The Game Maker Fund
Learn more about the Game Maker Fund and how to apply to get involved.
The Game Maker Fund is an initiative at The Sandbox which provides support to game designers and game studios, from a variety of skill and experience backgrounds, who have unique, brilliant metaverse game or metaverse experience ideas.
The fund guides creators and studios to help them produce and publish their excellent metaverse game and experience ideas so that the millions of players at The Sandbox can visit, play, and enjoy them.
No, The Game Maker Fund, despite its name, does not only consider game-related pitches.
It also supports other types of metaverse experiences. For example - art galleries, educational dioramas, second-life simulations, concerts & music festivals, interactive Web3 novels, and so on. The Web3 sky is the limit.
- Funding. We provide you with some finance on a milestone-based system for your time spent developing the experience. This, especially for studios, can help to cover some of your costs, such as paying your staff and acquiring additional talent, purchasing any necessary technology that you might need, acquiring LANDs, website hosting, expanding your marketing reach, and so on.
- Development Software. The Sandbox has two great development softwares to help you build your experience in the metaverse. These are the Game Maker (also sometimes referred to as "The Sandbox Maker"), which is a game development tool used for creating your experience. And VoxEdit, which is a tool for creating NFTs, in-game elements, and avatar collections.
- Publishing. The Sandbox provides a platform for your experience to be published upon. For example, this might be during Seasonal events at The Sandbox or themed holiday events, depending on the theme of your experience.
- Quality Assurance. The Sandbox has a dedicated and professional team of quality assurance developers, skilled in a variety of backgrounds (game development, NFT creation, and so on), who will periodically test your experience and its NFTs to ensure they are of a high standard and to help you detect any issues that need to be resolved.
- Consultation Advice. The Sandbox also has some highly skilled game designers, artists, NFT designers, and so on, who can offer you advice about your experience and creations.
- Account Management. Your project will be assigned an Account Manager from The Sandbox (at no additional cost to you, don't worry). This is an individual who will help you to oversee your experience's development. For example, they will make sure that you are able to access relevant consultants at The Sandbox as needed, answer any development-related questions, organise your publishing or sale dates, and so on.
- Marketing Support. The Sandbox also provides marketing consultations (also at no additional cost to you) to help you to self-market your project, from the early development stages all the way up to six months after release. The Sandbox will also periodically market your project too through multiple platforms, including social media, online articles, and email newsletters.
- Studio Search. The Sandbox provides a tool to make it easier for you to search for and hire vetted third-party studios and agencies (some of which may also be partners to The Sandbox) to help you with bringing your idea into reality, whether these be creative design studios, marketing consultants, web designers, video producers, and so on.
- NFT Sales. The Game Maker Fund will also provide you with support in regard to promoting and selling NFTs and avatars from your project on The Sandbox's primary marketplace.
Before you apply to the Game Maker Fund, you will need to produce a highly detailed Game Design Document (GDD). This is standard practice in the game development industry when pitching your idea to a fund or publisher, like The Sandbox.
To increase your chances of your pitch being successfully accepted, we strongly advise that you take all the time you need to create and polish your GDD before reaching out to us. It is not something that we recommend rushing. We provide a template GDD that you should ideally use.
Click here to download a blank Game Design Document (GDD) template from Google Drive. We strongly recommend that you use this template to submit your GDD pitch to us.
Once you have finished, checked, double-checked, and polished your GDD, you can then submit it to us through our application form.
Once you have completed your GDD, go here to go to the Game Maker Fund's webpage to submit your application and pitch: https://www.sandbox.game/fund/.
Anybody who has an account at The Sandbox which is also in good standing - for example, not having any infractions for attempting to cheat in events.
To create an account at The Sandbox and be a recipient of the fund, you need to be a minimum of 18 years of age. This is for legal reasons under GDPR, so no exceptions can be made.
If you are accepted into the fund, you are welcome to use your funding to hire a third-party studio to help you to bring your experience to life in the metaverse.
The Sandbox provides a vetted directory of such studios, which you can browse here: https://www.sandbox.game/agencies/directory.
Due to the popularity of the fund and additional workloads that the Game Maker Fund team have, it may take around one to two working weeks for your application to be reviewed.
Note that this can be affected by weekends, public holidays (in France), and the number of applications that were recently sent in before yours. For example, we typically receive a boom in applicants after Alpha Seasons at The Sandbox.
The majority of the team is based at The Sandbox's corporate headquarters in Paris, France. However, there are also team-members based in Australia, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Korea, Costa Rica, and so on.
The Sandbox is extremely proud to be a diverse organisation of skilled people from all kinds of backgrounds, cultures, beliefs, and identities.
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This will be determined by the Game Maker Fund team, with the help of your The Sandbox-assigned Account Manager who will know you better than anyone else. Your release dates depend on factors such as planned Seasons or Events at The Sandbox, as well as your experience completion percentage, marketing material progress, bug fix progress, and so on. You'll receive more details if you are accepted into the fund.
Please feel free to reach out to us. We have several options:
- Response times vary depending on the current size of the support queue.
- Response times vary depending on the current size of the support queue.
- It may take 3 to 7 working days for a response.
Please only choose one option.
A small selection of some of the Game Maker Fund projects (2020-2022)