Voodoo bets on play-to-earn crypto mobile games

French startup Voodoo has announced that it plans to make a significant investment in blockchain-powered mobile games. The company estimates that it represents a $200 million investment over the coming years.

2021 has been an important year for crypto gaming, with Axie Infinity popularizing the play-to-earn model. Some companies, such as Mythical Games, raised massive funding rounds and are working on mainstream crypto games.

Tangentially, fantasy sports NFT games could be considered as crypto games. On this front, Sorare raised a $680 million Series B round while Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, raised $250 million to go further in the NFT space.

Voodoo is currently best known for its hyper-casual games, with 5 billion downloads and 300 million monthly active users. Voodoo games include Helix Jump, Crowd City, Hole.io and Paper.io 2.

The company has its own studios but also acts as a publisher for third-party game studios. Voodoo’s secret sauce is its tech stack to optimize distribution, average revenue per user and constant iteration.

And the mobile game expert doesn’t want to stand still when it comes to crypto games. Voodoo already has 10 internal studios working on blockchain-powered games. Next year, it plans to open another 20 studios focused on crypto games.

In 2021, Voodoo acquired eight companies. So it sounds like new crypto game studios could come from acquisitions.

“There are few occasions in life when we experience a technological breakthrough that transforms industries. Blockchain will especially disrupt gaming, as players are already used to buying digital assets. This technology will give players true ownership of their digital assets, creating deeper interactions between players — collecting, trading, selling in game digital currencies and game assets — which will increase fun and engagement. This will also enable players to make a profit from their assets, opening up a new “play-and-earn” model,” Voodoo CEO Alex Yazdi said in a statement.

So you can expect tradable NFTs in upcoming Voodoo games. They could have a financial value outside of the games as users could be able to buy and sell them on online marketplaces.

In addition to Voodoo’s existing stack, the company plans to work on a reusable blockchain stack to manage tokens, create NFTs, create wallet addresses and integrate with layer 1 blockchains (like Ethereum) and layer 2 solutions to reduce transaction costs.