Argus, a studio advancing in the Web3 gaming sector, has closed a seed funding round worth $10 million, spearheaded by Haun Ventures.

Argus, the Web3 game developer and publisher, has raised a staggering $10 million in its seed round led by Haun Ventures, with notable participation from Alchemy, Dispersion Capital, Anagram, and Robot Ventures. Among the angel investors in this round are Balaji Srinivasan and Elad Gil, among others.

The minds behind Argus initially developed Dark Forest, an innovative on-chain MMORTS game that leverages zkSNARKs on Ethereum, which was launched in 2020. Founder and CEO Scott Sunarto and his colleagues co-created this project, revealing that the limitations of the existing blockchain frameworks discouraged many developers from venturing into Web3 gaming. This predicament drove them to establish

World Engine, an advanced blockchain tailored for the gaming industry.

According to Scott Sunarto, the founder and CEO of Argus, the unique design of World Engine enables developers to create and tailor their own interconnected and open game worlds. The cutting-edge sharding architecture of World Engine allows individual games to adopt their own horizontally scalable blockchain, which can be managed by the community and evolves with its user base.

Sunarto pointed out that the limitation of blockchain smart contracts not being able to execute automatically at set intervals complicates the implementation of a crucial 'game loop' for game servers. This challenge adds complexities for developers and can stifle their creative processes.

As a result, many game developers choose to store in-game assets as NFTs on the blockchain, while those who wish to create entirely on-chain games often find themselves restricted within a narrow design framework, limiting them to basic strategy or turn-based gaming styles.

Argus claims that World Engine effectively remedies this issue with its innovative sharding approach, which draws inspiration from the server architecture typically utilized in complex massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). By leveraging this method, developers can efficiently distribute the operational load of their games across various shards, and the World Engine blockchain can adapt its throughput to meet user demand.

The company asserts that its inaugural game shard, Cardinal, is capable of accommodating the demands of a high-performance gaming title.

According to the developer, World Engine’s sharding mechanism enables a separation between game execution (managed by game shards) and smart contract execution (conducted by EVM shards). This distinction opens up a wealth of design opportunities for developers to craft an optimized state machine specifically oriented towards efficiently managing computations related to gameplay.

At present, Argus is inviting a select number of teams to join the development stage on World Engine through a private beta. Interested teams can

and those chosen will gain invaluable support from the World Engine core team, covering both technical guidance and advice on game design, go-to-market strategies, and beyond.

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