Ragnarok Landverse, a Web3 version of the popular Ragnarok Online massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), will debut on Sky Mavis’ Ronin Network with Ragnarok Landverse: Genesis around the first quarter of 2025.
New life for an old standby
Ragnarok Online, a classic title from the MMORPG boom of the 2000s, has attracted over 100 million players and generated over $2 billion in revenue. The Web3 version will appear thanks to a partnership between Ronin and blockchain gaming platform Zentry. The terms of the agreement between Sky Mavis and Zentry were not disclosed.
Zentry launched Ragnarok Landverse in September 2023. It has attracted over 400,000 players and generated $18.9 million in revenue. It was particularly popular in Southeast Asia. Ragnarok Landverse: Genesis will not be a continuation of Ragnarok Landverse. Ronin said on X:
“This is a fresh new experience exclusively available on Ronin. Today, Ragnarok Landverse has other live servers and legions of players. These servers will also migrate to Ronin at a later date. For now, note that any existing Landverse assets will not be usable in the Genesis experience on Ronin.”
Zentry, which raised $150 million in an early-stage funding round in August, will become a node validator on Ronin. It will also bridge its ZENT token to Ronin and launch incentivized liquidity pools on Ronin’s Katana decentralized exchange.
Ragnarok comes in many forms
On Dec. 13, Zentry launched its Nexus Player Portal by onboarding the Ronin community. The portal offers benefits such as universal digital identity, a lifetime reward system and cross-platform integration. Zentry CEO Jarindr Thitadilaka said in a statement:
“Together, we’re paving the way for future Biggest gaming IPs [intellectual properties] to transition into Web3. […] We are fully committed to making our vision of onboarding 50 million global users to Web3 gaming a reality.”
With more than 3 million transactions per day and up to 4.7 million users per month, mainly thanks to the Axie Infinity game, Ronin has proven scalability. Ronin already hosts Ragnarok: Monster World.
Sky Mavis laid off 21% of its workforce in November, saying it needed to free up resources and hinting at a new game premiere in 2025.
All versions of Ragnarok were inspired by the South Korean comic Ragnarök, which is based very roughly on Norse mythology.
Ragnarok Landverse is based on Ragnarok Online, launched in 2002 by South Korean game developer Gravity. Gravity has a partnership with gaming studio Maxion Labs, which is partly owned by Zentry.