Gabe Leydon’s Limit Break has $200M to make a new kind of blockchain game
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Gabe Leydon was a pioneer of free-to-play mobile games at Machine Zone, which was sold for $600 million in 2020 to AppLovin. Now he’s back with Limit Break, a blockchain game company with $200 million in funding.
Leydon left Game of War maker Machine Zone in 2018 to explore cryptocurrencies. His initial attempts didn’t work out, but in August 2021 he teamed up with his Machine Zone cofounder Halbert Nakagawa to create a game with a new kind of blockchain-based business model dubbed “free to own.”
“Our focus is on a what I believe is going to replace ‘free to play’ with something I call ‘free to own’ games,” Leydon said in an interview with GamesBeat.
That’s a big statement, as free-to-play has become the dominant business model in games, generating $120 billion in annual revenues, or more than half of all game revenues. Pioneered in Asia with online PC games, free-to-play caught on worldwide with social and mobile games, and it expanded the reach of gaming tenfold to billions of people.
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So Leydon’s claim is a big one, and it starts with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. Limit Break uses NFTs to authenticate unique digital items using the digital ledger of blockchain. But in contrast to other models where game companies presell NFTs before they launch their games, Limit Break will give away the NFTs to fans. Leydon calls this a “free mint game.”
Leydon believes this will avoid the
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