French gaming giant Ubisoft has announced that Axie Infinity and Xaya are among the companies that have been invited into their entrepreneurs lab. This fifth season of the blockchain-oriented innovation program has place for blockchain and gaming service Xaya, the creators of Axie Infinity, the trading card game Splinterlands and fantasy football game Sorare.
In addition Planetarium, which is working on a community-powered blockchain system for games, joins as well again. Alongside Xaya and Axie Infinity, Ubisoft has also invited edutainment studio Atlantide, cloud gaming company Caregame and augmented reality gaming company Immersiv.
The collaboration between the different studios is mostly virtual, as they are spread around the world. Splinterlands is from the United States, Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity) is from Vietnam, while Sorare is French. However, Ubisoft wants to help these projects to achieve their goals to invent the future of gaming.
“We are convinced that by joining forces with talented entrepreneurs, we can only enrich each other and accelerate our common efforts for gamers.”
Emmeline Biscay, Chief Data Officer at Ubisoft.
Axie Infinity aims for mainstream
In a separate press release Sky Mavis announced their collaboration with Ubisoft. They stated to be working closely with Ubisoft in order to ‘prepare Axie Infinity for a mainstream release’. For example, the studio wants to embrace the concept of free-to-play, combined with play-to-earn. They also want to make the on-boarding process as easy as possible, while making it all feel like pure fun.
“We’re incredibly excited and grateful to be working with an industry leader like Ubisoft and look forward to leveling up our skills and exploring other avenues where we can work together.” – Sky Mavis
At the same time the team of Xaya seems to look at the collaboration in bit more open. They underline that Ubisoft will be mentoring each of the startups with specific needs. However, they didn’t specify what their specific needs are. Experts from Ubisoft can help them technically, but also with things like the user experience, design, marketing or legal issues. Interestingly both Xaya and Sorare are working on a blockchain-powered football game, so perhaps that’s an area for collaboration.
