Crypto gaming startup Voya Games gets $5M for dinosaur-themed crafting sim

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Crypto gaming studio VOYA Games has raised $5 million in funding in a round led by 1kx and Makers Fund, with RockawayX also investing.

Angel investors Jeff Zirlin, who cofounded Sky Mavis, and Sebastien Borget, cofounder and COO of The SandBox, also participated in the round (Zirlin is also a partner at 1kx).

“Our goal is to build a token ecosystem where games are connected through a shared player economy and culture,” said VOYA Games CEO and founder Oliver Loffler.

The studio plans to use the funding to release its upcoming game, Craft World, and set up the company for its long-term goals.

Craft World is billed as a “casual resource management game” with NFT items, where humans live with dinosaurs after a meteor hit Earth. Players must farm for resources to build structures. The game is currently in its testnet phase, powered by an unspecified blockchain stack, and has seen over 100,000 downloads on Android already. VOYA says more than 240,000 players have registered so far, and it has seen over 1.1 million testnet trades between players.

“They’re building a Web3 gaming ecosystem that prioritizes openness and ownership, treating the game world more like a public good than a closed economy,” said the pseudonymous 1kx partner known as Peter Pan.

The game uses Dyno Coin, a utility token players use to buy NFT items and craft. The team says it’s not intended to be a speculative token, and it currently does not appear on crypto exchanges.

*A look at the pixelated aesthetic of Craft World.*

Craft World is expected to fully launch by the end of this year and will release for iOS, Android, and on the web as a browser game.

VOYA Games was founded in 2023 and is tied to Angry Dynomites Lab, which released two pixelated dinosaur NFT collections on Ethereum back in 2022. Loffler previously cofounded Kolibri Games, a mobile gaming studio with games like Idle Miner Tycoon: Gold & Cash, which has over 100 million downloads on Android alone. Kolibri was acquired by Ubisoft in 2020.

Mobile games have continued to make up a significant portion of the crypto gaming market. Game7 research found that mobile games made up 29% of game launches last year, with an additional 20% being Telegram games (which are also primarily mobile games).

That means about half of crypto games have a mobile-first focus, and that doesn’t include the over 26% of crypto games that are launching in a browser, which can also be mobile-first titles.

Mobile games can be cheaper and easier to build than ambitious PC titles while having more opportunities for monetization via quick in-app purchases. They also generate more revenue than PC titles overall and have more players. Plus, mobile games have the additional advantage that their audiences are more used to monetization strategies like microtransactions and paid tiers of access.

“Development costs for resource management games are comparatively low. This allows us to release updates quickly and frequently, enabling us to identify and address issues early based on player feedback,” the VOYA Games team wrote in its litepaper.

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