Microsoft has invested in a Korean blockchain gaming company

Microsoft has invested in a Korean gaming company that specializes in blockchain technology.

Wemade has announced that a new round of investment saw it receive around $46 million in investment from a number of companies, including its Xbox parent.

While it is not clear how much of this $46 million is attributable to Microsoft, Wemade stated that it had “been remarkably successful in attracting new capital from […] a foreign strategic investor on favorable terms’.

Wemade CEO Henry Chang added: “This is a meaningful investment by recognized financial and strategic investors with proven results. Wemade and Wemix will continue to make efforts to attract more capital and actively invest to build the global digital economy platform.”

Wemade was founded in 2000 and develops PC and mobile games. The most notable franchise is Legend of Mir, a series of PC and mobile MMORPGs.

According to the company, the recent title Mir 4 “became the world’s first well-made blockbuster blockchain game since the company entered the blockchain industry in 2018”, although it is not clear what metrics it uses to determine this.

Wemade recently launched its own blockchain mainnet called Wemix 3.0, which it describes as a “platform-driven and service-oriented mega-ecosystem”. A mainnet is a fully developed and distributed blockchain network where cryptocurrency transactions can be broadcast, verified and recorded on the blockchain.

It also has its own NFT auction site, and plans to introduce its own “economy platform” that supports NFTs and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organization, a collectively owned organization with no central authority).

It’s not clear how Microsoft’s investment in Wemade fits into its own strategy, but it seems unlikely that it will directly lead to blockchain or NFT technology being included in its own games.

Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer has publicly stated that NFT gaming “feels more exploitative than entertainment” to him, adding in August that he was “wary” of gaming for profit cryptogaming, saying it “creates a workforce out of players”.

Spencer also recently referenced Mojang’s statement that it would not allow NFTs to be in Minecraft. The Xbox studio said it finds NFTs “exploitative” in their current use, but that the underlying technology could eventually serve a better purpose.

“We made some comments in Minecraft about how we view NFTs in this area because we saw people doing things that we thought were exploitative in our product — we said we don’t want that,” Spencer explained to Bloomberg in August.

“I think sometimes it’s a hammer looking for a nail when these technologies come up. But the actual human use – or player use, in our case – of these technologies, I think there could be some interesting things.”