TRON pushing games to blockchain with 130 million fund

Blockchain platform TRON is now investing 130 million into blockchain games for its own network. A $100 million fund was announced late November, and on Thursday they got a 30 million dollar investment into their TRON Arcade. This investment comes from Gumi Cryptos, a capital venture led by game development studio Gumi.

The TRON Network is one of the first established blockchain products that's aiming to embrace video games. Ethereum has proven to often be a bit too slow to deal with huge amounts of traffic. That's something CEO Justin Sun claims Tron will do a hundred times better.

Japanese game studio Gumi is best known for it's mobile role playing games. It made Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and Brave Frontier. The Final Fantasy game has been downloaded over 35 million times, while Brave Frontier was their first flagship title.

The video games industry is worth 138 billion dollars, and getting a piece of that pie would put the Tron Network on the map. However, the earliest games that have been released on either Tron or the Ethereum network, have difficulty with adoption and retention. The players that come, also move away pretty fast. That's probably something where the expertise of Gumi can help as well.

CEO Justin Sun has big hopes for the company's gaming efforts. “Gaming has been always the leading use case for any merging technology, as it was for mobile, and we think same applies to blockchain where we’ve already seen some proven business cases”, he said.

However, Gumi hasn't announced any plans to make a game for the blockchain. But when Gumi Cryptos, affiliated with the game studio, is investing 30 million into blockchain games, than it only makes sense to see Gumi develop one or multiple games as well. So far Gumi Cryptos will only have an advisory role.

Gumi isn't alone in their interest into the blockchain. Several gaming companies have been eyeing blockchain technology in recent months. Earlier this week Atari announced it will launch two blockchain enabled mobile games in the second half of 2019, including the popular management game Rollercoaster Tycoon Touch. While several independent studios, like Codeglue, are working on blockchain enabled games as well.

Even though blockchain technology in gaming is still very early, there are lots of efforts to make it grow. Gaming giant Ubisoft is one of the founders of the Blockchain Game Alliance, an organization that's all about embracing blockchain for video games. This organization includes Consensys, a blockchain development studio closely connected to Ethereum, indie game publisher Fig and blockchain gaming project Enjin.