VOYA Games and Angry Dynomites Lab Raise $5M to Launch Craft World

Angry Dynomites Lab and web3 game developer VOYA Games have announced a successful $5m raise that will help the two sides launch their flagship title Craft World and lay the foundation for bigger plans focused on bringing millions of traditional gamers to the world of blockchain gaming.

The funding round was co-led by early stage crypto investment firm 1kx and early stage VC Makers Fund. Among the two investors, other participants providing support included The Sandbox COO & Co-Founder Sebastien Borget, RockawayX, Sky Mavis’ Jihoz, and more unspecified backers from both web2 and web3 gaming.

“At times where you hear about web3 games companies shutting down almost every day, we are proud to get investment by some of the best investors out there who share our vision to bring a player-owned economy actually to life.”

How Will VOYA Games & Angry Dynomites Lab Use the $5M Funding?

VOYA Games and Angry Dynomites Lab will use the $5 million funding to not only launch Craft World, but also to create a player-owned economy. Specifically, the investment will help the developers set up the very base for a web3 gaming ecosystem of interconnected games, with the player-owned economy at the very heart of this shared on-chain world.

The aim is to give gamers the ability to shape the game world and its economy by generating resources through gameplay only in order for every item to hold “intrinsic value,” according to the official X article. Everything will be on-chain, so players will be able to trade these resources across decentralized exchanges, and since the assets are earned through gameplay and not created “out of thin air,” players will be the ones who will ultimately dictate this ecosystem’s economy and player-driven marketplace.

Instead of focusing on pump-and-dump tokens, the goal is to have these games deliver long-term value and enable players to have true ownership over not just their assets, but also their progress and identity, and have it all be possible to carry through a growing and interoperable gaming ecosystem.

To achieve a true player-owned economy, the team believes that this process “takes years to build and requires constant iteration.” They’ve already started down this road with a testnet release of Craft World over a year ago, and they don’t plan on stopping there, as the developers will not only continue to update and improve their debut game in line with community feedback, but they will also look to reward player’s time and effort in this title by launching more games in which you can use those same items and resources collected in Craft World.

“We chose to start with a crafting game for a reason. It’s the genre best suited to showcase a player-owned economy in action, where raw materials, effort, and strategy come together to create something lasting.”

What Is Craft World?

Craft World is a free to play crafting and resource management game in which players help out dinosaur-like creatures called Dynomites to rebuild and escape a destroyed Earth. Collect, craft, trade, and build as you engage within an on-chain, player-owned economy in this flagship title of the VOYA ecosystem.

Creating an easy onboarding experience for Craft World and their entire ecosystem is an important aspect to bringing more traditional gamers to the world of web3 gaming. That’s why jumping into Craft World is easy; anyone can start playing right away in just one click. There is no need to create an account, set up a wallet, or deal with any other technical barriers associated with blockchain technologies. This is thanks to the team’s usage of “the latest in smart wallet and account abstraction tech” that unlocks access to full web3 features for gamers to enjoy without having to understand any of it straight away. Instead, on-chain features unlock gradually as players get further engaged into the web3 title, making for a more seamless and accessible web3 gaming experience.

According to the X article announcing the funding, this “play-first, learn-later approach” is said to actually be working, as the game has managed to garner more than 240k players and wallets created at login, with an unspecified number even representing gamers who have never touched anything related to blockchain before.

Craft World is already publicly live on testnet with open on-chain economies and a system powered by more than 25 active tokens, with each said to be “woven into gameplay and trade mechanics” that players actually use on a daily basis. According to the official data revealed in the announcement, the game has more than 50k monthly players without utilizing token airdrops or other paid incentives. In terms of transactions, over 1.1 million swaps have been made to date, with all that happening on the testnet version, where there is “no financial rewards” for players to be motivated by. Check out the litepaper to learn more about this casual title, available for free on web browsers, Telegram, Android, and iOS.

What’s Next for VOYA Games’ Player-Owned Economy?

VOYA Games and Angry Dynomites Lab are planning on launching a new game soon: Project Voyager. This will be the first game to connect directly into the player-owned economy and will act as a meta-game through which players can bring their assets and progress over to future interoperable games within their ecosystem.

At some point this summer 2025, Craft World will officially launch to mainnet, with the core of the release said to be NFTs and Dyno Coin. These core assets provide “real utility, scarcity, and value” across the ecosystem, and players will have them distributed through Project Voyager.

While VOYA Games and Angry Dynomites Lab are successfully pushing on following this successful $5m raise, many other web3 games have been struggling to stay afloat. This month alone, web3 shooter Nyan Heroes shut down despite 1 million players and 250k wishlists, while Blast Royale announced their upcoming shutdown in the same week shortly afterwards, though that one is at least going open source.