While investment is heating up in the blockchain gaming sector, a common criticism of crypto-powered games has been how to secure users from outside of the cryptocurrency space.
Blockchain gaming powerhouse, Animoca Brands, believes that acquiring mainstream games with loyal players and exposing them to the benefits of blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) is the best way to attract new audiences into crypto.
Cointelegraph spoke to Yat Siu, the chief executive of Animoca Brands, to learn about his firm’s strategy for bridging the gap between the mainstream gaming and crypto worlds.
Animoca Brands has quickly emerged as a leading firm within the crypto gaming sector, securing a global licensing agreement with Formula 1 ahead of its F1 Delta Time release, and announcing a $3 million initial exchange offering (IEO) for its title The Sandbox on Binance’s launchpad last week.
Siu described The Sandbox as a prime example of how strategic acquisitions have allowed Animoca to capture non-crypto-native audiences and expose them to blockchain technologies.
“When we do acquisitions, we're not buying companies that are necessarily blockchain-related,” Siu said. “When we acquired the company Pixowl, it was a traditional mobile game developer that had the Sandbox game that wasn't yet fully on blockchain, although they had the vision to go there,” he continued.
“We're not just acquiring a talented team that could make stuff on blockchain, but we are also acquiring customers that already play the game — and these are gamers that we can transfer over.“
A stake in a game’s success
Siu emphasized that Animoca’s seeks to acquire games that “already have a captive audience that is already generating revenue [and] already loving the product as it is.”
“By giving it the benefits of blockchain technology, those gamers will get an additional benefit that we think is very powerful,” he added.
Siu described blockchain as driving a disruption to the gaming industry akin to the emergence of online gaming, but with very different concepts around “ownership and value.”
“Ownership allows [gamers] to actually have a stake in the success of the game.”