A video game industry veteran on creating the art behind popular NFTs • TechCrunch

Welcome back to Chain Reaction, where we unpack and explain the latest in crypto news, drama and trends, breaking things down block by block for the crypto curious.

For our Tuesday episode this week, we spoke with James Zhang, a 24-year veteran of the video game industry – first as an artist, then as a founder and investor. Zhang, founder and CEO of NFT art consultancy Concept Art House, began his career as a concept artist at LucasArts, the studio behind the Star Wars video games.

Concept Art House was launched 14 years ago with a mandate to provide art to video game companies, and in that time the company has helped ship over 1,000 games, Zhang said. But in 2021, the company honed its focus to exclusively serve clients building web3 video games as Zhang continued to identify opportunities in that very intersection.

“Over the past two years, we’ve had a total pivot to web3, and there’s kind of no looking back,” Zhang said.

Concept Art House has worked with both creative brands looking to build a presence through web3 video games and crypto-native companies lacking experience in games and art creation, according to Zhang. The company has worked on projects with NFT giant Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, and cartoonist Frank Miller, best known for writing and illustrating “The Dark Knight Returns.” Last October, it raised $25 million from investors including Animoca Brands, and from angels like Axie Infinity creator Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin.

But despite Concept’s initial gains in web3, the crypto bear market has hit NFTs particularly hard in recent months, making the job much more difficult. Zhang said that the crypto winter has had three main effects on his business – first, that low token prices have made people more careful about which NFTs they buy; secondly, that risk financing must last longer; and thirdly, that new token launches are no longer an important catalyst for growth in the NFT space.

One of Zhang’s main focuses these days is helping artists monetize their web3 skills.

“We want to create a really powerful artist network that can identify and identify who an artist is and what they’ve worked on in web2 and web3. So instead of making one [piece of] IP, we want to create a platform that is very friendly to artists in web3,” said Zhang.

Compensation of the artists behind NFTs has been a controversial topic, with artists such as Seneca, who illustrated the images in the Bored Ape Yacht Club project, stating that they were not compensated in a lucrative way.

Zhang sees both sides of the issue, saying artists in general are both “underpaid, and they get paid what they’re worth at the moment” based on market value. He believes artists have an agency to improve how they are compensated, and sees web3 as a tool that can help them in that process.

“The artists who are more financially savvy, who understand the community, have more power. They need fewer agents, less middlemen. That’s kind of the promise of blockchain,” Zhang said.

“I think in the future you will see this fork for most professional artists – do you want to try to understand economics more, your role in it, your role in society, your role in technology and contribute as a highly skilled artist? Or do you just want paint and draw very well?”

You can listen to the full episode to hear more of Zhang’s thoughts on how artists can position their skills in web3, as well as how he thinks about intellectual property rights and ownership issues in the NFT world.