Nexon, one of Asia’s largest game publishers, is developing a new Web3 game called MapleStory Universe based on its popular pixelated 2D role-playing franchise, and it’s launching a private Supernet on Polygon for the new game, Nexon announced Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Nexon’s long-running success story is MapleStory, which debuted in 2003. According to the corporation, the game has produced more than $4 billion in revenue to date and has more than 180 million registered users. Almost 260 million cumulative players are listed on the game’s Steam page.
“By building on Polygon, we hope to grow the NFT environment envisioned by MapleStory Universe,” MapleStory Universe Group Chief Hwang Sun-young stated in a statement. “We will collaborate closely with the Polygon Labs team to develop and sell the game.”
Polygon is an Ethereum scaling network that allows for faster and less expensive transactions than Ethereum’s mainnet. In an interview with Decrypt, Polygon Labs VP, Global Games and Platform Business Development Urvit Goel said that the upcoming PC game’s Polygon Supernet will allow Nexon to create its own “dedicated app chain.”
“They have the power to scale in ways that a shared blockchain cannot,” Goel said of Nexon and its planned Supernet. “Since the game and the IP are so huge, they have a pretty broad view of how many transactions they think they’ll do daily.”
Polygon’s Supernets are similar to Avalanche’s Subnets in that they provide a specialized sub-network for individual projects to use. They give designers some customisation choices while also protecting decentralized programs (dapps) and games from potential performance difficulties on the larger public network.
MapleStory World was revealed last year, but no release date has been set. However, Goel stated that there will be no NFT presales and that players will be able to acquire NFTs just by playing the game.
“They’re not pushing for in-app purchases,” he added, alluding to the microtransactions ubiquitous in iOS and Android mobile games.
