NCSoft Plots Web3 Games On Sui After $15M Mysten Labs Investment

The firms plan to collaborate on Web3 games after NCSoft contributed to Mysten Labs' recent $300M Series B round.

The well-known South Korean developer and publisher NCSoft is focusing more on Web3 gaming. The company announced today that it contributed to the $300 million Series B fundraising round recently completed by Mysten Labs, the company behind the developing Sui blockchain, and that the two will work together on further initiatives  

NCSoft—the company behind hit online game franchises like Lineage, Guild Wars, and Blade & Soul—invested $15 million in the round, which was originally announced in September without its participation disclosed. The round, which was led by FTX Ventures, valued Mysten Labs at over $2 billion.

NCSoft intends to collaborate with Mysten on prospective Web3-powered games in addition to providing financial support for the company. In a release, the companies said that they would "explore future collaborations to create digital entertainment experiences that are more engaging and player-centric, leveraging Sui."

In November of last year, NCSoft revealed that it was looking into the possibility of releasing games powered by NFT in 2022 as well as looking into developing its own cryptocurrency token. The company added that it was exploring with ways to develop Web3 gaming's play-to-earn business model for massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)

"Blockchain technology has the potential to create novel and innovative player experiences" said Dr. Songyee Yoon, president and chief strategy officer of NCSoft, in a statement.

"We are excited to partner with Mysten," she continued, "who shares our vision for the technology as a platform for a truly distributed player centric economy, passion for community building, and trustworthy technology which is crucial for those who desire to build a platform of desired scale and reach."

Ubisoft, Square Enix, and Take-Two Interactive, collectively the developers of such titanic series as Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy, and Grand Theft Auto, have also begun developing and investing in Web3.

Sui is a new layer-1 blockchain platform. Layer-1 blockchains are base-level networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana that allow developers to deploy decentralized applications (dApps) and projects on top of the protocol.

"Bringing gaming to Web3 requires infrastructure that can support millions of players while enabling these players to own and interact with fully on-chain, dynamic, and composable digital assets," said Blackshear, in a release.

As the Diem project was winding down in 2021, members of the social media giant's Novi Research team launched Mysten Labs. Sui, a proof-of-stake blockchain platform created for decentralized applications (dApps) and other use cases, is Mysten's first project. The project is still in testing and has not yet opened up its mainnet to the public.