Abstract

Crypto… blockchain… web 3… onchain… Whilst the terms we use to describe this zeitgeist are constantly evolving the core principle has always been the same: disrupting the status quo for founders, investors and customers. Founders build cool new things with emerging technology, investors underwrite the risk because of faster liquidity and customers get to own their data and assets (opening up opportunities to make money alongside founders and investors).

Why are we in Web 3?

Our canon event came a few years ago when we had a really negative experience with a publisher. Our founding team was dabbling in crypto and we saw an alternative pathway for gaming and for our company. Where publishers let us down, we became community members in NFTs, gaming tokens and more. This gave us the oxygen to start our company. So early on, it felt like publishing was evil and onchain was good. But as we have gotten older and the markets have matured, we now realise that everything sits on a spectrum of independence.

To founders, independence means financial and creative freedom. Onchain sits right at the polar end to publishing. I like to think of publishing like serfdom and onchain unlocks the final stage of the capital markets. Somewhere in the middle sits bootstrapping, crowdfunding, private equity.

There is no such thing as publishing is evil and onchain is good or onchain is evil and publishing is good. These are all merely tools in a toolkit and it is up to a founder to decide what is the right tool for them.

Objective and credits

I know that I know nothing. - Socrates

There is no such thing as absolute truths in the world of business but it is possible to create adaptable frameworks. At ENVD we have developed a pragmatic approach to Web 3 gaming - a figurative bible if you will. Before we go off and ship products that meet our framework, it is worth noting that this bible will need to evolve and adapt to market / consumer sentiment. We are publishing this information in the spirit of decentralisation and democratisation. If you are a founder in Web 3 Gaming, pivot to the ENVD framework.

This body of work has been made possible because of notable contributions from the below gigachads. Over the years, we expect to continue expanding on this body of work.

Nas Nakarus - ENVD

Aliah Grace - ENVD

Tsotne Pavliashvili - ENVD

Tom Tirman - Memetic Digital

Francis Foster - Memetic Digital

Jeremy Parris - KingRiver Capital

Max Kauffman - MomentumX

Ryan Wiancko - Ironbelly Studios

Kiefer Zang - Win Win

Nick Metzler - Win Win

Jordan Feinstein - ReplyCorp

The Bible

ThIs Bible / Framework / Playbook / is based on our unique background and experience in gaming. We are one of the most crypto-native, traditional gaming teams. We are also not boomers - this is very important because decentralisation and democratisation matters to our generation, they are not marketing buzzwords to appease a VC. With a huge community to protect in Web 2, we have always taken a pragmatic approach to finding a pathway to Web 3 for our company.

In this article, we will explore a few different pathways that are suitable frameworks in 2025. What all of these pathways have in common is the fundraising and marketing methodologies. The superpower of doing shit onchain is that it is an incredible way to organise people and capital - it is the most efficient way to put community on the captable.

Fundraising instruments include fungible tokens, NFTs and nodes. The instruments have different applications depending on what pathway founders are taking their projects. For example, is there a bonding curve, is there a fair launch, will you do a presale?

Web 3 completely changes the game for marketing by shifting data control from 3rd parties to the customer. In recent years there has been a crackdown on IDFA (identifier for advertisers) with GDPR which has been enforced by platforms like Apple. Building onchain means your customers own their identity and data via blockchain wallets deciding what they share. This is super important in gaming because onchain attribution from those Web 3 wallets can be used to build profiles on all of your users. Companies like Helika and Slise are playing a pivotal role in this economy to support companies to target users.

With all of this being said, fundraising and marketing are an underestimated component for every pathway that you take in Web 3. There is no one glove fits all approach to achieving success. If you try to copy the ENVD playbook bar for bar, although it might work for us, it will probably fail for you. As we already mentioned above, this is an adaptable framework - you will need to add your own sauce to make it work.

In 2025 this is what the landscape for opportunities in Web 3 Gaming looks like. At ENVD, we are actively pursuing opportunities in Consumer, Publishing and AI SaaS.

Consumer

Nick Metzler has done a great job at summarising how we also feel about consumer plays in Web 3.

There are only two paths for consumer plays. You left-curve it with crypto-native, degen games. Or you right-curve it with proper video games with blockchain infra on the backend.

