Taking Forte, Enjin, and Roco Finance as examples, a brief analysis of the characteristics of different types of GameFi

Original Title: "An Overview of GameFi Infrastructure Layer Projects"
Original Author: Jiawei (Twitter: @Elegy4TheArctic)

This article provides a brief introduction to the top three projects, Forte, Enjin, and Roco Finance, based on Messari's classification of GameFi Layer 1 in "Explain it Like I'm 5: GameFi."

(The latter three are game studios, with Sky Mavis being the development team of Axie Infinity; Dacoco developed Alien Worlds based on the WAX chain; Dapper is known for developing CryptoKitties, NBA Top Shot, and the NFT public chain Flow.)

Forte

Forte raised over $900 million in two funding rounds in 2021. Investors include giants from the crypto world such as a16z, Solana Ventures, Polygon Studios, Cosmos, and Animoca Brands, as well as traditional gaming/media publishers like Sea Capital, Big Bets, Overwolf, Playstudios, zVentures, and Warner Music Group.

Forte is a blockchain gaming platform that supports multi-chain interoperability, aiming to establish a comprehensive set of technologies, tools, and services for developers, communities, and players. This covers the entire lifecycle, including market making, compliance, tool development, player services, game development, and economic model design, to eliminate any barriers to the integration of blockchain technology with gaming.

By adopting Forte's complete solution, developers do not need to become experts in economics, blockchain technology, and compliance, allowing them to focus on enhancing player experience.

Forte also provides funding for developers and game creators, notably in the form of pure grants that do not require equity in return.

Forte is currently in a closed beta phase, open only to partners, and has not disclosed further details.

As seen in the image above, Forte introduces in-game DeFi and NFTs to create new revenue streams for existing games and establish and integrate scalable token economies. It also offers market and trading services, a simplified digital asset wallet experience, and built-in compliance components (including AML and KYC).

In terms of team background, Forte was founded in 2019 by Kevin Chou and Josh Williams.

Kevin was the former CEO of mobile game publisher Kabam, which had over 1,000 employees and saw its annual revenue grow from $300,000 to $400 million under his leadership, ultimately selling for $1 billion to Netmarble and FoxNext Games. He also co-founded the well-known esports club Gen.G, which includes multiple game divisions such as League of Legends and Overwatch.

Currently, Forte has over 200 employees and 40+ game development partners, along with more than 15 million partner gamers. Employees come from industry companies like Unity, ngmoco, Riot Games, Electronic Arts, Sony, and Rockstar Games. By the end of 2020, over 20 game projects had integrated into Forte, covering various game types including competitive, role-playing, simulation, strategy, and sports.

Enjin

As an established NFT platform, Enjin offers components such as wallets, development platforms, marketplaces, and scaling solutions like JumpNet, providing universal SDKs, APIs, and development tools, along with comprehensive developer documentation, and achieving interoperability at the tool layer, thus building a relatively complete ecosystem and partnership network.

The development platform provides APIs and SDK integrations for token distribution, wallet linking, and in-app trading, with 27,000 projects currently integrated into Enjin's development platform. Games using the Enjin platform include 9Lives Arena, Lost Relics, Age of Rust, and Forest Knight, among others.

In addition, Enjin has launched the Polkadot-based NFT public chain Efinity.

Efinity has made targeted optimizations for NFT interoperability and trading experience in its design. One important feature is that all tokens compliant with ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 can be imported into Efinity via cross-chain bridges, enabling cross-chain flow of NFTs. It successfully secured the 6th parachain slot on Polkadot at the end of December 2021.

On the data side, Efinity can achieve a block time of 6 seconds, 20 million NFT mintings per second, and 120 million NFT mintings/transfers per block.

In terms of financing, Efinity completed a $18.9 million private placement round in March 2021, led by Crypto.com Capital, DFG Group, and Hashed.

For ecosystem development, Enjin announced the establishment of a $100 million Efinity Metaverse Fund in November of the same year, aimed at supporting metaverse projects, games, infrastructure projects, NFTs, and other pioneering projects on Enjin and Efinity.

Roco Finance

Roco is a decentralized GameFi platform on Avalanche, aimed at providing blockchain services for game developers, content creators, and player communities.

Roco's main services include:

Providing NFT services for managing, distributing, and trading virtual items; creating staking and farming pools; offering ID0/IG0 platforms; and providing open-source SDKs, APIs, game add-ons, virtual item management applications, and payment system platform services.

In September 2021, Roco Finance announced the completion of $3.6 million in funding from seed and private rounds, with investors including Alameda Research, Huobi Capital, Avalaunch, and X21 Digital.

Summary

• The game economic model design and compliance services provided by Forte seem more like a service for the migration of traditional games to GameFi or the integration of existing games into GameFi. Moreover, in this process, it achieves "Blockchain Agnostic" for developers and players, meaning a single platform supports multiple chains, with seamless switching between them.

• Founded in 2009, Enjin has a deep accumulation in the gaming field and ventured into the blockchain space in 2017, becoming a major proponent of the ERC-1155 standard.

Its recently launched Efinity aims to become a cross-chain NFT "highway." Currently, Efinity is still under development, reportedly capable of processing 120 million tokens in a single transaction. However, as another NFT public chain, Efinity faces strong competitors like Flow and ImmutableX, and whether it can deliver good games remains to be seen.

• In comparison, Roco's offerings such as staking, farming, and ID0/IG0 have relatively low technical barriers. The payment gateway, mobile wallet, SDK/API, and other services mentioned in the documentation are still under development, and it may not have significant competitive advantages against Forte and Enjin.