Magic Eden Accelerates Games Growth with Chief Gaming Officer

Following its expansion to Polygon, Magic Eden appoints games industry veteran Chris Akhavan to boost Web3 games vertical

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Magic Eden ("The Company"), the leading cross-chain NFT platform, announced the hiring of Chris Akhavan as its first Chief Gaming Officer. In his new role, Chris will be responsible for driving the growth of Magic Eden's gaming partnerships and supporting the development of enhanced game creator and collector experiences on the platform. Magic Eden believes Web3 gaming will grow into a multi-billion dollar per year industry by placing digital asset and gamer identity ownership in the hands of players, and will open up its massive Web3 audience reach to game developers to make this a reality.

Prior to joining Magic Eden, Chris served in a number of roles across the game industry navigating multiple platform and business model shifts. As Chief Revenue Officer, he helped lead Glu Mobile's turnaround from a struggling company from the pre-smartphone mobile games era with a $240M market cap to a leading modern mobile free-to-play studio that was acquired by Electronic Arts for $2.4B. Prior to Glu, he was an early employee at pioneering mobile gaming startup Tapjoy which created a platform leveraged by nearly every free-to-play mobile game in the early days of the App Store and Google Play, reaching over a billion mobile devices and ultimately being acquired by ironSource / Unity for $400m. Chris gained Web3 experience as Chief Business Officer at Forte and as part of Game7, a $500m Web3 gaming fund and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which he will continue to advise.

"As a lifelong gamer, I truly believe the game industry is going to be transformed by placing ownership in the hands of players. There are already massive vibrant markets around in-game items in games like Counter-Strike, and Web3 technology is the perfect solution to enable game asset ownership in a scalable and connected way across an enormous universe of games and player communities. Magic Eden is one of the largest Web3 platforms in the world with over 10 million unique user sessions per month and $2.5 billion in NFT trading volume to date. The team here really believes in the mission to bring digital property rights to gamers while creating incredible new opportunities for game developers. I'm excited to see the impact we will have in accelerating Web3 gaming," stated Chris Akhavan.

In July 2022, Magic Eden launched a venture arm, Magic Eden Ventures, that focuses on investing in Web3 games and has helped incubate eight projects to date. Pay-to-win models and escalating game marketing costs have led to industry stagnation with the game industry set to decline year-over-year. With blockchain gaming, a better alignment between the game developer and gamer can exist, whereby the gamer becomes strongly interested in the game's long term success. This alignment can enable more transparent game economy design and community driven organic marketing. The company stands firm in the belief that blockchain games will be an on-ramp for millions of gamers to Web3 and an important growth opportunity for game studios. Magic Eden's existing Launchpad has delivered over 400 projects and will be leveraged to launch the most impactful Web3 games in the coming years.

The games-focused initiatives come on shortly after Magic Eden's announced integration into the Polygon network. The team plans to support game developers building on Polygon to onboard the next generation of gamers into the Web3 ecosystem and has already lined up a number of world-class developers to debut on its Polygon enabled Launchpad, including: BORA backed by major Korean developer Kakao Games, Block Games, IntellaX, Animoca-backed nWay, Boomland, Planet Mojo, and Taunt Battleworld.

Zhuoxun Yin, COO of Magic Eden, stated: "Chris is going to take us places. He's got that special sauce that only a few people in the world have, coming from traditional gaming while also being intimately familiar with blockchain technology through his experiences at Tapjoy, Glu, Electronic Arts, Forte, and Game7. We have been preparing to unleash the reach of our platform to the game ecosystem, and our vision to drive distribution and revenue to Web3 games can now really come to life with Chris' leadership and guidance. Our team and the broader Web3 game industry are lucky to have Chris here working on this."

Magic Eden is the leading cross-chain NFT platform driving the next billion users to Web3. Led by former crypto, tech, and hospitality leaders, Magic Eden is building a user-friendly platform powered by market-leading minting and trading solutions. Magic Eden brings dynamic cultural moments onto the blockchain, empowering users across thousands of digital communities to create, discover and collect unique NFTs. For more information, please visit www.magiceden.io.

Media Contact
Dillon Arace
M Group Strategic Communications (on behalf of Magic Eden)
315-512-6886
[email protected]

SOURCE Magic Eden