Embattled board game firm CMON pours $2.1m into a lossmaking NFT company

On Thursday, April 23, Hong Kong based board game firm CMON announced its intention to purchase $2.1 million worth of shares in the firm behind 'Capverse', which it describes as a "Web3 'play to earn' game using the blockchain technology". In a disclosure to the Hong Kong stock exchange, CMON's directors set out the reasons for purchasing a stake in a firm, which - according to figures CMON itself provides - made a loss of $197,000 from a total revenue of $409,000 in 2024, and held liabilities worth $889,000 USD.

Once renowned as a major producer of premium Kickstarter board games, CMON's most recent annual report showed that it lost $19.9 million in 2025, following losses of $3 million in 2024. It ceased development on all new games in April 2025. It has since sold off several major IPs including the flagship Zombicide IP to Asmodee in June, and Cthulhu: Death May Day to Asmodee in October. In February 2026 it secured $1.2 million via the sale of shares, earmarking the money for game development.

Two months later, this new trade will see it spend almost twice that much to secure 2.2% of the shares in Blissful Link Investments Limited, an NFT videogame company with its HQ in the British Virgin Islands tax haven. According to CMON's disclosure to the HK stock exchange, "the Company believes that in order to continue to be relevant in the games industry and to expand the Group's revenue stream, the Group would need to conduct digital transitioning and venture into video game development and Web3 projects".

In its announcement of the deal, CMON says "this transition is expected to create a new revenue stream for the Group", and that "the Board believes that the integration of the Group's proprietary IPs with digital and Web3 technologies will enhance the long-term commercial value of the Group's portfolio". It also adds that "Web3 projects often emphasise social responsibility and ethical practices such as transparency and fairness on decision making. By participating in Web3 projects, the Company can demonstrate its commitment to social responsibility and sustainability".

CMON also suggests that "Digital transitioning would have the benefits of enhanced visual effects, have apps that handle scoring, timing etc, would enable a diversified number of players and are more accommodating to players not within the same vicinity". It adds it would "continue to supplement this digital transformation as physical games would still offer a "screen break" for individuals as well as foster direct face to face interaction".

"Web3" games include marketplaces for players to trade their digital assets using real world money, and players can earn additional, saleable assets by winning at the game, hence the moniker 'play-to-earn'. While exactly the same structures have existed in games for a long time - notably the unpopular cash auction house in the launch version of Diablo 3 - Web3 gaming became a buzz term in 2021 because it was built on the then-popular technology of NFTs, which rely on blockchain tech.

Rather than tracking which objects a player owns in a server-side database, Web3 games use blockchain to distribute a ledger of transactions among all participants with no single owner. Notionally, this makes the games decentralized, so that players rather than developers own their digital assets. However, since the assets in a Web3 game only have use and value within the coding framework of that game, this is a purely theoretical distinction - if the game shuts down, the assets disappear in all functional senses. This is one reason why most enthusiasm for Web3 games disappeared at the end of the NFT craze: you can find retrospective articles looking back on the boom and bust of NFTs as early as 2023.

Source: https://www.wargamer.com/board-games/cmon-invests-nft-company