Gigi Levy Weiss Eyeing NFT Gaming With His $450M NFX Fund
Israeli investor Gigi Levy Weiss now has a fresh $450 million NFX fund to play with and the odds are good he'll be investing in gaming enterprises.
Levy has invested in Plarium, Playtika, Moon Active, Beach Bum, AI Dungeon, and Papaya Gaming.
Dean Takahashi of Game Beat had a chance to sit down with Levy to discuss his future plans.
"We’ve been looking at the field of crypto gaming, play-to-earn, NFT gaming and so on," he tells Takahashi. "Our thesis is that we’re in the first stage of this. We’re seeing the crypto people coming in and trying to make games. But when we analyze this, the biggest issue is that these are really bad games. You can come in to this play-to-earn and try to make money and that’s perfectly fine. But if you really want to play a game, it doesn’t work.
"For us, the concept is that the minute people understand they can make money in the game, it’ll all collapse immediately, because there’s no game excitement keeping them in the game. On the other hand, we do think that the games built in the many studios we’ve been involved with–basically they had NFT-like elements in them already for years. You could buy skins and guns and things like that. You could trade them and sell them.
"What we’re trying to see is how we can attract game founders rather than crypto founders. This isn’t to say we have anything against crypto founders. But how can we attract game founders into taking the good things from NFT gaming and play-to-earn — the mechanisms that can make a good game even better — and develop the best new games that take the principles in games like Axie Infinity and implement them alongside the excitement of a truly great game. This is our big thesis for the new fund."
