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Gamercraft has raised $5 million in funding for its AI-competitive gaming platform for skill-based console and PC gaming.
The Miami-based company said it will use the money to expand its engineering and platform capabilities, develop new games and genres for 2024, and also grow its marketing arm, said CEO Jose Javier Garcia Rovira, in an interview with GamesBeat.
The cofounders of Alienware led the round, with participation from Le Fonds, Mistral Ventures, Quantic Fund, Stellaria Capital and others.
Gamercraft’s mission is to integrate skill-based gaming — where players can wager on whether they can win matches or not — into the heart of future gaming economies. The company aims to offer challenges, competitions, and robust anti-cheat detection to enhance gaming experiences and trust for all players.
The company has attracted a user base of more than 300,000 gamers across North America, Latin America, and Europe.
Positioned at the intersection of blockchain and AI, Gamercraft wants to be a gaming infrastructure player. The platform leverages the AWS Quantum Ledger to provide a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log, the company said.
Gamercraft’s proprietary scoring and player-tracking system analyzes hundreds of data points per game for each player and translates them into performance assessments and insights using AI. This blend of AI and blockchain technology sets Gamercraft apart in its focus on high-value competitive gaming experiences and analytics for players at all skill levels, the company said.
For anti-cheat, Gamercraft uses an adaptive learning-based model to analyze the most granular details of player data. The precision of this model ensures fair play and paves the way for highly defensible, hyper-localized features such as personal AI coaching and player development.
Gamercraft plans to use some proceeds for further exploration and innovation in promising areas of competitive and blockchain gaming.
The accelerating adoption of Gamercraft’s platform highlights the rising demand for an accessible skill-based gaming economy and signals the potential for a new era of competitive gaming, the company said.
Gamercraft’s vision is to create a future where gamers’ investment in time and skills invested result in tangible returns for them. Gamercraft plans to close the seed round later this year. The company was founded in 2020. Gamercraft has 12 people, and it has raised $6.8 million to date.
“We envision a future where gamers will no longer have to settle exclusively for passive gaming experiences, instead embracing experiences where their time and skills invested result in tangible returns for them,” said Garcia-Rovira. “This ambitious vision forms the core of Gamercraft’s mission: to integrate skill gaming into the heart of future gaming economies.”
Origins
In studying the market before its launch, Gamercraft learned that gamers really wonder if the scales are tipped against them or if someone is cheating in their competitive games, Garcia Rovira said.
“We needed to step up both the fairness and compliance level and do it through AI,” he said. “Our ecosystem and platform are powered by both AI and blockchain, as well as adaptive learning models that track player performance from the very get-go.”
That tracking helps the company place players in the right divisions for better matchmaking. And the tracking powers retention and engagement.
As for cheating, Garcia Rovira said the company looks at player behavior when it comes to cheating. Does the data about the player tell them something about cheating? Individual game companies may be able to do something about whether a particular machine is being used to tamper with game files.
“Since we’re talking about skill gaming, where monies at stake, we needed to upgrade the game. We look at server-side, behavioral anti-cheat,” he said. “It’s all minimally invasive, but we look at data and we create this very accurate profile about you as a player. So that’s really the core difference that makes us unique” compared to solutions like Easy Anti-Cheat. It looks at things like account sharing and more, like a reputation score, or risk score, that goes up and down with every game that you play.
The first year was about fine tuning the anti-cheat data and other things related to being able to stage fair competitions. It launched the platform around 15 months ago and it has steadily been improved over time. At about that time, the number of users started growing rapidly.
It makes most of its revenue from its competitive platform for triple-A games, such as League of Legends, Valorant or CS:GO. It uses AI to provide insights about the players on the platform. As for skill gaming, Garcia Rovira believes that major game companies will adopt skill-based wagering in competitive triple-A games in the coming years.
“Obviously, the bigger companies will be slower to adopt it,” he said.
Gamercraft hopes to develop its own games in the future using its technologies. Currently, the company makes money from subscriptions and a percentage of revenue associated with match entry fees.
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Dean Takahashi
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