It’s interesting to see Sky Mavis co-founder Aleksander Larsen tweeting out that the Ronin blockchain has parted ways with two game developers.
The first is Japanese outfit ACT Games, which bought its TCG Zoids from Polygon to Ronin in November 2023. I thought it was a well polished game but wasn’t innovative either in its web3 or trading card elements [YT]. It’s also worth pointing out that November 2023 was before Ronin’s current resurgence. If Zoids was to launch now on Ronin, it would do much better.
Anyhow, Larsen says there have been “some strategic shifts with the leadership within ACT that no longer aligns with the vision we have at Ronin Network”. For that reason, Sky Mavis has “offramped” Zoids and all its NFTs with immediate effect. Existing NFT holders will get some RON as recompense.
In general, he seems pretty pissed about the situation.
The other company off Ronin is Bowled.io, which is an Indian developer working on sports-based hypercasual mobile games, staring with cricket. It was one of the first wave of games announced for Ronin in early 2023, but there’s not been much public progress since. It doesn’t have any assets on Ronin, for example, instead announcing its token is launching on the BNB blockchain.
In that sense, the move from Ronin isn’t a surprise. That stated, Sky Mavis led Bowled.io’s recent funding round so it seems that something weird has occurred in the past couple of months.
In general, though, these were some of the weaker games announced for Ronin and so are no loss in that regard. Another early game Battle Bears announced it wasn’t launching on Ronin a couple of weeks ago, although this decision was positioned as by mutual consent.
More strategically, however, I think the announcement highlights Ronin’s growing confidence as a gaming platform. When it first announced its thirdparty games, Ronin had about 10,000 daily active unique wallets and was a business partner of uncertain potential. Now, however, it’s about to top 1 million DAUWs, and hosts Pixels, the most popular blockchain game. The RON token has just hit an all-time high too.
Of course, as a permissioned blockchain, Sky Mavis also has the final say in terms of which games it will allow to be launched.
That puts it in a very strong commercial position.
Hence I’d also be very surprised if it doesn’t announce a bunch of high profile new games coming to Ronin in the near future; possibly even next week during GDC, which would contextualized these announcements as cleaning the deck ahead of time.
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