Case studies:

The market is being flooded with left-curve games because they have been faster to ship and easy to onboard people to - remeber degens do not read, they ape. Some of the best left-curve games we haveve played recently are Onchain Heroes, Gigaverse, Boinkers, Rektech. The overall TAM for these games is low by Web 2 standards but we know from Helika the ARPU for these games can be crazy.

Games that sit on the right side of the curve are actual video games where the aim is to abstract onchain interface away from the end user. These games range from MMOs like Eve through to shooters like Off The Grid. There are not many right curve games on the market right now. We are still waiting for more titles to drop like Maplestory or The Bornless. As Nick Metzler puts it, these are:

Games that, for all intents and purposes, resemble today’s Free-to-Play (F2P) titles. They’ll have Live Ops (eventually automated and personalized with AI), battle passes, lootboxes, DLC, cosmetics, and the like. Blockchain will serve as a backend utility: a global payments and settlement layer, a transparent data storage system for proving fairness when needed, and a game-themed UI to make all crypto elements invisible to the player. To the average player, these games won’t feel like blockchain games at all. They’ll just be video games.

As much as we want to see Web 3 Gaming mature and right-curve games take centre stage the likelihood is left-curve games will always have an audience. It is the same reason why dog coins can easily outperform utility coins. If you are a founder balls-deep into development, running out of runway, have not found PMF but have established a crypto-native community / it would be possible to do it, I would suggest pivot to left-curve. VCs are not coming to save your ass. Right-curving gets you a proper game but to be honest the last thing you want is to become a broke, zombie company. Left-curving in 2025 is your cyanide pill.

If I had to personally weigh in, I would wager the TAM for left-curving will always be bigger than right-curving. I see a lot of parallels to traditional gaming market where indie is outperforming AAA. That is not to say there is not money to be made or success to be found right-curving, my general thoughts are that the most successful product on the right-curve will be IPs that have established PMF before they come on chain. The purpose of coming onchain for the best right-curvers will be to extend the shelf life of an existing IP (Maplestory or EVE) or to build something new for a very clear target audience (Off The Grid).

Right-curve opportunities at ENVD

Our flagship IP is of course Vigilancer. We do not see a left-curve future for Vigilancer but we do see a right-curve future. We believe this looks like The Bounty Network - an onchain dark net for bounty hunters.

The business model we envision is that blockchain technology can be used to bring second life to a successful traditional game. Traditional game developers have a 2D mindset. They think I have just made a game, in the future I can port it and I might do a sequel. If we were not in Web 3, that is exactly what we would do with Vigilancer: ship Psyko and move on to the next game.

But we are in Web 3 so as an example, how we see Psyko working with The Bounty Network is after we have rinsed it in the traditional market we can turn it into a F2P, live-service game called Psyko +. That onchain version of Psyko could be distributed exclusively on mobile where there is a huge TAM for these kind of games + Apple / Google have very clear regulation around onchain games vs Steam. We know how these right-curve games will work, Nick Metzler has done a great job describing it (see above).

The Bounty Network would basically be our appchain for Vigilancers we can explore novel ways to build a loyalty system for our gamers. Some of the ideas we have been toying with are “achieve-2-earn” - rewarding gamers for their achievements by tokenising them into XP, opening up opportunities to trade that for merch or Steam Gift Cards. This is kind of like how Nintendo’s web shop works.

Left-curve opportunities at ENVD

Our personal hypothesis is that left-curve will always have a bigger TAM than right-curve, although the size of right-curve games will be bigger on an individual basis - just like indie vs AAA in the traditional gaming market.

We found ourselves in a unique situation with Vigilancer where we had a community before we had a product so it afforded us a few years to R&D with indie traditional games and left-curve games. This has been a very informative experience for us because as the saying goes the best way to predict the future is to build it. It has also been super useful for team and corporate development.

Below is the litepaper for a shelved left-curve zombie survival project we were working on. A lot of the knowledge we are writing about in this article has been informed by this project.

We spent the better part of last year experimenting left-curve with this IP. What we discovered is that with right-curve experiences usually because of the scale you can afford to not ship but with left-curve games, you either ship or die. Left-curve games are very trendy. One day it is all about Telegram, the next day there is a new meta.

