Gabe Leydon's Limit Break has $200 million to create a new kind of blockchain game

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Gabe Leydon was a pioneer of free mobile games on Machine Zone, which was sold for $600 million in 2020 to AppLovin. Now he's back with Limit Break, a blockchain gaming company with $200 million in funding.

Leydon left Game of War maker Machine Zone in 2018 to explore cryptocurrencies. His early attempts didn't work out, but in August 2021 he teamed up with his Machine Zone co-founder Halbert Nakagawa to create a game with a new kind of blockchain-based business model called "free to own." .

"We're focusing on what I think is going to replace 'free to play' with something I call 'free to play' games," Leydon said in an interview with GamesBeat.

This is an important statement, as free play has become the dominant business model in games, generating $120 billion in annual revenue, more than half of all gaming revenue. Pioneered in Asia with online PC games, free play has spread around the world with social and mobile games, and it has increased the reach of games tenfold for billions of people.

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So Leydon's claim is significant, and it starts with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. Limit Break uses NFTs to authenticate unique digital items using the blockchain's digital ledger. But unlike other models where game companies pre-sell NFTs before launching their games, Limit Break will give away NFTs to fans. Leydon calls it a "free mint game".

Leydon thinks this will avoid the scam-like behavior where companies first sell NFTs and then don't ship games. Instead, by giving away the NFTs, Leydon believes he can turn fans into the best defenders of an upcoming game, where fans evangelize the game virally. It will be so appealing to fans starting from scratch that Leydon believes the model will eliminate free and NFT pre-sales.

Gabe Leydon, CEO of MZ, at MobileBeat 2016.

These digital items would normally be something a company only sells. But in this case, the company shares these articles with the first fans. It also keeps a percentage of the digital items for itself. Fans are free to sell their items on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea. If the price of NFTs increases, then Limit Break may sell some of its own NFTs alongside those sold by fans. And so...