Animoca Brands is big on MMORPG blockchain games

Animoca Brands, the parent company of The Sandbox, added Eden Games to its portfolio on Tuesday. Eden Games is a publisher of popular racing games including Gear.Club and test drive Series. Animoca hopes this acquisition will expand its REVV Motorsport ecosystem from blockchain-based racing games to Polygon.

On Wednesday, Animoca announced that it was acquiring Darewise Entertainment, a Paris-based games studio founded by former Ubisoft executives and other AAA games industry veterans. Darewise is currently developing a new play-to-earn (P2E) massively multiplayer online role-playing game or MMORPG called Life Beyond. According to VentureBeat, Animoca Brands has agreed to a 70 percent stake in Darewise Entertainment.

Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, laid out some of the reasons for the acquisition in a Twitter thread.

1/ Incredibly excited to announce that the incredibly talented team at @Darewise Creator of #AAA #MMORPG @LifeBeyond and seasoned online world builders joins us @animocabrands fam quickly to the reasons #NFT #Blockchaingames https://t.co/LWLJ4gvQCA

— Yat Siu (@ysiu) April 13, 2022

As one of the key factors, Siu cited the collective experience of the team behind Darewise in franchises like Assassin’s Creed and The Division. Set on a strife-ridden alien planet, Life Beyond is being built on the Unreal Engine and is currently in Closed Alpha. He said “expect lots of collaborations, partnerships and interoperable experiences + the highest level of quality.”

According to the company, Life Beyond intends to “empower players to make decisions both on an individual level through their own gameplay decisions, and collectively by making important decisions about the future direction of the game.”

Related: Fortnite developers Epic Games raise $2 billion from Sony and LEGO to fund Metaverse plans

On Thursday, Darewise announced via Twitter that it had bought a Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible token (NFT) called Franck. The details of the “support” for BAYC members and ApeCoin help have not yet been announced.

At Darewise, we firmly believe in the Open Metaverse philosophy. Building bridges between communities.

We start today by supporting the @BoredApeYC and @apecoin Holder in our project! pic.twitter.com/KLHQ64Q0iU

— Darewise (@Darewise) April 14, 2022

In addition, Animoca Brands recently co-led a $5 million seed round for P2E mobile game Blast Royale with investment firm Mechanism Capital. First Light Games is the developer behind Blast Royale and other popular games like Monument Valley, Fable, Street Fighter and Tomb Raider.