One of the most profound things we discovered about left-curve games is that they will nearly ALWAYS get botted, especially if it is fully onchain. Below is an example of a user simulating an onchain RPG called Gigaverse. Our design philosophy at ENVD for left-curve games is to embrace bots.

We have coined a term to describe this design philosophy gaimbling. If you claim your game is right-curve and you are using buzzwords like P2E etc, pivot to left-curve - you will miserably fail in the right-curve market. If you are building in left-curve, gaimbling is the future. Your users are degens - they want outsized returns. Embrace AI and make it easy for them to gamble. Our personal belief is that you should incorporate idle sim into your design philosophy for your left-curve game because if you do not, the users will find a way. And that is an uphill battle you do not want to fight.

Fucking around with ZMB last year has served its purpose because it give us the data and validation we needed to return back to Vigilancer but this time on a pathway to The Bounty Network. Our team is always keeping our mind open towards left-curve opportunities because they are the perfect way to get your hands dirty and really understand what the future of onchain x gaming will look like. The shelf lives for these kind of games can be very short but we believe left-curve games are always worth exploring on our journey fundraising and marketing journey to bigger, like a right-curve game. IYKYK. Our endgame is growing Vigilancer to a billion dollar IP after all. Although we likely will not ship a left-curve game inside the Vigilancer IP, as a company we will explore the opportunity to ship a left-curve experience to further validate our design philosophy for “gaimbling”. This will likely be a stealth launched game.

Publishing

Publishing a game means to take a financial stake in a game in return for investments and/or services. This can be a super lucrative business model in traditional gaming, especially for indie games which are dominating marketplaces like Steam vs AA or AAA.

The problem with traditional publishing business model is capital formation and they are also stuck a decade behind when it comes to viral marketing / growth hacking.

This is a problem Web 3 can solve. And we have a few case studies that offer an effective means to form capital and virally market traditional games on Steam.

Case Study: Daos.Fun

At ENVD, we have never seen anything quite as sophisticated as daos.fun for capital formation. Our company has a long history of experimenting with DAOs. We played around with investment clubs on Syndicate.io (before they pivoted), we also sought permission to use the OrigamiOS (OrangeDAO).

The problem with investment clubs that Baoskee solved with daos.fun is using fungible tokens instead of NFTs for capital formation. When I first started shilling daos.fun to my Ethereum DAO frens, I told them to go to do Daos.Fun because it was basically Syndicate x Pump Fun.

Case Study: Questing

Questing is nothing new in Web 3. Gleam has existed for over a decade and used in a similar capacity for viral marketing by companies and content creators. There is not a lot differentiating Gleam and something like Mon Protocol or Notcoin, besides the fact that you get more data capture with the latter.

The opportunity in Web 3 is that anyone can create their own questing platform instead of having to rely on a middleman. The opportunity that this presents is you can monetise that traffic. Imagine having an army of users who will offer you engagement in return for rewards. Today social capital is arguably more important than financial capital - you can have a direct relationship with your community. In Web 2, this might be limited to having your users signed up to your mailing list. In Web 3, if you can build a social graph of your users under the umbrella of a decentralised identity like a blockchain wallet this could be a gold mine for a game publisher.

Case Study: Guilds

Before they were Virtuals, Beam, Zentry and Sovrun they were PathDAO, Merit Circle, GuildFi and BreederDAO. Guilds were basically game publishers with a left-curve business model. Whilst the above companies have moved away from being guilds, YGG has shown how lucrative combining capital formation with questing can be. YGG’s GAP has been proven to be an effective funnel for players into its portfolio games like Pixels. A similar model could easily be reflected with a traditional publisher targeting indie games.

Opportunity for ENVD

We have been collecting a lot of data around the potential to fund indie games with 10-25k checks that are 3-6 months out from a launch on Steam. There will be a follow up to this article with an official announcement on what we are cooking with Win Win for a launch on daos.fun.

The business model will be to loan money to fund the development of games that fit this investment thesis and take a % of revenue share - with much better terms than traditional publishers. Our edge? Virally market games using ReplyGames on X, powered by ReplyCorp - effectively gamified quests. There could be an opportunity to grow this into a Gleam-like questing platform. Observing the social media strategy of publishers like Raw Fury (see TikTok), social capital is everything in this business model. If we can establish an audience, we can very easily monetise that traffic similar to Mon Protocol or Notcoin without having to invest into games - although skin in the game is always very important.

AI SaaS

With tools like v0, Cursor and more it is very possible to vibe code your way to a revenue-generating SaaS over a weekend. As game development becomes more and more accessible the opportunity to create SaaS products and sell them to game developers is becoming a blue ocean. Large enterprises should be very scared of indie hackers who can easily chip away at their revenue with targeted micro SaaS.

Below are some areas that are ripe for disruption:

• Game Analytics & BI

• Multiplayer & Backend

• Cloud Gaming & Hosting

• Live Ops & Monetisation

• Game AI & NPCs

• Game Asset & Dev Tools

• User Acquisition & Community

Case Study: AI Agents

The following is a unique opportunity that might die within the next year but it is worthwhile exploring: tokenised AI Agents for SaaS businesses. Frameworks like GAME by Virtual enable very lean marketing and customer service via an agent on X. There are a plethora of frameworks out there but how many of them besides Virtuals have cut a deal with X to get massive API access? What has become very apparent is that investors will bid AI Agent tokens that have a revenue-generating protocol behind them. AI Agents without revenue generating protocols backing them are simply memecoins.

With a plethora of AI Agent launchpads, this would be an incredible opportunity to miss out on. We believe the most exciting platform is Virtuals who recently announced a venture arm and are also supported by Vader’s Early Agent Offerings. The ultimate flywheel we see is a tokenised AI Agent and revenue-generating protocol which buys back tokens. It is possible to go the extra mile and offer revenue sharing with token holders subject to legal consideration. NFA lol.

Opportunity for ENVD

To complement our indie game publishing activities, we have begun development of tooling in the game analytics field.

My cofounder, Nas, is also part of the founding team Gamalytics.com. Gamalytics turns over thousands in revenue per month but lacks an intuitive UI to gather data and get insights for game ideas. This is something we know Gamalytic customers, many of whom are game developers want to see.

This product would be something we want to keep super lean so having an AI Agent present on X for marketing and customer service would be very important. The AI Agent could also produce thought leadership / using deep reasoning from an LLM to contextualise the data we have access to.

DePIN

DePIN is not a pathway ENVD has a personal interest in at the time of publishing but it is a blue ocean. DePIN is the use of token rewards to encourage users to contribute hardware, services, or data for a computing network. Why has DePIN made the list? Enterprises offering similar services in Web 2 to the case studies below own the hardware and the software. The monopoly on the backend infrastructure means they have uncontested market share.

Although we have no interest in DePIN currently we are excited about Beamable, Full Metal and Shaga. We expect to see more DePIN gaming companies pop up in the next year.

Using Akash Network as an example of an early entrant into the DePIN space, it is understood that their crowdsourced network offers lower costs compared to major cloud service providers. This suggests that if the following case studies can achieve scale, they can offer significant cost benefits compared to their Web 2 counterparts.

Beamable

While PlayFab has long been a popular backend solution for live game services, Beamable offers a similar suite of LiveOps and backend tools—but with additional support for onchain games

In other words, if you are interested in a platform that handles traditional gaming backend needs (like multiplayer, leaderboards, and LiveOps) while also offering seamless Web3 capabilities (such as tokenization and NFT integration), Beamable is a viable alternative to PlayFab. It even provides migration paths for developers coming from PlayFab.

Beamable's DePIN flips the script on something like PlayFab. Instead of using only traditional cloud servers like Azure, it spreads the game’s backend services across a network of independent computers (called nodes). These nodes are run by different people or organisations, making the system more resilient and like Akash Network should hypothetically make it more cost-efficient.

Full Metal

Our design philosophy for left-curve consumer gaming plays is gaimbling. The blockchain can easily serve the “gambling” experience for degens but in order to realise the potential for gaimbling, games need a reliable AI partner. This is where Full Metal comes in.

The Full Metal SDK will equip game developers with smart contract agents that use NRN technology for machine learning. One of the problems we have identified at ENVD is in order for gaimbling to become a thing, we need sustainable compute infrastructure for the agents.

