Esports company Metaco partners with Playfix
Esports is already becoming part of mainstream entertainment in Southeast Asia, with “over 60 per cent of Southeast Asian gamers drawn to esports”. Starting in 2019, esports was even included as a medal sport in the Southeast Asian Games held in the Philippines. According to a report, esports will grow even faster in the region thanks to mobile gaming, generating US$72.5 million in revenue by 2024.
With blockchain technology now also on the rise in Southeast Asia, where over 600 cryptocurrency or blockchain companies are headquartered, what will be the impact of blockchain on esports?
“Metaco’s vision is to create communities of gamers between web2 and web3 games. We want to create an ecosystem where both web2 and web3 gamers can take advantage of blockchain technology while also creating a smaller barrier of entry into the ecosystem,” said Iskandar Ramli, founder and CEO of Indonesia-based esports company Metaco.
“Eventually Metaco plans on creating curated wallets and a front end ecosystem so that users can play, earn, and compete in their preferred games. Potentially, a lot of our web2 gamers might not even know that they are already in the blockchain ecosystem,” Ramli said.
Founded in 2017, Metaco originally started out as a media company focusing on grassroots gamers.
“[Metaco Co-founder] Jaime [Djuhar] and I were talking about the scene in Indonesia one day and we realized that while gaming and esports were growing massively, Indonesia’s market was growing away from the rest of the world. From there we saw that there was a distinct lack of focus on communities and gamers across the nation.
“Hence, by 2019 we created the first community-centric event platform for gamers in Indonesia. Today the Metaco platform, together with more than 100 community partners, hosts on average more than 250 monthly events with about 30,000 participants,” he said.
Since Metaco wanted to embrace web3 and become part of this ecosystem, it decided to partner with blockchain firm Playfix. The Playfix platform provides an all-in-one solution for developers to easily build, launch, and grow web3 games and NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
“Since Metaco is a web2 company, the biggest benefit from partnering with Playfix is that they became our infrastructure enabler, like the wallet system. On top of that, Playfix has built a community around web3 gamers that Metaco can also engage. This partnership will allow Metaco to strategically become part of the web3 games community,” Ramli said.
As part of this partnership, Metaco and Playfix collaborated on the Metaco Online Tournament Clash Royale event on Sept. 18. Offering a prize pool of 50 USDT, this online tournament was open to all regions.
Esports and blockchain technology are the future of gaming, and Southeast Asia aims to lead the way.
