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Two big new web3 ventures broke cover this past week, led by well-known mobile games folk.
First, there’s Limit Break, the new web3 firm co-founded by ex Machine Zone bigwigs Gabe Leydon and Halbert Nakagawa. They raised $200m from Buckley Ventures, Standard Crypto, Paradigm Ventures, FTX, Coinbase Ventures, Anthos Capital, SV Angel and Shervin Pishevar.
The firm intends to make ‘free-to-own’ games that’ll gift NFTs to players as a way of driving adoption. “Free-to-play gaming is ending,” said Leydon as part of the announcement, “and Limit Break is coming to replace it.”
“People talk about Web 3 gaming like a futuristic inevitability,” he added. “It’s not. It requires people to properly design and build it. And those people work at Limit Break.”
Then there’s Xterio, which appears to have spun out of FunPlus. Jeremy Horn was announced as FunPlus’ new VP and head of innovation back in February, and he’s clearly been busy since: he’s now co-founder of Xterio. Prior to FunPlus/Xterio Horn was VP of business strategy at Jam City, GM at TinyCo and a producer at Gameloft and Ubisoft.
He’s joined at Xterio by CTO Yitao Guan (who is also a co-founder of FunPlus) and CMO Darion Lowenstein, a veteran advisor and consultant who has worked in senior roles at Scopely, EA, Activision and Rockstar. Former Krafton senior art director James Hall is also part of the Xterio founding team, and is now the firm’s creative director.
Away from Web3, Rovio has hired Sybo’s creative director Giorgio Giussani. He’ll now serve as the Angry Birds brand’s creative director, and has previously held senior art roles at King, Ikea and LEGO. Elsewhere in Finland, former Seriously product owner Petrik Sandberg is now game designer at Metacore.
At Scopely this week, Linda Schram has stepped up internally to become the new people business partner, Svetoslav Grigorov is the new ASO manager, Jeremias Rocha is now senior build engineer and Dajana Pitra is the new community manager.
A couple of moves at King to report; Hannah Sprake is the Candy Crush maker’s new commercial finance manager and Carlos Martinez is now senior Java software engineer.
And last but not least, Amazon Games has hired former Blizzard ops manager and Zenimax product manager Marie Peters as its new senior publishing producer.
