PUBG’s parent company Krafton to compete in the world of NFTs and Metaverse

Krafton, the parent company of the widely popular PUBG video game developer Bluehole, announced on its web portal that it has made equity investments worth $2.5 million in Seoul Auction Blue and $4.1 million in XBYBLUE to develop a non-fungible token (NFT) oriented project. Krafton signed a memorandum of understanding with these two companies. Seoul Auction Blue is an affiliate of Korea’s largest art auctioneer, Seoul Auction and XBYBLUE is a subsidiary of Seoul Auction Blue and operates a service called XXBLUE, which secures and curates the intellectual properties (IP) of various digital content to offer limited digital art content to users.
Krafton earnt over $300 million in 2021. The announcement further gave the following details about Krafton’s NFT and metaverse-related projects:

• • Seoul Auction Blue and XBYBLUE will be responsible for designing and promoting the NFT products and managing Krafton’s intellectual property rights.
  • Bluehole Studio, one of the game development studios of Krafton, will lead the company’s initial collaboration with Seoul Auction Blue and XBYBLUE.
  • All the companies will together help in achieving Krafton’s big-scale massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) server operation and next-generation graphics technologies to create and sell NFT avatars that can be used in the metaverse in the future.
  • The partnership with XBYBLUE and Seoul Auction Blue will help Krafton to offer NFT avatars and other products based on its PUBG Battlegrounds franchise.
  • Krafton has also collaborated with Naver Z to develop a joint Web3 and NFT-based platform.
  • The metaverse experience created with the technical expertise of Naver Z will augment the experience of Krafton to design the digital assets of its metaverse.
  • Naver Z owns Zepeto, a four-year-old platform that runs a metaverse-based project allowing players to communicate through 3D avatars using augmented reality technology.

The CEO of Krafton CH Kim said the partnership would help in offering new experiences that global users will find fun and engaging.