Taki Brings Play-to-Earn Mobile Games to Polygon After Merger, Acquisitions

Taki began life with a crypto-powered social app built on Solana, but following a merger with a Web3 studio and acquisition of established mobile games, the rebranded Taki Games has revealed plans to launch play-to-earn experiences built on Polygon.

Taki Games recently completed a merger with Unite, the blockchain studio behind the Kungfuverse NFT project, and has named former Unite CEO Weiwei Geng as its own CEO as it launches projects on Polygon, an Ethereum scaling network.

Geng co-founded Rally Network and previously held leadership positions at esports team Gen.G and prominent mobile game developer Kabam. At the latter firm he oversaw the launch of popular mobile titles in the “Kingdoms of Camelot” and “The Hobbit” franchises.

In addition to the merger and CEO appointment, Taki Games acquired the existing mobile games Bored Button and Mom’s Kitchen, claiming some 5 million installs for Bored Button—a collection of quick-hit games developed by Gabble Studios—and over 150,000 downloads for cooking game Mom’s Kitchen from Magic Game Studio.

Overall, Taki says it spent a combined $2.5 million worth of money and TAKI tokens between the merger and acquisitions, which were completed in recent weeks.

Taki Games will launch its native TAKI token on Polygon, and reward players with the token via play-to-earn games. The company bills its deflationary token rewards model “Takinomics,” buying back (from the market) and burning as many tokens as it rewards to players in an effort to gradually reduce the circulating supply.

Play-to-earn gaming surged in 2021 with the rise of Axie Infinity, inspiring a vast number of other games that attempted to incentivize gameplay with token rewards. Axie’s economy struggled after several months of buzz and the model lost steam—but with the crypto market blooming again, some developers are rethinking the approach and giving it a fresh start.

“The initial blockbusters of the Web3 gaming showed the enormous demand for a game that players can actually own,” said Geng, in a statement. “They also showed what happens when the business model can’t keep up with the vision and inflation eats away at the value. Taki’s mission is to grow Web3 gaming by transforming multibillion-dollar markets into value that gamers can keep for themselves.”

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He added that players will earn tokens through gameplay, explaining, “All of the ad revenue they see from in-game ads is brought on-chain and distributed to players as rewards for clearing content.” A Taki representative said that TAKI is already being implemented across the company’s 11 mobile games and will soon be featured in all of them.

While Taki’s focus has shifted towards gaming, it will continue to support the TAKI token on Solana and aims to eventually build across even more chains, all powered by the same type of buy-and-burn model.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.