The trend of AI Agents is beginning to spread to the Web3 gaming sector. On January 17, Solana officially promoted the ecological game fundraising platform Indie.fun, quickly attracting market attention. Indie.fun is a platform similar to Pump.fun, focused on providing community-driven fundraising support for game projects within the Solana ecosystem. What is the background of Indie.fun? What changes will it bring to the GameFi sector? With these questions in mind, PANews recently interviewed the Indie.fun team.
According to the introduction, Indie.fun innovatively allows developers to simultaneously release games and tokens, providing a community-driven fundraising channel for game projects. Supporters can invest in projects by purchasing tokens and can use these tokens within the game immediately, achieving a seamless connection between game development, fundraising, and user participation.
Similar to the token creation process on Pump.fun, users can create games or choose existing games on Indie.fun, create tokens, and initiate crowdfunding activities. During this process, users can set a fundraising goal (minimum 25 SOL), and supporters can invest using SOL. If the fundraising goal is reached, one-third of the raised amount and 25% of the tokens will be deployed as a liquidity pool on Raydium. Two-thirds of the funds will go into the game developer’s wallet (with a platform fee of 2.5 SOL).
As is well known, although the GameFi sector was once highly praised, it later encountered a setback due to an overall bear market, reduced profit-making effects, and low gameplay quality, leading to a significant decline in user retention and a drastic squeeze on the survival space of games. According to Coinspeaker’s research on the GameFi sector in 2024, 93% of GameFi tokens have averaged a 95% decline, and the average lifespan of most GameFi projects is four months, much shorter than that of other crypto projects.
“Currently, Web3 games are investing more in speculation and vanity metrics rather than gameplay and player experience,” Indie.fun told PANews during the interview. The team is shifting its focus to creators and gameplay, allowing developers to fundraise based on playable and high-quality projects. By enabling developers to have their own game’s economic system and empowering supporters to invest in trustworthy games, they aim to create a sustainable, community-driven ecosystem that prioritizes game quality and long-term participation.
The Indie.fun team has extensive experience in gaming, startups, and the Web3 field. CEO Jaeyun Noh is a serial entrepreneur who has created several popular multiplayer games, such as Braains.io, while COO Linda Yuan has held significant positions in esports and AI startups, as well as at the publicly listed company Lyft.
In building the game ecosystem for Indie.fun, the open-source Web3 native game engine Moddio and FullMetal.ai play crucial roles. Moddio aims to simplify the creation process of multiplayer games by providing a code-free editor that allows developers to quickly build games, while also incorporating features like a physics engine and artificial intelligence to facilitate complex game mechanics. According to Moddio’s founder @bboym0dE, a game can be developed in just five hours using this platform. Currently, Moddio has over 200,000 monthly active users, and 5,000 new worlds are created each month. Since its establishment in 2017, Moddio has undergone multiple funding rounds, with investors including Alliance DAO, Solana Ventures, Taisu Ventures, and Untamed Ventures.
FullMetal.ai serves as the AI engine of the ecosystem, allowing developers to seamlessly create, deploy, and manage AI agents using the Eliza framework, integrated directly with the Moddio game environment. Its main goal is to address the challenges of traditional self-hosted AI models, such as high hardware costs, privacy concerns, and selection difficulties. According to Indie.fun, FullMetal.ai allows users to deploy numerous independent AI Agents through $BNTY. These AI Agents have their own wallets and can be used in games. This means that over time, players and AI Agents will become increasingly indistinguishable, and there will always be other players interacting in the game.
“AI Agents have enormous potential in the game ecosystem, capable of transforming game production and play, making the game world more dynamic, engaging, and vibrant. For developers, integrating AI technology into games through Indie.fun can simplify the game creation process. For players, AI Agents can make the gaming experience more interesting by providing intelligent, adaptive gameplay that evolves in real time,” Indie.fun told PANews regarding the introduction of AI Agents.
In addition to issues like the difficulty of game development and fundraising, poor user experience and complex user interfaces are also considered major barriers to player entry into Web3 games.
To ensure game quality, Indie.fun has established a strict review mechanism. “Since our launch, demand has been very high. For a short time, we allowed anyone to launch games, but we are currently conducting whitelist reviews for every game that goes live to ensure quality. Each game will be tested to ensure it has an engaging game loop and intuitive controls, and we will communicate with the game team to understand their vision for the game. We want to ensure that players can enjoy the game before it officially starts fundraising.”
As of the publication date, over 30 games have successfully completed crowdfunding on the Indie.fun platform, with a cumulative market value exceeding $31 million. However, among these games, only Indie.fun’s official flagship game Powpow World (BNTY) has gained some market recognition, while the market value of other projects remains relatively low, only in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and has not gained widespread market participation.
In this regard, whether Indie.fun can break the GameFi deadlock through lowering the financing threshold for game developers and leveraging Moddio and FullMetal.ai to create an AI agent-driven game ecosystem remains to be seen, as it seeks to activate the Agentic Metaverse and gaming boom, which will require time to verify.
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