Exclusive interview with Indie.fun: Integrating AI Agents to change game creation and gameplay, and creating a player-driven economic model

Author: Nancy, PANews

The AI Agent craze has begun to spread to the Web3 game track. On January 17, Solana officially released an article to promote the ecological game fundraising platform Indie.fun, which quickly attracted market attention. Indie.fun is a platform similar to Pump.fun, focusing on providing community-driven fundraising support for game projects in the Solana ecosystem. What is the origin of Indie.fun? What changes will it bring to the GameFi track? With these questions, PANews recently interviewed the Indie.fun team.

According to reports, Indie.fun innovatively allows developers to release games and tokens simultaneously, providing a community-driven fundraising channel for game projects. Supporters can invest in projects by purchasing tokens and use these tokens instantly in the game, achieving a seamless connection between game development, fundraising and user participation.

Similar to the token creation process on Pump.fun, users can create tokens and launch crowdfunding campaigns after creating games or selecting existing games on Indie.fun. During this process, users can set fundraising goals (minimum 25 SOL), and supporters can invest with SOL. If the fundraising goal is reached, one-third of the fundraising amount and 25% of the tokens will be deployed as a liquidity pool on Raydium. Two-thirds of the funds will be placed in the wallet of the game developer (2.5 SOL will be charged as a platform fee).

As we all know, although the GameFi track was once popular, it later suffered a setback due to the overall bear market, weakened money-making effect, and low game playability. The user retention rate dropped sharply and the survival space of the game was greatly squeezed. According to Coinspeaker's research on the GameFi track in 2024, 93% of GameFi tokens fell by an average of 95%, and the average life cycle of most GameFi projects is four months, which is much shorter than the life cycle of other crypto projects.

"Currently, Web3 games invest more in speculation and vanity indicators rather than gameplay and player experience." Indie.fun told PANews in an interview that the team will shift its focus to creators and gameplay, allowing developers to raise funds based on playable and high-quality projects. By allowing developers to own the economic system of their own games and empowering supporters to invest in trusted games, a sustainable, community-driven ecosystem is created, which prioritizes game quality and long-term participation.

The Indie.fun team has extensive experience in games, startups, and Web3. CEO Jaeyun Noh is a serial entrepreneur who has created several popular multiplayer games, such as Braains.io. COO Linda Yuan has held important positions in startups such as e-sports and AI, as well as the listed company Lyft.

In the creation of Indie.fun's game ecosystem, open source Web3 native game engines Moddio and FullMetal.ai play an important role. Among them, Moddio aims to simplify the creation process of multiplayer games. By providing an editor that does not require code writing, the platform allows developers to quickly build games. It also has built-in functions such as physics engines and artificial intelligence to facilitate developers to implement complex game mechanisms. According to Moddio founder @bboym0dE, a game can be developed within 5 hours using the platform. Currently, Moddio has more than 200,000 monthly active users, and 5,000 new worlds are created every month. Moddio has received multiple rounds of financing since its establishment in 2017, and investors include Alliance DAO, Solana Ventures, Taisu Ventures, and Untamed Ventures.

FullMetal.ai is the artificial intelligence engine of the ecosystem, allowing developers to use the Eliza framework for seamless creation, deployment and management of AI agents, and directly integrate with the Moddio game environment. Its main goal is to solve the challenges of traditional self-hosted AI models, such as high hardware costs, privacy issues and difficulty in selection. According to Indie.fun, Fullmetal.ai allows users to deploy a large number of independent AI Agents through $BNTY. These AI Agents have their own wallets and can be used in games. This means that over time, players and AI Agents will become increasingly difficult to distinguish, and there will always be other players in the game to interact.

"AI Agents have great potential in the gaming ecosystem and can change the way games are made and played, making the gaming world more dynamic, engaging and vibrant. For developers, Indie.fun integrates AI technology into games to simplify the game creation process. For players, AI Agents can make the gaming experience more interesting by providing intelligent and adaptive gameplay that can evolve in real time." Indie.fun told PANews in an interview about the introduction of AI Agents.

In addition to issues such as game development difficulty and fund raising, poor user experience and complex user interface are also considered to be the main reasons hindering players from entering Web3 games.

In order to ensure the quality of the games, Indie.fun has developed a strict review mechanism. "Since we launched, the demand has been very high. For a short period of time, we allowed anyone to launch games, but we are currently whitelisting every game that is launched to ensure its quality. Each game will be tested to ensure that it has an attractive game loop and intuitive controls, and we will communicate with the game's team to understand their vision for the game. We want to ensure that players can enjoy the fun of the game before the game is officially raised for fundraising."

As of this writing, more than 30 games on the Indie.fun platform have successfully completed crowdfunding, with a cumulative market value of more than 31 million US dollars. However, among these games, only Indie.fun's official flagship game Powpow World (BNTY) has gained a certain degree of market recognition, while the market value of the remaining projects is relatively low, only tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and has not yet received widespread market participation.

From this point of view, whether Indie.fun can form a flywheel effect to break the GameFi dilemma and activate the Agentic Metaverse and the gaming craze by lowering the financing threshold for game developers and building an AI agent-driven gaming ecosystem with the help of Moddio and FullMetal.ai, still needs time to verify.