Quick take:
- Chris Akhavan will be responsible for driving the growth of Magic Eden’s gaming partnerships.
- He joins Magic Eden from Forte, an end-to-end blockchain platform for games.
- Prior to entering the Web3 space, Akhavan led Glu Mobile, Electronic Arts and Tapjoy.
Magic Eden today announced the appointment of games industry veteran, Chris Akhavan, as its first chief gaming officer.
He joins Magic Eden from Forte, an end-to-end blockchain platform for games, where he was chief business officer. He is also part of Game7, a $500 million Web3 gaming decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which he will continue to advise.
In his new role, Akhavan 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.
“We’re going to build products on Magic Eden that will give gamers reasons to visit us every single day to discover games, get rewarded for playing them, and interact with vibrant communities of passionate gamers. We’re also going to build products to help game studios to reach gamers and significantly grow their revenue by accessing valuable Web3 markets,” Akhavan told NFTgators in an email.
Prior to entering the Web3 gaming space, Akhavan served in a number of roles across the Web2 gaming industry. As chief revenue officer, he helped lead Glu Mobile’s turnaround from a struggling company in 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. Following the acquisition, he served as VP of EA Mobile.
Before joining Glu, he was an early employee of the 10-person team at Tapjoy, where he built a leading advertising and monetization platform for free-to-play mobile games and grew the business to more than 300 employees worldwide and over $120 million per year in revenue. As the company’s SVP of global partnerships, he built and scaled Tapjoy’s commercial operations and developer relations globally, including establishing offices in Japan and Korea.
Magic Eden is expanding into blockchain games, having launched Magic Ventures, a new fund that will focus on investing in promising blockchain games and gaming infrastructure as well as its internal gaming division, Eden Games.
In November, it announced plans to integrate with the Polygon network, allowing the marketplace to work with strategic IP owners, world-class game developers, and emerging creators from the Polygon ecosystem.
The platform firmly believes that blockchain games will be an on-ramp for millions of gamers to Web3 and an important growth opportunity for game studios.
When asked about what it would take to onboard Web2 gamers to Web3, Ahkhavan commented: “Getting Web2 gamers into Web3 will ultimately come from providing seamless connections into the games they already love and play every day. We’re confident that Magic Eden can be a major driving force in introducing Web3 ownership to Web2 game communities, building off of the experiences we’ve had in massively growing the NFT market so far.”
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