Limit Break’s 10K NFTs for DigiDaigoku Disappeared ‘Immediately’ After Super Bowl Ad

Limit Break gave away 10,000 “free-to-own” non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in its DigiDaigaku Dragon series during the Super Bowl on Sunday.

Gabe Leydon, CEO of Limit Break and former CEO of Machine Zone, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the company’s first 5,000 Dragon Egg NFTs were snapped up instantly by players who had already established cryptocurrency wallets. And since the company anticipated this demand, it also randomly gave away another 5,000 to people who registered on the company’s website.

Under the “free-to-own” model, players can receive NFTs for free and eventually use them in a game or sell them to others.

“It was literally instant, one second,” Leydon said. “Wow, that was just crazy. We did something unusual and talked about our Super Bowl ad in early October. And we used it as another in our series of free-to-own NFT campaigns.”

After the Super Bowl coin, players began selling their holdings. And the company added more than 1.3 million followers on its social platforms like Twitter.

Currently on the NFT market Open Sea, the DigiDaigaku Dragon Eggs have a floor price of 0.28 ETH, or $426. About 33% of NFTs hit the market, with a total volume of 1,180 ETH, or about $1.4 million. Over the past 24 hours, the price had risen as high as $700.

The actual dragons have not been revealed yet. It will happen later and the NFTs will enable those holding the eggs to get the dragons.

Using a QR code in a commercial during Super Bowl LVII yesterday, the company gave away thousands of Dragon series NFTs. Leydon said the ad, which cost $6.5 million, was well worth the price. Limit Break raised $200 million last year.

Limit Break has been giving away free NFT funds for months to a growing number of fans ahead of this upcoming free NFT giveaway during Super Bowl LVII. The gifts mark a radical departure from the previous generation of NFT projects, which often required thousands of dollars for
digital collectibles instead of giving them away for free.

In many cases, these earlier projects sell these collectibles as in-game assets for games that they promise to build with the money they receive in these sales. Many such projects fail to deliver on these promises or simply push them far into the future, and Leydon has been critical of such failures while asserting the promise of NFTs if handled properly.

“I definitely think this is the future of advertising. It’s just absolutely crazy,” Leydon said.

Mobile gaming is a huge industry worldwide – far bigger than TV, movies and music combined. The vast majority of the industry is built around the free-to-play model – also developed by Leydon and co-founder Halbert Nakagawa at a previous company, Machine Zone – where users either purchase additional game enhancements or earn them by playing.

Founded in 2021, Limit Break aims to grow a massive global audience. Leydon was CEO of Machine Zone in 2016, when it sponsored a memorable Super Bowl ad featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger for its Mobile Strike game. Other Machine Zone ads featured celebrities such as Kate Upton and Mariah Carey.

The company decided to hold half of the NFTs for later distribution through a lottery process because it expected that most people viewing the ad would not already have crypto wallets. About 100,000 people per hour still enter the site.

“We knew it was going to happen extremely quickly,” Leydon said. “We wanted it to be as clean as possible.”

Get it technically right

Other NFT coins have not fared as well, especially recently when there were large “gas fees”, the computing/environmental costs associated with transactions on Ethereum in the past. Limit Break focused on technology to eliminate this cost, (Ethereum’s move to proof of stake helped) and the company’s total spend on minting costs (covered by the company) was just 9 ETH, or $13,423 in US dollars, Leydon said.

“In the past, gas taxes were too expensive,” he said.

Leydon said the company had to be concerned from past experiences to ensure its website would hold up under a load of Super Bowl traffic. It was a nail-biting moment when the time came for the commercial, with more than 40 people in a sort of “war room”. But it went off without a hitch, Leydon said.

“We had zero technical issues. We were able to get millions per second into the site and we were running a first-come, first-served distribution of NFTs,” Leydon said. – We had to solve a big problem. This is extremely high pressure.”

And Leydon said the company used its own technology and didn’t need to resort to another Layer 2 blockchain solution on top of Ethereum. Players scanned the ad and had to use a cryptocurrency wallet.

“I’m a big believer in Super Bowl ads,” Leydon said. “We invented a new form of advertising. We created a technical process to do this on Ethereum. We were also able to distribute these assets through an advertisement. I think it’s a watershed for game marketing.”