to another player. Once an item is in a player’s possession, it’s theirs to use, trade or sell as they will. Afterward, the company plans to open up this platform for other developers to build upon.

On the other path, last summer the company revealed its own game – a digital trading card game called SkyWeaver. This is imagined to be a fantasy-heavy trading card game that can maybe be compared to Blizzard’s Hearthstone. It’s free-to-play, and cross-platform across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.

Players in SkyWeaver fight each other using the cards they’ve obtained through buying, earning or trading. There are currently around 500 different cards in all, and each card comes in two different colors: silver and gold.

According to the company, the game has already 12,000 tester players and more than 90,000 players who are currently on the waiting list for access. Horizon says it has been balancing the game, making numerous UI and UX improvements based on user feedback, and have been testing their Marketplace.

Get Ready for SkyWeaver Season 0

As part of Horizon’s Private Beta, the SkyWeaver Preseason is already live, and SkyWeaver Season 0 will start later this month. There will be 500 unique cards to choose from and players will fight for top spots on the leaderboard. The first 1,000 players will earn rewards that they’ll be able to play with, trade and sell once Open Beta begins later this year.

The company said players made fan art and users have built some third-party tools like skyweaverdecks.com. The community has already organized two tournaments – a testament to SkyWeaver’s compelling gameplay.

When playing SkyWeaver’s ranked matches, players can climb up the competitive leaderboard to win a crypto-token called Weave. Weave can be traded and it can be used to make rare SkyWeaver Gold cards. Players will be able to play with these cards, build decks with them and trade or sell them on the open market. There will also be a built-in SkyWeaver marketplace where can they trade cards. However, players will be able to sell them on any other marketplace that supports our open multi-token standard, ERC-1155.

However, it’s good to know that you can mint Gold cards only through the weekly leaderboard won by the top SkyWeaver players. In order to acquire a Gold card, you’ll have to win it or buy it from another player.

You Can Earn Real Money here

The company explained it has established a number of new protocols and transaction infrastructure for Ethereum. It created an Ethereum-based blockchain stack for virtual worlds that is “non-custodial, user-friendly and easy to build on.” Every player will be able to store, manage and trade their virtual items with a provided user-friendly wallet or any other Ethereum wallet.

Let’s also mention Horizon Blockchain Games first raised $3.75 million in a seed round last year and this round is seen simply as an extension of that one.

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