A video game industry veteran on making the art behind popular NFTs

techcrunch.com:

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 talked to 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, started his career as a concept artist at LucasArts, the studio behind the Star Wars video games.

Concept Art House 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 customers building web3 video games as Zhang kept identifying opportunities at that very intersection.

“Over the last two years, we have had a total pivot into 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 gaming and crypto-native companies that lack experience in gaming and art creation, according to Zhang. The company has worked on projects with NFT giant Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, and comic book creator Frank Miller, best-known for writing and illustrating “The Dark Knight Returns.” It raised $25 million from investors last October from investors including Animoca Brands and angels such as Axie Infinity creator Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin.

But despite Concept’s initial wins in web3, the crypto bear market has hit NFTs particularly hard in the past few months, making its work much more difficult. Zhang said crypto winter has had three main effects on his business — first, that low token prices have