Limit Break (DigiDaigaku) Raises $200M to Bring the Gaming Industry into New Era‍

‍Gabriel Leydon and Halbert Nakagawa's startup, Limit Break Inc., a company best known for its DigiDaigaku NFT collection, has announced that it has secured $200 million in funding from Buckley Ventures, Standard Crypto, and Paradigm Ventures. FTX, Coinbase Ventures, Anthos Capital, SV Angel, and Shervin Pishevar also contributed to the funding.

Nakagawa and Leydon are most known for founding Machine Zone, which had flashy advertisements with celebrities like Mariah Carey, Kate Upton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as #1 top grossing games including Game of War, Mobile Strike, and Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire. With Limit Break, Leydon and Nakagawa—pioneers of "Free-to-Play" gaming—take an entirely different direction.

"We have the perfect partners, perfect investors, and perfect team in place to bring the gaming industry into a new era," said Leydon. "Free-to-Play gaming is ending," said Leydon, "and Limit Break is coming to replace it."

‍The DigiDaigaku NFT collection, Limit Break's debut project, was made available to the public for free. Limit Break anticipates that "Free Mint Games" will replace the use of the IPO-style financing that dominated the NFT market in 2021 and allowed game developers to sell components of "Play-to-Earn" games for hundreds of millions of dollars. Leydon said, "This model doesn't work, but our Free-to-Own model works.”

Limit Break intends to replace both the "Play-to-Earn" and "Free-to-Play" models with a new one termed "Free-to-Own" with the introduction of DigiDaigaku.

Limit Break was born in August 2021, and the fight sequence known as "Limit Break" that became popular in RPGs like the Final Fantasy series served as the inspiration for the name of the game. Limit Break was created by Leydon, who got his start in the video game industry as a game tester in the 1990s. The game aims to fill a significant need in the emerging Web 3 gaming market.

"People talk about Web 3 gaming like a futuristic inevitability," says Leydon, "it's not. It requires people to properly design and build it. And those people work at Limit Break."

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