US game developer and blockchain company SuperDuperSecretCo. has raised more than $1 million towards remaking traditional games like chess with a modern twist: this chess game will be a ten-player battle royale…
The pre-seed funding round was oversubscribed with investors including Polygon, Round 13 Digital Asset Fund, Merit Circle, Solana, Overwolf, Big Brain Holdings and LD Capital. Sebastian Borget, Gabi Dijon and Christian Mane also invested.
Chess for the masses
The chess-based battle royale game, aptly named Royal Chess, will be the first of many planned games for the meta-game platform acrosss multiple platforms including mobile later this year, targetting casual and midcore audiences.
As reported by GamesBeat, this pre-seed round makes co-founder and CEO Jazlyn O’Reilly the first Latina founder in the games industry to have raised $1 million in venture capital funding.
“It’s astonishing that the number of funded female and minority founders in the gaming space is still so small in 2023, especially considering how diverse the consumers of games are; 48 percent of gamers identify as female, for example,” she noted.
“I can only hope that news like this can help encourage others who don’t as often see people like themselves represented in this space, to take the leap and build companies of their own, and to not be afraid to pursue funding to achieve their vision.”
O’Reilly added that SuperDuperSecretCo. is a games company first and foremost, feeling “there’s too much focus on Web3”. All games will be dual economy, meaning interaction with Web3 elements is going to be optional.
“We are focused on the ‘time-to-fun’ being as minimal as possible; both traditional and Web3 players of Royale Chess and all our games will be able to jump in without having to connect a wallet or even know what an NFT is,” O’Reilly said.
London-based Mystic Games recently secured $1.3 million from its seed round with plans to use the funds to develop mobile game Call of the VoYd.