Red Door Digital raises $5M to build high-end blockchain games

Red Door Digital has raised $5 million in seed funding to build high-quality blockchain games.

Singapore-based Red Door Digital has developers from Electronic Arts and Tencent, and the company’s mission is to inject some much-needed creativity into web 3 games.

Blockchain games that use nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have taken a lot of heat from game developers and hardcore fans because the gameplay has been weak and it feels like a scam or aggressive monetization scheme.

Founded in 2021, Red Door Digital is one of the companies taking a high-end approach to incorporating web 3 infrastructure, play-to-earn economic models, cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure, and NFT interoperability.

Red Door Digital currently has three titles under development, leveraging its proprietary game theory models for engaging gameplay. Reign of Terror is set for release in summer 2022. The game is billed as a cyberpunk massively multiplayer online (MMO) game set in a dreamlike futuristic metaverse, with in-game characters and items available as NFTs.

Expansion packs are already in the works for Reign of Terror later in the year. Toward the end of 2022 will follow racing and battling casual game DinoHorse Saga, and the sci-med battle royale style Project Synth.

A consortium of investors participated in this seed round of funding, including M6, Shima Capital, Maven Capital, and Cryptology Asset Group. Red Door Digital’s founding team has experience from companies like EA Online, Ubisoft, Epic, Tencent, and NetEase, and even Emmy award winners.

Red Door Digital said it is well versed in ensuring the scalability and sustainability of games that are simply fun to play. The goal is to enhance entertainment and social interaction via immersive metaverse experiences, with a priority on good, creative gameplay akin to triple-A games. This includes live ops running at the global-to-local level, with local-language support.

Meanwhile Red Door Digital’s web 3 infrastructure will manage the underlying GameFi models to support sustainable
in-game economies, with cross-chain NFT interoperability, the company said.

The seed funds will be used to build out Red Door Digital’s central technology team and platform, which will design and develop the studio’s games. That platform includes the studio’s proprietary game theory models, which drive the scalability and sustainability of the in-game economy, and web 3 infrastructure.

“Web 3 gaming has set in motion a paradigm shift for the industry, but so far studios have not delivered titles that are all that fun to play. Red Door Digital will be using this funding to plug that gap. We’re building triple-A quality games on the blockchain, to increase value, utility, and social interaction for gamers, with P2E built into fundamentally entertaining games,” said Joseph Derflinger, CEO of Red Door Digital, in a statement. “As game developers by background, we have always served deeply engaged communities, who play for fun and have shared social and financial incentives. Web3 is the next, exciting extension of that dynamic, built on blockchain technologies.”

Derflinger has worked in the gaming industry for over a decade, with roles at multinational game companies including Perfect World, Gree International, Tencent, and NetEase.

Red Door Digital is not only releasing its own GameFi titles. It is also proactively bridging traditional studios, developers, and gamers into Web3. Its proprietary Web3 infrastructure is intended for use in third-party studios !games, as well as its own.

This infrastructure consolidates cross-chain processes and transactions in the back-end, incorporating P2E economic models, DeFi infrastructure, and NFT interoperability. This creates a simpler onramp and more intuitive experience for mainstream gamers and developers alike, allowing them to focus on gameplay without becoming crypto experts.

Red Door Digital is already in talks with top-tier game studios seeking a gateway into GameFi with its turnkey web 3 infrastructure.

“By moving these complex blockchain transactions to the back-end, we ensure that good gameplay is the focus,” said said See Wan Toong, chief technology officer of Red Door Digital, in a statement. “We want to see the ecosystem populated with a community that!s passionate about gaming, so this is a major factor to begin attracting traditional gamers and studios into GameFi in earnest. They don’t want to get distracted navigating multiple wallets and protocols, they want to play and create truly entertaining games.”

In response to a query from GamesBeat, Red Door Digital said the team had triple-A experience and wanted to explore the world of blockchain and NFTs. They got increasingly excited about the possibilities in the GameFi space, as the next evolution of gaming.

“But we saw there was a big gap in terms of actually fun games to play in the P2E segment. So we want to bring our passions together,” said Derflinger. “With web 3 interoperability in games, we can give users more ownership of their assets and involve them in the games more than ever. And by bringing AAA-quality gameplay we can help attract
the mainstream into this segment. “Metaverse” is a buzzword right now, but this will be the trend: having more immersive online interactions.”

The company has grown to 40 people, with the headquarters in Singapore and the development team spread among Taiwan and the U.S.

Regarding the resistance to NFT games from hardcore gamers, the company said, “Over time gamers will start to understand how Web3 can help games. There has been some backlash to NFTs, as traditional gamers didn’t see or don’t understand the benefits yet. We think this is mainly because the first wave of games weren’t really games, just DeFi products that had been gamefied. So for us, we’re building games first, then we use blockchain as a tool as a
secondary step. When MMO/online games first emerged people were skeptical too.”

Red Door Digital added “Then it was the same with free to play, which drew skepticism. People thought it’s not sustainable. People also thought mobile games were low-grade. But look where mobile gaming is now. Web 3 is the
next paradigm shift. That’s the trajectory we’re seeing. At the beginning of any innovation, people always complain and don’t understand the benefits, but slowly with more success and better games proving the concept, there’s an inevitable transition.”