Author: Nancy, PANews
The AI Agent craze has begun to spread to the Web3 gaming track. On January 17, Solana officially released a post introducing the ecosystem game fundraising platform Indie.fun, quickly attracting market attention. Indie.fun is a platform similar to Pump.fun, focusing on providing community-driven fundraising support for game projects in the Solana ecosystem. What is the background of Indie.fun? What changes will it bring to the GameFi track? With these questions in mind, PANews recently interviewed the Indie.fun team.
According to the introduction, Indie.fun innovatively allows developers to simultaneously release games and tokens, providing a community-driven fundraising channel for game projects. Supporters can invest in projects by purchasing tokens and use these tokens immediately in the game, realizing the seamless integration of game development, fundraising, and user participation.
Similar to the process of creating tokens on Pump.fun, users can create tokens and initiate crowdfunding activities on Indie.fun after creating or selecting an existing game. In this process, users can set a fundraising target (minimum 25 SOL), and supporters can use SOL for investment. If the fundraising target is reached, one-third of the fundraising amount and 25% of the tokens will be deployed as a liquidity pool on Raydium. Two-thirds of the funds will be placed in the game developer's wallet (a platform fee of 2.5 SOL will be charged).
It is well known that although the GameFi track was once popular, it later encountered a setback due to the overall market downturn, the weakening of the money-making effect, and the low playability of the games, resulting in a significant drop in user retention and a significant compression of the game's survival space. According to Coinspeaker's research on the GameFi track in 2024, 93% of GameFi tokens have dropped by an average of 95%, and the average lifespan of most GameFi projects is only four months, much shorter than that of other cryptocurrency projects.
"Currently, Web3 games are investing more in speculation and vanity metrics rather than game mechanics and player experience," Indie.fun told PANews in the interview. The team will focus on creators and game mechanics, allowing developers to fundraise based on projects with playability and high quality. By enabling developers to have their own game economies and empowering supporters to invest in trustworthy games, Indie.fun aims to build a sustainable, community-driven ecosystem that prioritizes game quality and long-term engagement.
The Indie.fun team has extensive experience in the fields of gaming, startups, and Web3. CEO Jaeyun Noh is a serial entrepreneur who has created multiple hit multiplayer games, such as Braains.io. COO Linda Yuan has held important positions in esports and AI startups, as well as the public company Lyft.
In the construction of Indie.fun's game ecosystem, the open-source Web3 native game engine Moddio and FullMetal.ai play important roles. Moddio aims to simplify the creation of multiplayer games, providing an editor that allows developers to quickly build games without writing code, and it also includes features such as a physics engine and artificial intelligence. According to Moddio founder @bboym0dE, using the platform can develop a game in 5 hours. Currently, Moddio has over 200,000 monthly active users and creates 5,000 new worlds every month. Moddio has received multiple rounds of funding since its establishment in 2017, with investors including Alliance DAO, Solana Ventures, Taisu Ventures, and Untamed Ventures.
FullMetal.ai is the ecosystem's artificial intelligence engine, allowing developers to seamlessly create, deploy, and manage AI agents using the Eliza framework, and it is directly integrated with the Moddio game environment. Its main goal is to solve the challenges of traditional self-hosted AI models, such as high hardware costs, privacy issues, and difficulty in selection. According to Indie.fun, FullMetal.ai allows users to deploy a large number of independent AI agents through $BNTY. These AI agents have their own wallets and can be used in the game. This means that over time, players and AI agents will become increasingly indistinguishable, and there will always be other players participating in interactions within the game.
"AI agents have tremendous potential in the game ecosystem, as they can change the way games are made and played, making the game world more dynamic, engaging, and vibrant. For developers, Indie.fun's integration of AI technology into games can simplify the game creation process. For players, AI agents can make the game experience more interesting through the provision of intelligent, adaptive gameplay that can evolve in real-time," Indie.fun told PANews about the introduction of AI agents.
In addition to the difficulties in game development and fundraising, poor user experience and complex user interfaces are also considered the main reasons hindering players' entry into Web3 games.
To ensure the quality of the games, Indie.fun has established a strict review mechanism. "Since our launch, the demand has been very high. In a short period of time, we had allowed anyone to launch games, but we are now whitelisting each game that goes live to ensure its quality. Each game will be tested to ensure it has an engaging game loop and intuitive controls, and we will communicate with the game's team to understand their vision for the game. We want to ensure that players can enjoy the game before the official fundraising begins."
As of the publication, more than 30 games on the Indie.fun platform have successfully completed crowdfunding, with a total market capitalization exceeding $31 million. However, among these games, only Indie.fun's official flagship game Powpow World (BNTY) has gained a certain degree of market recognition, while the market capitalizations of the remaining projects are relatively low, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have not yet gained widespread market participation.
In this light, whether Indie.fun can form a flywheel effect by lowering the financing threshold for game developers and building an AI agent-driven game ecosystem with Moddio and FullMetal.ai to break the GameFi dilemma and activate the Agentic Metaverse and gaming craze remains to be seen over time.
