Beamable raises $13.5M for decentralized open source backend infrastructure for games

Beamable has raised $13.5 million in funding to develop its decentralized backend infrastructure for online games.

The Beamable Network represents a disruptive shift in the way live games are supported, breaking free from the traditional dependence on centralized hyperscale data centers owned by tech giants, said Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable, in an interview with GamesBeat.

One of the ways it is doing that is launching blockchain tokens through its Beamable Foundation in the future and open sourcing its technology so that game developers don’t have to worry about whether to entrust their game’s backends to Beamable.

Bitkraft Ventures led the round for the Boston-based company. The funding will support the development and scaling of the Beamable Network, a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) poised to redefine how backend infrastructure for games is built and operated. It works with any online game supported by Unity or Unreal across platforms including PC, console and mobile.

Beamable Inc. is a software company that is kind of the lab that builds the tech and operates Beamable.com. The Beamable Foundation is independent, without owners. The foundation has a mission to take a license of the Beamable technology, open source it, and make it sustainable from now on, Radoff said. He said he could not discuss specifics of the token launch, which the foundation will share in the future.

Other investors include Arca, Advancit Capital, 2Punks, P2 Ventures, Solana Foundation, Scytale Digital, Defy.vc, GrandBanks Capital and Permit Ventures.

At launch, the network is projected to rank as a top-10 DePIN project by revenue, thanks to the existing demand for its infrastructure among games already running on Beamable’s technology. With millions of users and billions of API calls served to date, the Beamable Network brings unparalleled scalability, cost efficiency, and resilience to the gaming industry.

“Bitkraft has been a leader in identifying transformative opportunities at the intersection of gaming and Web3, and this funding validates the enormous potential of the Beamable Network to revolutionize videogame infrastructure,” said Radoff. “By leveraging the proven success of our existing platform and integrating decentralized principles, we’re unlocking a new era of scalability and inclusivity for developers.”

Decentralized innovation and a hyperscaler alternative

The Beamable Network will be managed by the Beamable Foundation, a new entity recently announced to open-source Beamable’s infrastructure technology and create a tokenized protocol that challenges the centralized dominance of hyperscalers.

By decentralizing resources—computing power, storage, and network bandwidth—the network enables a more cost-effective and robust alternative to traditional server platforms. This is achieved through tokenized incentives that align contributors and users, creating a community-driven infrastructure model.

The network will also enable the inclusion of third-party developers who may launch their own custom software modules and services on the network, giving them access to interoperable infrastructure and mechanisms to earn royalties and license fees from their creations.

A Top-10 DePIN Project at Launch

Unlike many emerging DePIN projects, the Beamable Network expects to enter the market with established demand. Games already leveraging Beamable’s backend infrastructure will transition to the decentralized model, driving significant network utilization from day one. This positions the network as a top-10 DePIN project globally.

“We believe Beamable is uniquely positioned to set a new standard for decentralized infrastructure in gaming,” said Carlos Pereira, general partner at Bitkraft Ventures, in a statement. “Its proven technology and built-in demand, combined with the disruptive potential of DePIN, represents an unparalleled opportunity to enable game developers – across Web2 and Web3 – to build, grow, and thrive at scale.”

Bitkraft Ventures is the global early-stage investment platform for gaming, AI, Web3, and immersive technology, with assets under management totaling over $1 billion.

The Beamable Foundation is an independent organization dedicated to advancing gaming technology through open-source initiatives and decentralized infrastructure. By leveraging Beamable’s backend technology, the foundation empowers developers and transforms the gaming industry into a more collaborative, inclusive, and sustainable ecosystem.

Origins

Radoff previously ran Disruptor Beam, which made live-service games like Star Trek: Timelines and Game of Thrones: Ascent. Then he sold off the Star Trek game and pivoted the company to Beamable in 2020 to be like the Unity for the backend infrastructure for games.

Back then, Radoff said this idea was a kind of myth, promised but not really delivered. Radoff wanted to enable game developers to easily create social technology, payment technology, and data persistence — “all the things that you need to operate game servers at scale, basically,” he said.

“And that has never changed. We’ve kept doing it,” Radoff said.

But he noted that GameSparks shut down and took about 2,000 games with them. And ever since then, game developers have become really cautious about how they place bets on using backend technology that they haven’t created themselves.

“There was a clear realization that even the biggest companies could shut these things down and you might be left with a dependency that means you can’t keep operating your game,” Radoff said.

Developers could of course run their own backend infrastructure. But Beamable wanted to offload that task. It specialized in live operations services that can keep an online game going, and Radoff wanted to offload this task from game developers who should focus their own energy on making a game fun.

Going open source

To give some assurance that it will still be around for the long term, Radoff said Beamable is open sourcing its technology so developers can get that reassurance.

“It forced us to think about whether there’s a completely different approach to business than being a typical game. We’ve got now have around 80 games that have launched on top of Beamable. There’s another 150 or so that are actively building more games, and there’s thousands of developers who are deciding whether to build a game on this platform,” he said.

By open sourcing the tech, developers could be more comfortable that there will always be source code out there that they can use. On top of that, Radoff said Beamble had to figure out how to enable developers to scale out their games to lots of servers — potentially millions of them.

