Animoca Brands to acquire Darewise, the indie game company developing “Life Beyond”

Animoca Brands, the company advancing digital property rights for gaming and the metaverse, today announced it will acquire Darewise Entertainment, a game developer founded by veterans of the AAA games industry that is currently developing the high-quality blockchain MMO Life Beyond.

Darewise Entertainment is a European game studio made up of highly accomplished game developers with deep experience in various highly popular and successful AAA games, including Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Dying Light 2, Black & White, Tom Clancy’s The Division, and the Fable series. Darewise Entertainment was co-founded by former Ubisoft game director Benjamin Charbit and former Ubisoft and Crytek tech lead Samuel Kahn, both of whom will continue to operate the company after the acquisition.

The collaboration between Animoca Brands and Darewise Entertainment will facilitate planned growth,  accelerate game development, and combine expert AAA video game development with blockchain integration, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and play-and-earn capabilities. Animoca Brands will assist Darewise Entertainment to fast-track development and publishing in the Web3 space. 

Darewise Entertainment’s first game, Life Beyond, is currently in development. It is a fast-paced and ever-evolving modern persistent massively multiplayer online game set on Dolos, a fascinating alien world where players will create and foster a new society in which social behaviors and technology will determine success.

Life Beyond will be free-to-play (F2P) and will have a low barrier of entry; a series of free drops of the NFTs required to play the game will be announced soon. Initially, the game will be available on PC.

Powered by Web3 and blockchain technologies, Life Beyond will pioneer the emerging genre of the play-and-earn MMO. Its guiding principles are the true ownership of digital assets, a player-driven social in-game economy, and decentralized governance.

Initially, user governance in Life Beyond will be enabled by gameplay-based tools, and later upgraded to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) when the unique token of the game is made available.

The game experience of Life Beyond will revolve around the three main pillars of Pioneering, Settling, and Politics.

Pioneering: Explore the mysteries of the magnificent landscape and engage in combat.  Tame ancient nanotech corrupting the World, collect resources and ancient tech, cleanse ancient ruins in order to conquer regions.

Settling: Transform conquered regions into lands to be settled by players. Build housing and provide leisure and economic activities for the populace. Trade resources and goods, blueprints, and tech to support a new civilization of pioneers. Deal with thieves and criminals and organize town defenses against attacks from nano enemies.

Politics: Define and enact the rules of your society. Choose whether to pursue personal wealth and control of your neighborhood, or develop a more democratic organization. Hold elections, organize the market, impose taxes, regulate the economy, define policies, and deploy police forces to maintain order. Convince other towns to follow your model or fight against them to impose your supremacy.

Life Beyond will empower players to make decisions both on an individual level via their own play choices  as well as collectively by making critical decisions on the future direction of the game. The society of Life Beyond will evolve according to the choices, user generated creations, and behaviors of its players.

Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, commented: “Bringing on board Darewise Entertainment is incredibly exciting. Its game Life Beyond is an  MMORPG of great beauty and scale that will be a strong addition to the open metaverse.  Benjamin and Samuel have built a world-class team that is creating a play-and-earn game universe that is intricate, sophisticated, and deeply engaging.”

Benjamin Charbit, CEO of Darewise Entertainment, said: “We are incredibly proud to join Animoca Brands and add our AAA games experience to the company that has been so instrumental in the development of Web3 gaming. Since late 2017, we’ve firmly believed that virtual existence will become at least as important as the physical one. Over time it became obvious that we’re a Web3 company at our core and that blockchain offers the means to achieve our vision.

“It took visionary entrepreneurs like Yat to leap ahead and build such an impressive ecosystem, paving the way for everyone else. As we watched Animoca Brands set out the blueprint of the open metaverse with projects like The Sandbox, REVV, and Phantom Galaxies, we knew that we would benefit enormously from its Web3 expertise and network. We are thrilled to be a part of this endeavour!”

Related News