For over two decades, MapleStory Universe has been one of gaming’s most enduring online worlds. Originally released in 2003, the 2D side-scrolling MMORPG developed by Nexon has amassed hundreds of millions of players globally.
But according to Jeongheon “Keith” Kim, Chief Operating Officer of MapleStory Universe under the web3 division NEXPACE, those virtual investments were never truly owned by the players who made them valuable. Blockchain, he says, changes that entirely.
“MapleStory has been around for 23 years and I myself grew up playing the game,” Kim told TheStreet Roundtable. “People spent a lot of time, a lot of energy and money into playing the game, accumulating their characters, growing their characters, seeing them as a second self in the virtual world.”
“In Web2, all these valuable things that accumulate cannot be translated to something lasting — something that can be monetized or traded. But with blockchain technology, because you actually own whatever you get over the journey of playing the game, you can actually trade them and that’s officially recognized.”
Kim believes this shift from platform-controlled assets to player-owned economies is the next logical evolution for gaming, one that allows players to treat in-game progress as genuine property.
A new builder economy
Beyond ownership, MapleStory’s blockchain transition is about expanding its ecosystem beyond what a single studio could build.
“We would like to expand our ecosystem so much faster, so much bigger — beyond what we can imagine ourselves,” Kim said. “That’s why we’re inviting builders to build using the blockchain protocol where all the items, all the assets are interoperable.”
He added that blockchain also creates a powerful way to incentivize creators to collaborate directly with MapleStory’s IP and assets.
“It’s much easier for us to incentivize the builders to build with us using our IPs, using our assets, and hence the blockchain becomes such a useful tool for us to achieve all these expansion visions we have.”
Why Avalanche
When asked why MapleStory Universe chose Avalanche as its blockchain partner, Kim pointed to a balance between independence and scalability.
“We did try different ecosystems before we made the choice,” he said. “We wanted to have our own chain, but we are a gaming company — not a blockchain core company. We don’t want to spend a lot of resources researching, hiring and building these chain from scratch.”
Avalanche’s technology, Kim explained, provided exactly what the company needed: enterprise-grade subnets with interoperability and performance out of the box.
