If you’ve ever balked at paying, like, $60 for a video game, you are obviously not a venture capital firm trying to get in on the metaverse’s first smash-hit app.
To wit: This week, VR gaming studio Alta closed a $12.4 million seed round that values it at $62 million. The studio makes an open-world RPG called A Township Tale, which topped the Oculus sales charts for more than seven weeks last year.
- The company says it has 500,000 users and plans to raise more capital as early as this year so that it can hire more people.
- Alta uses a technique called procedural generation, that allows it to combine algorithmic- and human-generated content on a large scale.
Alta’s not the first VR content developer to milk metaverse success for millions in funding.
Within, the maker of popular VR fitness app Supernatural, was scooped up by Meta for a reported $400+ million—the acquisition is currently under review by the FTC, though.
- Meta also bought Beat Studios, which makes another popular VR fitness app called BeatSaber, for an undisclosed sum in 2019, along with several other mixed-reality studios.
And two other independent VR content developers have landed fresh batches of cash in recent weeks:
Looking ahead: The killer app for mixed reality has yet to arrive, but plenty of studios are hard at work trying to change that. Expect the VR content development space to continue to attract attention from metaverse-minded investors and big tech buyers alike.