The developers of Soccerverse, a football management MMO currently available in Beta 4 on the Polygon network, have recently managed to successfully secure new funding in a seed investment round led by Hiro Capital for an undisclosed fee.

The official announcement of the financing came last week on Friday, February 10th, with the company, Soccerverse Ltd, stating that the funds will help in speeding up game development while improving gameplay and propelling the blockchain title into “the limelight of both football/soccer management simulation games and blockchain games.”

Hiro Capital is a venture capital fund founded in 2019 by Luke Alvarez, Cherry Freeman, Spike Laurie and Sir Ian Livingstone, with the latter one being known for co-creating the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and co-founding Games Workshop, a British manufacturer of popular miniature wargames such as Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. The VC firm invests in traditional video games, technology, esports and streaming, and they’ve more recently begun putting focus on investing in metaverse and Web3 platforms and services, with Soccerverse Ltd being the company’s first blockchain games studio investment.

Following the funding, Partner at Hiro Capital Spike Laurie had the following to say in a LinkedIn post:

“Very pleased that Hiro Capital has made its first blockchain games studio investment, and couldn't think of a better team to be backing in the space!”

The football management simulator uses the Xaya blockchain SDK in order to enable fully decentralized, on-chain gaming where players can not only take control of clubs and manage players while earning weekly wages from the club in the process, but they can also become player agents, player shareholders and club shareholders, making football clubs and players essentially fractionalized NFTs, with both club shares and player shares tradable on a decentralized marketplace. Club shareholders have the power to vote and fire managers while earning dividends from a debtless club’s income, while agents can receive a part of the player’s wages and player shareholders can get commissions from a player’s wages as well as bonuses depending on the performance of the player they own shares in.

Some of the team members of Soccerverse include Andy Gore, former CEO of Soccer Manager Ltd; Andrew Colosimo, creator of the world’s first on-chain blockchain game called Huntercoin and founder of the Xaya blockchain, and Daniel Kraft, a former Google engineering scientist, co-founder of the Xaya gaming platform and a regular Bitcoin Core contributor.

The announcement article can be found linked in the tweet down below.

As a result of this newly-raised capital, the developers have decided to delay the full release of the game to Q3 this year in order to for the title to be “expanded upon as originally envisioned.”