Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki’s new studio is making NFT games

Former Team Ninja boss Tomonobu Itagaki has announced that his new studio is making an NFT game called Warrior.

The Japanese game designer, who is best known for creating Tecmo’s Dead or Alive series and for reviving its Ninja Gaiden franchise, said last year that he was returning to game development with a new studio.

It’s called Apex Game Studios and is focused on producing “high-quality and immersive 3A Web3.0 games”, Itagaki said on Tuesday.

Apex Game Studios currently has over 100 employees based mainly in Japan and Singapore.

Its debut project is Warrior, an NFT game for mobile and PC built with Unreal Engine.

“The Warrior Project is about to make its initial decentralized exchange offering, or IDO, and release the first Alpha version, and a series of Giveaway events are ongoing in the communities,” according to a press release from Apex Game Studios.

It added: “Itagaki expressed that one of the main characteristics a blockchain game must have to succeed is to be a real game that is fun and attracts attention — precisely what his team wants to achieve with Warrior.”

According to a roadmap on its official site, the beta version of Warrior is planned for release in the first quarter of 2023.

Today’s press release said: “[Itagaki] also commented that he was interested in not only developing games based on nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, but also the Metaverse and is planning to use the technologies as a great weapon.

“Itagaki believes it is vital to embrace the changes and take on the new challenges inherent in blockchain technology.”

Sales of NFTs dropped to a 12-month low in June amid a broader slowdown in the cryptocurrency market, which has fallen in worth from about $3 trillion in November 2021 to under $1 trillion.

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Earlier this month Web 3 company Polium announced its ‘Polium One’ system, which it claimed will be “the world’s first multi-chain gaming console” that will be capable of running games built on different blockchains.

Last month Sony Interactive Entertainment veterans Michael Mumbauer and John Garvin announced the formation of a new gaming and entertainment studio called Liithos, which is working on an NFT game called Ashfall.

The title, which will see players fighting to survive in a world scarred by global warming, is the brainchild of Garvin, the former creative director and writer at Days Gone developer Bend Studio.