We are at the beginning of a profound change in the Games Industry.

This is not the same type of change that we’ve seen before. It is not a cyclical platform transition driven by new local processing power, changes in storage mediums or interfaces that have powered the growth of our industry every 5-10 years. This change is much, much more complete than any that has gone before - it is the start of a new epoch that will impact every aspect of our industry.

How do we know? Individually and collectively the team at N3TWORK have been a part of many great phases in our industry - we’ve grown up coding games in our bedrooms on home computers, we’ve leapt from 8-Bit to 16-Bit, from Genesis to PlayStation, from offline to online and from dumbphone to smartphone. When compared to those transitions, we can tell you that this is very, very different.

Blockchain gaming does not favor a demographic, a region or a platform. It doesn’t just affect what we play, but how we play and why we play. It’s not constrained to a single constituent in the great ecosystem of games - it will affect every corner of the industry, force multiplying value in its wake and impact developers, publishers, marketers, advertisers, investors, platform makers and of course, players.

At N3TWORK, we believe that the changes brought by the advent of blockchain gaming and all that it represents will be felt not only in the games we make, but how they are made, how they are marketed, how revenue & ownership are distributed throughout the ecosystem and even how games are thought of by those who play them.

It is of course already happening - the pace of innovation is blistering and sometimes it’s easy to dismiss because so much of the innovation is happening in and around things that seem simplistic by the standards of gamemakers today - but it’s the inversion of game-making in Loot!, the governance models in Nouns DAO, the CC0 creativity platform of Gremplin’s Cryptoadz, the advent of YGG’s PlayerDAO or the incredible ambition and scope of PixelVault’s MetaHero Universe that show us hints of what’s possible for games, our community of players and our industry as a whole.

At N3TWORK, we’ve felt this transformation in our bones (or bits) and, for the last 6 months, we’ve embarked on a careful plan to meet this incredible opportunity by transforming our company and today, I’m very happy to announce the final two pieces of that puzzle.

1. N3TWORK Studios is born.

Our first big announcement is that we’re creating N3TWORK Studios, a new standalone company to house our incredible Game Teams & IP. The company will be led by Matt Ricchetti, who will serve as its President. Matt joined us earlier in 2021 to oversee Legendary & our new franchise Triumph, and has a rich background as both a gamemaker and Studio leader with roles as the President of Studios at Glu, VP Mobile at Kabam & Chief Product Officer at PerBlue. Capitalized from the proceeds of our recent transactions and stacked with talent, the N3TWORK Studios team will have the mission to create breakthrough experiences on and around blockchain technologies across all platforms, but with an obvious and particular focus on mobile where we have spent so much time over the last decade.

In addition to its development capacity, N3TWORK Studios will have a dedicated publishing and growth team to help its products thrive in the web3 space as well as the benefit of the technology that has powered N3TWORK’s Scale Platform using its own instance to unlock the potential of its products in the market.

Finally, EA Co-Founder Bing Gordon and ngmoco:) / N3TWORK co-Founder Bob Stevenson will join me on the Board of N3TWORK Studios where I’ll serve as the Executive Chairman.

For the team at N3TWORK Studios, they now have the opportunity to reimagine what games can look like - how players connect with and participate in the things that the incredibly talented gamemakers their craft. A chance to rewrite the rules of gameplay, of player ownership and player involvement.

2.Forte!

Our second announcement involves Forte. From the first moment that I started discussing the potential for Blockchain gaming with Forte’s CEO & Founder Josh Williams, it was clear to me that we saw its opportunity in the same way and at the same scale. Blockchain gaming represents to both of us an opportunity to reimagine and revolutionize not just games themselves, but the entire games industry. It’s a mission that will require incredible talent, technology & resources deployed across the ecosystem both directly through the work of a company like Forte, and through investments and partnerships with others in the space.

With some shared DNA between our companies, we initially started exploring the possibility of collaborating and, like all the best love stories, ours had that kind of inescapable gravity that made it seem inevitable. The more we dug into the possibilities and the potential, the clearer it became to both of us what the nature of that partnership should really look like.

To that end, today we’ve announced that Forte has acquired N3TWORK’s Platform Technologies and Team. We’ll be joining forces to be a leader in this industry transformation and as a part of this acquisition, I’m delighted and incredibly excited to be joining Forte to lead our Games Industry endeavor as we pursue our mission to reimagine and revolutionize the entire ecosystem through the blockchain.

At Forte, we’re just getting started - In addition to today’s announcement to bring our technologies and talents together, we’ve recently announced our $725m Series B, the $500m Game7 Ecosystem Fund in partnership with BitDao and the $150m Fund with Griffin Gaming Partners & Solana for Blockchain Games. These resources, our teams and our technologies are all being deployed in service of unlocking the market’s potential - across all those corners of the industry and on behalf of all those developers, publishers, marketers, advertisers, investors, platform makers and players.

There will be a new era of gaming, and Forte is committed to helping rewrite the rules of the industry. We’re going to enable this ecosystem in the spirit that it deserves - underpinned by community economics & governance, openness & interoperability, ultimately decentralized, leading to enduring change and impact for every participant within it.

All that is left then is everything that this blue ocean has for us. Whether at Forte or N3TWORK Studios. This is it, join us & LFG!

Neil Young