The Full Metal SDK offers a really flexible model where you can cover the costs with your own hosted LLM or plug into their decentralised network to access cheap compute for your agents. The team has also taken a novel approach using a Pump.Fun-launched token as the utility token for this platform. At the time of writing $BNTY sits at around $2-3m MCAP - an absolute steal if our design philosophy for gaimbling plays out across the industry. We see a world where every left-curve game could be set to integrate the Full Metal SDK.

Shaga

Honestly, cloud gaming is a tough business to crack. When I explained what Shaga is to my Web 2 friends they were sceptical.

Case Study: Google

Google miserably failed with its Stadia but Google also miserably fails at 90% of the new ventures they launch - ahem, cough cough. Google was betting if they could undercut PlayStation, Xbox and computers on the hardware cost they could attract gamers over to the Stadia. Man were they wrong. Why would I spend $70 for a AAA game on the Stadia when I can buy the exact same game on my PlayStation for the same price - my friends are there, my trophies are there and I can play offline lol.

Case Study: Xsolla

Whilst Google’s cloud gaming venture was a poor B2C play, Xsolla has found market-fit as a B2B play offering white-labelled services to largely computer-based indie games and localised payment solutions. Google failed because the kind of games they were offering were in direct competition to what I could already get on my PlayStation, for example. Xsolla’s niche is computer-based indie games. It is much easier to get a gamer to switch from a software like Steam to another software like a launcher / browser than it is to get them to purchase completely new hardware.

Cloud gaming is a a two-sided marketplace. Andrew Chen (a16z) draws from his days at Uber in The Cold Start Problem: it is a chicken and egg situation but you need to solve the supply-side first. Xsolla’s edge was payment solutions. As a game developer, you get charged 30% by Steam or 5% by Xsolla - this includes 700+ payment currencies, chargebacks and more. Why do you think indies love Xsolla?

Whilst the cloud gaming offering is a small part in their business it shows in order to win you need an edge.

Cloud gaming sounds borderline bearish, so why have I included Shaga in this list? Three reasons:

1. It shows people want to invest in infra even if it risks being vapourware

   If you are building infra, this is a sign to have a DePIN angle. Investors will underwrite DePIN.

2. Shaga has an edge to publish indie games

   No matter what Shaga will have to solve the supply-side problem and they need a niche. Although it has the TAM, I do not think left-curve games would be suitable; these are typically low-latency, web-based experiences already. At the moment, Epic Games seems to be the leader for right-curve game discovery and the TAM is pretty small. Although in the coming years, I do expect the market for right-curve games to expand. Can Shaga survive long enough to see those days?
   
   If you read our publishing chapter above, you will understand why I think Shaga could have an edge incorporating publishing for small indie games into their business model. Shaga can fund indie games to be on Steam, collect revenue but also require distribution on its own platform as part of the terms. By onboarding games that might not otherwise get funded, they could solve the supply side.

3. “Web 3 Steam”

   There is currently no de facto platform for crypto-native gamers. We have seen multiple companies fail in this area because they have no edge. There is a distinct reason I, as a right-curve game, would want to be distributed on Shaga vs something like Elixir. Elixir offers me no edge. Whereas if cloud gaming, and it is a pretty big IF, cloud gaming has a future Shaga could be well-positioned to become the de facto platform for crypto-native games.
   
   I have also found historically teams that end up solving the big problems in an industry often start with the smallest. In Shaga’s case, the target audience for crypto-native games are people who might not have the best hardware, but they are increasingly getting better access to internet services.
   
   A big part of accidentally becoming the “Web 3 Steam” will require a focus on the social side of the experience on Shaga. Will closely keep an eye on their growth.

Conclusion

This article serves two purposes:

1. Give some context to our investors and partners on what we are up to

2. Influence founders, investors and gamers with what the future of Web 3 Gaming looks like to us. After all the best way to predict the future is to build it.

If you skipped right down to the bottom, the tl;dr is

1. We are launching a publishing business onchain with daos.fun

2. We are open to left-curve games but it is not a significant focus for us but it would be cool to validate our design philosophy for gaimbling. TBD

3. Our end game in Web 3 is a right-curve consumer play. We would like to explore this with Psyko after we have rinsed it in the traditional markets as part of The Bounty Network. TBD

4. To complement our publishing business, we are exploring an AI SaaS business. TBD

5. DePIN is not for us but if you are building something in DePIN, we would love to chat and explore synergies. We are bullish on this category.