The “2nd Korea NFT Blockchain Game Conference” hosted by the Korea Game Media Association (Chairman Lee Taek-soo) took place on June 27 at the international conference hall in Gyeonggi Center for Creative Economy in Pangyo Techno Valley, Gyeonggi-do.
Various game companies that are currently working on blockchain projects, such as Nexon, Marblex, Alibaba Cloud, and Polygo, participated in this event. During the morning session, Nexon and Marblex gave presentations on the reasons and strategies for adopting blockchain technology.
In the first presentation, Hwang Seon-young, a team leader of Nexon, talked about “the reason why Nexon is introducing blockchain”. She said, “It has been 20 years since Nexon released Maple Story, and the cumulative number of users has reached 180 million. In the meantime, since we pride ourselves on being a leader in the content industry, we decided to go beyond the realm of games and integrate them with events and broadcasting. That is why it is important to provide “Rarity Control” function in the game.”
Hwang went on, “In RX 2.0 system, which combines reward experience and blockchain, we will provide a next-generation Maple Story by strengthening the game’s utility and making its items rarer by limiting the total amount of items. They are the essence of our new ‘Maple Universe’.”
Then she introduced Maple Universe. Maple Universe is an environment where developers and creators can build content together and apply NFT to PC Maple Story and provide the game for various uses around the world through Maple SDK.
In the second presentation, Moon Jun-ki, a director of Marblex, a subsidiary company of Netmarble specializing in blockchain, spoke on the topic of “New Challenges in the Marblex Web3 Game Ecosystem”. He first introduced Marblex’s games “A3, Ni no Kuni: Cross world,” “THE KING OF FIGHTERS: ARENA,” “Everybody’s Marble 2: Metaworld” and its blockchain technology.
While operating various types of games, Marblex said that the staff felt that web3 games were still at a beginner level, and that they were going through various trials and errors to popularize web3 technology, and that the company plans to improve the platform.
Moon said, “We plan to increase user accessibility and reduce hidden costs by providing various services at ‘MBX Station’ for the popularization of web3 games.” Lastly, he concluded, “Introducing ‘MBX Universe 3.0’, Marblex will strive to secure the sustainability of our platform and expand to multi-chain services.”
During another keynote speech, Park Jae-kwan, the Korean branch manager of XT.COM, talked about “the blockchain NFT game market and success strategy”. He stressed the potential of the blockchain game market, saying that the blockchain game market was worth 6.4 trillion won back in 2021 and it is expected to reach 130 trillion won in 2028, accounting for half of the current game market.
In addition, as for why NFT is important for the game industry, he said it is because play time can be converted into economic value, game items can be owned forever, new game culture can be created, and finally, the concept of GameFi now has a direct impact on game companies.
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