Nexon Teams Up with Polygon to Launch New NFT Game, MapleStory Universe

Quick take:

• Nex­on is team­ing up with Polygn to cre­ate a new NFT game dubbed MapleSto­ry Universe.
• The Kore­an game pub­lish­er first for­ayed into NFTs last June with MapleSto­ry N.
• Play­ers and cre­ators in the Maplesto­ry Uni­verse will be able to devel­op and man­age NFTs in the vir­tu­al world.

Nex­on has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Poly­gon to launch a new non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT) game, MapleSto­ry Uni­verse. The Kore­an video game pub­lish­er will allow play­ers and cre­ators to devel­op and man­age NFTs in the vir­tu­al world, giv­ing them dig­i­tal own­er­ship of in-game items in the game.

The com­pa­ny began its for­ay into NFT gam­ing in June last year when it announced MapleSto­ry N and MapleSto­ry Mobile N. Devel­oped with­in the new MapleSto­ry Uni­verse, the two games will allow cre­ators to devel­op new con­tent and char­ac­ters based on MapleSto­ry IP.

Begin­ning with MapleSto­ry N, Nex­on will add the MapleSto­ry-based IP and dApp sup­port before intro­duc­ing the use of dApps and NFTs to the rest of the MapleSto­ry Universe.

MapleSto­ry is a mas­sive­ly mul­ti­play­er online role­play­ing game (MMORPG) with more than 180 mil­lion reg­is­tered play­ers. The game also boasts a strong com­mu­ni­ty on social media plat­forms and gam­ing forums. How­ev­er, the MapleSto­ry Uni­verse is far big­ger than that, encom­pass­ing mak­ers of third-par­ty games and user-gen­er­at­ed content.

In a ses­sion on Tues­day dur­ing the Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence (GDC), the com­pa­ny said the NFTs will have both tan­gi­ble and intan­gi­ble util­i­ty, as it charts a path that some tra­di­tion­al gamers in the west con­tin­ue to resist.

Unlike reg­u­lar video games where play­ers can buy weapons and skins, MapleSto­ry N will not include a cash shop. Play­ers will acquire in-game assets via the game­play by com­plet­ing quests and defeat­ing monsters.

NFTs are lim­it­ed in each lev­el or region in the game, which cre­ates a val­u­a­tion mech­a­nism and fun for own­er­ship. The com­pa­ny wants to demys­ti­fy the myth that NFT games are not fun by build­ing its new blockchain game on top of its already fun and suc­cess­ful franchise.

Its col­lab­o­ra­tion with Poly­gon will also play a big role giv­en the Lay­er 2 blockchain protocol’s big net­work of cryp­to-native users.

Poly­gon recent­ly formed an alliance with fel­low Ethereum scaler, Immutable to cre­ate a new web3 gam­ing ecosys­tem dubbed Immutable zkEVM, pow­ered by Poly­gon. The new gam­ing plat­form utilis­es zero-knowl­edge rollups to pro­vide infi­nite scal­a­bil­i­ty while main­tain­ing the secu­ri­ty pro­to­cols pro­vid­ed by the Ethereum network.

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