Axie Infinity developer brings Japanese Web2 games to Ronin

On November 2, Sky Mavis, the developer behind the popular monster-battle nonfungible tokens (NFT) game Axie Infinity, announced a partnership with Korean gaming studio Act Games, to bring a variety of Japanese video game franchises to its native Ronin blockchain.

In an email seen by Cointelegraph, the partnership revealed that the first game to be bridged to Ronin is Zoids Wild Arena, inspired by Japan’s largest toy manufacturer Tomy’s award-winning anime series. It was first unveiled by Tomy in 1983 as a plastic model figure. Other franchises to be migrated include Hello Kitty Aggretsuko and Bubble Bobble.

“Act Games excels at expanding iconic IPs, transcending demographics, and enhancing player engagement. This alliance will allow us to combine our web3 learnings and expertise with nostalgic IP backed by a pre-existing core fanbase,” said Trung Nguyen, CEO and Co-founder of Sky Mavis, regarding the development. Initial incentives include Zoids NFTs and a token drop for users who migrate to a Ronin wallet to play the game. Since 2019, Act Games has developed four arcade-style games with net sales of $6.4 million and 3 million downloads.

Since inception, Sky Mavis’ Axie Infinity has $4.2 billion in NFT sales volume, millions of daily active users during its peak, and $1.3 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, its Ethereum Virtual Machine-powered gaming blockchain Ronin ranks only behind that of Ethereum itself in terms of NFT sales transactions. The company is currently based in Vietnam and Singapore, with noticeable funding rounds led by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Libertus, Mark Cuban, and Binance.

Related: Axie Infinity accounted for nearly two-thirds of blockchain-game NFT transactions in 2021