“You have to solve for that whole scalability process on the back end. And a way to do that around open source technology is to build a network where that software runs automatically and easily and everybody gets paid. That’s where this new market of decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DePIN, comes in because it uses blockchain to become the settlement layer,” Radoff said.

It’s basically doing what blockchain is good at, which is to function as a public accounting system of records and you can use it to trade for compute, Radoff said.

The DePIN capital formation model

At the beginning of Bitcoin, miners provided computing power and were paid in the form of tokens. They solved cryptographic puzzles in order to earn Bitcoin. In this case, the company is running game servers — another very compute intensive workload — and that’s how you’ll be able to earn tokens on the DePIN network, Radoff said.

“It removes a lot of risk from the equation because you’ve got to aggregate to different service providers all sharing the same source code base,” he said.

Beamable Foundation will likely issue tokens, and those tokens can be given to the third-party companies who operate the servers and provide them to the game developers, Radoff said. Those third-party companies can be rewarded for their services with the tokens. Game developers can acquire the tokens and then use them to acquire server capacity from the server owners. The demand can rise and fall, and the game companies only pay for the servers that they use.

This kind of DePIN model is a blockchain-based way for capital formation around hardware-intensive networks.

“A lot of DePIN is about finding where the hardware already exists, as underutilized capacity, so that they can fulfill those demands. But you have to create a incentive mechanism where people want to participate. If you did it with typical capital formation, you’d still need billions of dollars of capital. With a tokenized economy, you can incentivize people to get involved early and then with games coming to the network those games will have the token as a payment instrument in addition to the mechanism,” Radoff said.

This DePIN business is similar to the business of Aethir, which uses tokens to acquire unused graphics processing units (GPUs) to provide AI processing and cloud streaming on the fly for those who need it. By contrast, Beamable provides game servers to help live-service games scale as they become more popular. Aethir is a partner with Beamable, as they support different parts of the service network. Both are examples of the usefulness of blockchain where people are generating revenue with a structure to harness compute resources and bring more hardware online and orchestrate hardware.

Scaling online games

While GPUs are increasingly rare, CPU-based servers are more plentiful and they’re needed for games. There are a number of data center companies that would like their servers to be more fully utilized. Game companies have some of these servers but they don’t have the scale that the biggest companies do.

“If you aggregate them together, and then you’ve got effectively a virtual hyperscaler. So we want to be that virtual hyperscaler for the game industry to build out,” Radoff said. “In game development, there is really no true ecosystem for all of the complexity of the backend of games.”

He added, “In the front end, one of the huge advantages of Unity and Unreal are that you’re not just buying great game engines. You’re buying into all of the plugins and software that has been built around Unity. When you go to their asset store, or Unreal has a marketplace that does a similar thing. Choosing those engines gets you into an ecosystem. That has never happened for the backends because it’s too siloed. It’s lots of game companies building the same thing over and over again, or using it to run into a normal silo. The opportunity here for Beamable, because we’re open sourcing this tech, is to really encourage third parties to start” contributing things like a matchmaking algorithm to the ecosystem.

And he said, “There’s countless back-end things that you need to build a live services game, and we would like to become that ecosystem. The reason why it’s hard and it hasn’t really happened to date is because the backend is different than the frontend. The back-end has to scale, right? You can’t just ship people software and then leave it to themselves to scale it. You have to service the scaling part, which means you aren’t just selling software. You are deploying that software on a network, which is what we’re doing with our DePIN. And because DePIN has a payment mechanism built into it, you are also making it possible for anyone who invents software.”

Radoff hopes that Beamable will become a competitive ecosystem as well. But developers don’t have to be making Web3 games to use the network. Those who operate nodes can be rewarded with tokens but the games can simply use Beamable’s live services software to make traditional online and mobile games.

Beamable is chain agnostic in that its games can be built to run on a wide variety of blockchains.

“We don’t tell people which chain to build their game on if they’re building a Web3 game,” he said.

With Beamable, the function of the chain is simply to be an accounting system to make sure that when a game server is provisioned to provide a service in a game, someone will be paid for it, he said.

“We make sure that they are getting paid based on the real level of utilization for the workloads,” Radoff said.

Radoff said Bitkraft has been good to work with because of its knowledge of both the gaming and blockchain markets, as well as its wide network.

A more sustainable business

The business is structured to deliver lower cost for developers, more sustainability and an ecosystem of developers adding to it over time — and those three things can accelerate the velocity of game development and allow people to put more of their capital into building a fun game, Radoff said.

“We want to invite everybody to come and participate in it whether you want to head towards the core source code or whether you doing plug-ins of your own that add capabilities,” Radoff said.

Last year, the company launched its preliminary version of this by creating a marketplace where others could contribute third-party software plugins for Beamable. The DePIN network allows developers to be paid for the plugins that the developers use. The biggest analogy for this is the Salesforce Cloud, built around the CRM software.

“Salesforce has built exactly what I’ve described, but around their CRM,” Radoff said. “For example, you as a third-party software developer can build plugins to their CRM, run it in the cloud, scale it up. It can either be for yourself or you could get paid as a third party for adding new tech to Salesforce Cloud.”

He added, “But of course, Salesforce had to invest billions into making that possible. So DePIN is this new capital formation mechanism that allows you to create incentives for people to add compute so that you can effectively crowdsource or use the community to build the network as opposed to relying on a big company to come up with billions of dollars to do it for you.”

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