4 min read
The studio behind mobile game Fableborne has announced that it will be moving the title from Avalanche to the Ethereum sidechain scaling network Ronin, with the developers pointing to Ronin’s robust gaming community as reason for the shift.
Fableborne is a mobile multiplayer game that blends action role-playing gameplay with base-building strategy in a quest to create a competitive game that can be played in “short, snackable sessions.” It has completed two open beta testing periods, called seasons, where the developers claim to have seen “explosive growth.”
Pixion Games founder and CEO Kam Punia told Decrypt that Fableborne racked up over 100,000 players in its second season with a high retention rate—an average of 18 hours per week per player.
Originally, Fableborne was being built on top of Avalanche but ahead of its third season, Pixion Games has announced it will be migrating to Sky Mavis’ curated gaming network Ronin.
“[Ronin] has this passionate community that welcomes you in, and there's so much that we can learn from that community,” Punia said, explaining why Fableborne is migrating. “Being able to jump into that community, I think, is going to be really important for the studio.”
This has been named by Sky Mavis and supporters as the “Ronin Effect,” claiming that games that join the network see impressive growth numbers thanks to such a fervent built-in community around games like Axie Infinity and Pixels. The later game itself migrated to Ronin in 2023, with its NFT land prices jumping 300% following the move.
Sky Mavis is also the studio behind Axie Infinity, one of the first Web3 games to take off and generate billions of dollars’ worth of NFT trading volume back in 2021. But this success didn’t come without its hardships as the game’s economy crashed, resulting in mass criticism of its play-to-earn model. Now Sky Mavis is passing its lessons to the next wave of developers.
“Tapping into Sky Mavis’ vault of knowledge [is also a factor],” Punia added. “I don’t think there’s another ecosystem that has been through the experiences that they have, specifically on gaming.”
This knowledge will be crucial as Fableborne heads into its third season, which promises to be the biggest yet as crypto elements will be added to the game for the first time.
“Up until now, it's really been about perfecting and finding that fun core loop,” Punia explained, adding: “That will change in Season 3.”
Fableborne had not deployed any assets onto Avalanche, making this migration to Ronin seamless for the developers and players.
For now, Pixion Games remains fairly tight-lipped on the specifics of its Web3 plan for Fableborne. But broadly, Punia revealed, in-game heroes and equipment are set to become NFTs, all with unique traits suited for different playstyles.
No official date has been set for Season 3 as of yet, but Punia expects this to be revealed over the coming weeks, alongside other “really exciting” announcements. Season 3 will deliver three weeks’ worth of play time, Punia said, and will act as a significant step to Fableborne’s eventual full launch.
“We've got a clear goal: That's to make Fableborne a huge success, and a category-defining hit,” Punia told Decrypt. “And everything we do up until then is defined by that North Star.”
Pixion Games is eyeing a full, global launch for Fableborne in 2025. Pixion Games believes that Ronin’s collective expertise and welcoming community will help the studio reach this goal, as it enters the final stretch.
“I always say: In Web3 you can run 1,000 experiments and still fail, because there isn't that clear silver bullet,” Punia said. “So being able to really curate and battle-test our assumptions [...] I don't believe we've got a better partner than Ronin.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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