A16z’s Gaming Metaverse Play; Cognixion’s Assistive Reality Progress

As investment pulls back and tech stock sell-offs continue, leave it to Andreesen Horowitz to dangle a bit of hope for startups aiming to power through to the next boom. The Menlo Park firm announced Wednesday the creation of its first fund focused on the gaming industry, totalling $600 million. And though there’s a current of optimism for immersive tech behind this fund, I would bet that it focuses more on quickly scalable games and immediately useful tech than any true metaverse moonshots. 

Indeed, the fund’s announcement refers to the rise of games “that more closely resemble social networks and scale like consumer technology companies.” Given that consumer tech firms reach tens of millions of people, this would seem to preclude the kind of AR/VR technologies that currently reach only a few million active users at best. Andreessen also made clear its intentions by saying the fund will focus on technological infrastructure for games in addition to game development and gaming-related consumer companies a la Discord or Twitch.