Summoners Arena, a Vietnamese blockchain-based roleplaying game (RPG), has closed a US $3 million seed fundraising round headed by Pantera Capital.
Participants included Coinbase Ventures, Onechain Technology, GuildFi, Merit Circle, Cosmic Guild, Coin98 Ventures, Istari Ventures, Spartan Group, Impossible Finance, Kyber Ventures, and Kyros Ventures.
Angel investors such as Krafton CEO Chang-Han Kim and Injective Labs Head of Business Development Mirza Uddin joined them.
According to a press release, the play-to-earn gaming company wants to utilise the funds to expand the Summonia world by creating and integrating new features and tools to improve user experience.
A portion of the funds will also be used to hire new employees across all departments.
Summoners Arena is funded by OneSoft, Zitga, and Sonat, three-game development firms.
Summoners Arena is a Binance Smart Chain-based idle RPG game in which players take on the role of Summoners and explore the Summonia Metaverse. In various game types, players must summon Heroes (represented by NFTs) to fight in five-vs-five combat with their fellow Summoners. They may then engage in immersive gameplay in Summoners Arena and take advantage of game features that allow them to own gaming assets while also earning digital assets.
Summoners Arena is preparing to release two official versions of the game: a non-blockchain free-to-play (F2P) version that does not allow gamers to earn digital assets, and a Play-Own-Earn (POE) version. When F2P players join the POE version, they are rewarded with free characters and features.
“By prioritising building an amazing game first and layering in crypto-economics second, their P2E model is setting a strong example for other projects in the space, learning lessons from early attempts at the play-to-earn model,” said Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital.
