Gabriel Leydon makes a comeback with $200 million in funding for Limit Break for new blockchain gaming companies
Quick take:
- Gabriel Leydon raised $200 million for his new blockchain gaming company, Limit Break.
- He teamed up with Machine Zone co-founder Halbert Nakagawa to create a new blockchain game.
- The game will be “free” to build a large community of fans from the start.
Gabriel Leydon, the former co-founder and CEO of free gaming and technology company Machine Zone, is making a comeback with a new blockchain gaming company called Limit Break, as first reported by GamesBeat.
Once known as “the man on the iron throne of gaming”, Leydon has raised $200 million for Limit Break. The funds were secured last year from Buckley Ventures, Paradigm, FTX, CoinBase Ventures, Shervin Pishevar, Anthos Capital, SV Angel and Standard Crypto. Pishever and Anthos Capital previously invested in Machine Zone.
Leydon left Machine Zone in 2018 to explore cryptocurrencies and sold Machine Zone in 2020 to AppLovin for $600 million. Last August, he teamed up with Machine Zone founder Halbert Nakagawa to create a new blockchain game that will be “free-to-mint” and “free-to-own”.
“Our focus is on what I think is going to replace ‘free to play’ with what I call ‘free to own’ games,” Leydon said in an interview with GamesBeat. Despite the popularity of games to make money, Limit Break avoids this model by giving away free NFTs to players from the start. Leydon told GamesBeat that the free-to-own model could reduce fraudulent behavior in the blockchain gaming space, where game studios sell NFTs but fail to deliver games.
Not only does Leydon want to turn fans into evangelists for the game that Limit Break is developing with free NFTs, but he also believes that the free-to-mint model could “wipe out” free-to-play and play-to-earn games.
Eliminating free-to-play may prove difficult as the business model generates $120 billion in annual revenue – more than half of all game revenue, according to GamesBeat. However, Leydon is optimistic.
Speaking to GamesBeat, Leydon said, “If you’re matching free to play against free to own, there’s no way free to play is going to survive. I don’t see how anyone goes back to free-to-play after that. Free to play is downloading the game for free of a bunch of virtual items that you can’t actually own. We are completely reinventing the gaming industry.”
Free to Own (F2O) is the new meta. The paid coins and “country sale” is OVER!!! 🥳
— Gabriel Leydon (@gabrileydon) 29 August 2022
Details about Limit Break’s new game are scarce, but the studio is giving away free NFTs to early fans who can sell their digital assets on NFT marketplaces. Limit Break will also keep an undisclosed percentage of the NFTs for itself. If the NFTs become valuable, Limit Break can sell them at market prices – along with those sold by fans – to generate revenue.
Earlier this month, Limit Break released their first NFT collection, called DigiDaigaku Genesis. The collection consists of 2022 cute female anime characters who “live in a mysterious world unknown to outsiders”. Currently, the collection has a floor price of 13 ETH on OpenSea.
Keep yourself updated:
