Neon Machine, the developer of blockchain-based AAA first-person shooter game Shrapnel, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital. Other investors included Griffin Gaming Partners, Brevan Howard Digital, Franklin Templeton, IOSG Ventures, and Tess Ventures. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate the launch of Shrapnel, which will be available to paid subscribers from December 2023 and as a free-to-play version in 2024. The game has already gained popularity in the industry, and Neon Machine also plans to launch the Shrapnel Marketplace for in-game item purchases and trades.

According to Benzinga, blockchain gaming studio Third Time has announced the completion of a $2 million Seed+ funding round, with Sfermion as the lead investor and participation from Reciprocal Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, 32-Bit Ventures, and 6th Man Ventures.

Brawlers, a web3 video game co-designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, is now available on the Epic Game Store. This player versus player game was co-designed by Garfield and developed by web3 gaming company Tyranno Studios, which specializes in creating games on the WAX blockchain. Brawlers includes a limited edition NFT collection and has cross-platform functionality through NFT bridging on Polygon, Ethereum, and Binance BNB chains.

Roblox, an online gaming platform with over 200 million monthly active users, has added XRP as a payment option. The announcement was made by BitPay on Twitter on October 17th. Xsolla, a Los Angeles-based company that manages in-game payments for Roblox, will partner with BitPay to facilitate the connection with crypto wallets.

Ronin Network, a game-specific EVM blockchain, announced the launch of the Lucas (v2.6.2) upgrade and Shillin hard fork on the Ronin mainnet. It is reported that this Lucas version implements Optimistic Fast Finality (REP-0003) and REP-0002 multiple protocol improvements. Among them, REP-0003 proposes a new fast finality mechanism aimed at improving the speed of transaction confirmation on Ronin. 

October 13th, the community administrator of the blockchain game AbyssWorld announced that "in order to safeguard the funds needed for game development, we have decided to postpone this month's SUI airdrop for Gazer. We have encountered long-term deception, and our early major investor Chainhill Capital has experienced a thunderstorm problem, and the investment funds for AbyssWorld and other games have not been received. Abyss World has been owed for more than half a year, and we have expanded our team as planned but have consumed more cash reserves than planned."

According to a report by cryptocurrency data company DappRadar, Web3 gaming projects raised $600 million in funding in the third quarter of 2023, bringing the total investment for the year to $2.3 billion. Although 2023 is not yet over, this $2.3 billion in funding so far is only equivalent to 30% of the total funds raised last year. DappRadar found that most of the cryptocurrency gaming funding in the last quarter went to game-centric investment companies. This indicates that venture capital firms and their various accelerators and funds will continue to be the main source of startup funding for emerging blockchain gaming studios.

Chain game Parallel announced that it has been added to the comprehensive gaming platform Steam. Steam users can now add the game to their whitelist to receive notifications as soon as the public beta launches.

On October 10th, blockchain game publisher Xterio announced that it will launch Xterio Marketplace, a game-centered market, on October 22nd. Earlier this year, Xterio completed a $40 million financing round with a $300 million valuation through SAFT sales in August 2022.

According to a report by CoinGecko, among the top 40 video game companies ranked by market capitalization, 72.5% (29 companies) have to some extent entered the web3 field, investing in web3 projects, developing blockchain games, and even recruiting related positions. However, only 7 of these 29 companies (24.1%) are currently developing blockchain games.