Cartridge acquires web3 game dev Playmint

Consolidation is in the air. Following Polygon’s purchase of blockchain game infrastructure outfit Sequence, US onchain gaming platform Cartridge has announced it’s buying UK game dev Playmint.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Both Cartridge and Playmint share Bitkraft as an investor, which likely made the deal easier to close.

Playmint’s debut game was fully onchain co-op experience The Crypt in 2022, after which it focused on building deeper, fully onchain gaming infrastructure alongside its UGC game Downstream, which had a long public test but which was never formally released.

However, as part of the Autonomous Worlds movement, Playmint continued to experiment on its technology, in particular focusing on client-side proofs.

This resulted in Playerchains, which are described as “a peer-to-peer consensus architecture designed to enable real-time multiplayer without centralized servers”.

These will now be integrated into Cartridge’s Dojo onchain gaming engine.

In its blog post, Cartridge says this will expand what is possible for developers building with our toolchain, adding:

“This acquisition strengthens our ability to provide the most comprehensive infrastructure for onchain game development. We’re excited to build on the foundation Playmint established and continue pushing the boundaries of what games can be”.

We last spoke to Playmint CEO David Amor two years ago on the subject of “Autonomous worlds and godless games”.