TenthPlanet unveils two ambitious blockchain games

TenthPlanet, a game studio started by former TikTok game leaders, plans to launch some ambitious blockchain games.

The company is working on some ambitious games, including Mech Angel, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game inspired by Genshin Impact, and a digital cat metavers called Alien Meow.

The studio was started by William Wei Chen, a former game development manager for TikTok, and his colleague Kevin Yeung. He started Mokun Technology and sold it in 2019 to Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, for more than 250 million dollars. The company’s games have so far generated more than $ 600 million. Chen’s role was production manager.

Chen took the money and started TenthPlanet to create a series of new games to take advantage of Web3 technology, which uses the blockchain to authenticate unique digital objects. TenthPlanet has more than 100 game developers working on Unreal Engine and Unity titles with triple-A production values, Yeung said in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We’ve been building mobile games for the last 10 years,” said Yeung. “Our goal is to make games that last for a decade. We position ourselves as digital nation builders, digital world builders. “

Chen’s former team at Mokun Technology was responsible for creating One Piece, which was launched in April 2021 and generated more than $ 200 million in revenue for TikTok. The rest of TenthPlanet’s management team and advisors have worked in Final Fantasy, Forbes, Solana, Tencent Gaming, NHN and Hashed.

In all, Chen’s 10 games have generated more than 200 million users, and he managed more than 1,500 game developers. Yeung previously worked at Morgan Stanley and has made various venture capital investments.

While the founders are from Hong Kong, TenthPlanet is a virtual production house built for “new gaming economies driven by digital ownership, with a deep understanding of blockchain community engagement,” Yeung said. Most of the team are in Shanghai.

“We believe in free trade in virtual assets, decentralized management of online communities and real digital
possession, “said Yeung.” To build and realize this gaming future, we have assembled a best-in-class production team, with proven results in gaming / blockchain / VC, with M&A and secondary exits. “

Mek Angel

The self-funded titles include Mech Angel, a Unity-based MMORPG game that comes to both mobile and PC platforms. The mobile titles have completed beta demos, and the team hopes they will have hundreds of hours of gaming before it launches, Yeung said.

The animated world is similar to Genshin Impact’s anime style, and it contains young women fighting against Japanese-style mech robots. The company has invested more than $ 6.5 million in the game so far. The game features player-versus-environment shooters and is friendly for new players, Yeung said. And it will also have player-to-player play.

Mech Angel already had playable demos on Android and iOS this year. The company is completing a funding round for these titles and developing in-game wallets, an NFT marketplace, virtual assets and more in the second half of the year. The company will develop a PC version demo for the fourth quarter and launch the PC beta in the first quarter of 2023.

“We are very close to finishing that match and we are very excited,” said Yeung. “We have hundreds of playing hours now. As we saw with Genshin Impact outside Asia, animation is taking over the world in a way now. You see how much of the Netflix volume comes from the animation genre. “

Alien Mews

Alien Mews is a digital cat life simulation metavers. It’s a digital cat breeding and grooming world built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. It’s a virtual pet game that lets players try to generate value in the game from breeding, much like CryptoKitties. The company has poured around $ 2.5 million into the game so far, Yeung said.

They describe it as a large, open playground that can be home to all kinds of pets in the galaxy, where players can collect, breed, upgrade, train, tame and participate in competitive mini-games with their new furry.
companions in the funniest and most rewarding metaverse experience ever where Nintendo meets Pokémon.

Each cat is very detailed and has as many as 500,000 strands of hair. Alien Meow is expected to have a video demo in the third quarter and a playable demo in the fourth quarter. The goal is to launch a beta version of the cat’s metaverse in the first quarter of 2023 with more mini-games.

Build the team

Yeung said the company has begun raising funding from external gaming companies. He thinks it will go well because the team has a history of making hit games, including One Piece, Fighter of Destiny, Three Kingdom, Project Ragnarok and Heroes of Storm. Most of these were hits in China.

Other executives include Tony He, chief technology officer, and Vanessa Tso, blockchain leader.
Advisors include Yoshihisa Hashimoto, technical director and producer on Final Fantasy; Jeff Yam of Forbes; Neo Liu, Head of Tencent Gaming in the United States; Alex Shin, founder of Hashed; Paul Walborsky, founder of AI Reverie; and Kit Low, formerly of Goldman Sachs.

Why blockchain?

The company focuses on blockchain because it felt that the needs of mobile users were not met in the last decade when it came to trading assets in the game. Such trade was “very inefficient and opaque,” Yeung said.

“If you went back a decade, people would meet physically offline to swap usernames and passwords and shop for cash,” Yeung said.

Now blockchain technology will enable players to trade seamlessly with transparency, he said.

“It’s turning a pure entertainment experience into an entertaining and economical experience,” Chen said. “Players have put so much time and financial investment into a game, and it’s a one-sided consumer experience,” Chen said. “We can not do it alone. But we are very encouraged by what has happened in the last 18 months. We think there will be many partners that we can grow together. “

Chen added: “With or without blockchain, it has its own economy. And blockchain only gives us a seamless platform to make it happen. The second point is that we are very experienced in open worlds, as you can see from some of “The videos of the One Piece game we made. Some of the One Piece virtual assets were very popular with users to buy. So we are excited about a seamless and transparent financial platform that we can finally create with blockchain in the future.”

He is aware that players in the West have expressed their opposition to blockchain technology in games, as they are concerned about over-revenue generation or fraud. But Chen said there will be a big difference between Web2 players and Web3 players. Not everything in the game will involve non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

“It goes back to the core idea of ​​whether a game is an entertaining experience,” he said. “Our job is to let you enjoy your screen time money. Players do not have to think about the blockchain when they play our game. It will be like any other entertaining experience for regular players. “

He added, “And if they want the blockchain, they can claim the wallet, and then they can start trading the NFTs, the virtual assets, the virtual land and upgrade their weapon acceleration.”