In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Kevin Lee, the CEO of AI game-making platform Verse8, which recently announced its $5 million seed funding round.
BlockchainGamerbiz: We previously caught up with Verse8 when we spoke to JC Lee in episode 204 [YT] so six months on, it’s great to be talking to its new CEO Kevin Lee. But before we get into Verse8, can you give us an introduction?
Kevin Lee: My name is Kevin Lee and I’ve been working as CEO of Verse8 for about eight months. Prior to that, I was part of a company called Planetarium Labs, which is the parent to Verse8. At Planetarium I ran a web3 venture fund for about three years, mainly focused on deploying capital to early-stage web3 gaming studios. Before joining Planetarium I had a background in private equity, and before that I was in M&A. So I’ve been in finance for some time and then made the transition over to web3 and gaming.
What was your first reaction when you saw the Verse8 tech and got your hands on it?
Actually, with what became Verse8, we first started off by building our own WebGL game engine. That was supposed to be for our latest title at Planetarium. But in late 2024, we quickly realised that with the most recent LLMs, the engine interacted really well with these major models. It can actually spit out fully playable games in a couple of minutes.
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We realised that in 2024, and we were like, this is going to change the game. That’s when we decided this could be a huge project. Verse8 is now a separate company, a totally different brand. We believe this can go really big and become a global brand. From 2024 to now, it’s been a heck of a ride.
That’s interesting because in 2024, LLMs weren’t that great, compared to what they can do now.
You’re absolutely right. In the early days — 2023, 2024 — LLMs and the tools out there couldn’t make games. But in 2025, we started seeing products like Nano Banana, Veo 3, all these high-tier generative AIs.
Now, if you go to our website, verse8.io, you’ll come across games that have more than 100 hours of progression and new creativity that you’ve never seen in the market. We’re very early, and it has huge potential, just like Roblox did 10 years ago.
We haven’t actually explained how Verse8 works. As a consumer, you go to the website and you can type in a prompt and it builds you what most consumers would call a hypercasual game. But there’s also a version for professional developers too.
Also, there’s really nothing wrong with hypercasual games. We need snack games in our lives. But in order to progress, we need to be able to come up with a lot more complex games, where we can integrate different things like crypto, like webview features. We’re helping our creators implement different methods of monetization within their games so they’re incentivised to create games where people can come in and stick to it. It’s a big challenge and we’re constantly trying to solve it.
One interesting thing you’re doing with the technology is encouraging people to play and remix other people’s games.
We’ve got some good early traction. Just for the record, the platform currently has about 3.5 million MAUs and more than 200,000 DAUsm so we have a player base willing to try out games on our platform. What that means is, if you have creative ideas, you can come to our website and start creating games of your own, and you can use our platform as a testbed. You can see if your game works or if people are interested in playing it. This is a game-changer.
If you look at larger-scale game studios these days, you’ll notice there are certain formulas to making games. That’s because the upfront cost of creating games in a traditional way is so high you can never take risks. Tools like ours allow individuals or small-scale teams to actually test their ideas, and if it works, they can expand on it.
To your second point, if you don’t have any original ideas, you can take a look at others and start from that by doing the remix, what we call the spin. What we found most interesting was that we did all kinds of marketing, and we didn’t have to spend that much to attract 3.5 million users. There were demographics from all different regions willing to come to our platform and try out new types of games. It looks fantastic and we see a lot of potential in it.
Of course, you enable creators to integrate web3 too.
Web3 is in our DNA. We never intended this to be a web3 product, but I think there’s huge potential in integrating web3 features. Now we can come up with games and let individual creators create something that’s creative and truly web3 degen. We did a hackathon with YGG, and we’re got more than 100 submissions in a couple of days.
[The winning game was Bank or Plank.]
We’re seeing a lot of creative ideas come to life, integrating features and making sure there are onchain mechanics implemented within their games to attract more players to come in, play fun fast games, trade cryptos and hopefully win something back from their plays.
One thing announced fairly recently was you raised $5 million. We’ve not seen a lot of funding recently in web3 but you have a good number of well-known South Korean game companies as investors. What are the things they like about Verse8?
We ended up raising our seed round from mostly strategic investors. Names like Nexon, Netmarble, MarbleX and Neowiz. These are all giant gaming studios based in Korea. For instance, Nexon owns a number of legacy IPs and it’s all for utilising them for secondary creations. For all these big gaming companies, their main interest is how they can utilise their legacy IPs — IPs that have been around for 20 or 30 years — to unlock more revenue.
When I had the opportunity to pitch them the idea of Verse8, they were very excite. All of them have a separate contract with Verse8 for IP partnerships. You’ll see more legacy IPs being rolled out on Verse8. That has huge potential, because obviously individuals and small teams can create their own IPs using Versate, but they can do it much faster with legacy IPs. They can utilise working IPs, IPs with a fanbase and a community, to come up with their own original ideas and creations and start generating revenue right off the bat. This round was shaped by these strategic investors, and we’ll carry out experiments with them on how to make these IPs come to life even more.
Nexon and its web3 arm Nexpace, which is making MapleStory Universe, seem very interested in the opportunities.
Yes, it did a separate press release on their investment. It’s all about maintaining and running the builder community for MapleStory. It maintains huge communities of developers from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere and its intention is to expand the ecosystem. I think Verse8 is a great fit. We’re in discussion to roll out a separate landing page for MapleStory Universe, and we’re going to invite all the developers from MapleStory to try out Verse8 and come up with their own creations. It’s going to be great.
There are lots of AI tools, so what makes Verse8 different?
Kevin: I’ll try to be careful here, but I think for our investors our biggest moat was the fact that we have our own engine. We’ve been developing our engine and building our libraries for about three and a half years. Utilising our engine, creators can easily come up with games that are complex enough to implement whatever they want, versus other tools out there that may be good for creating a simple side-scroller or a simple puzzle game. Our platform is more equipped to create a variety of games.
How are you handling the costs of running a platform that’s using AI companies’ very expensive compute?
For full transparency: if you sign up as a new user to Verse8, you’re automatically given $10 free credit. You can use your tokens for Claude, Gemini etc. We provide all options for our creators. When you run out of that $10 you’ll need to top up with your credit card. We try to lower the barriers so developers can put in a couple of prompts free of charge and see what comes out. We run fairly complicated budgeting schedules to make sure we can afford that going forward.
For the foreseeable future, our plan is to let everybody come in and try our tools for free, at least for the first couple of prompts. If they like it, they can top up. If they really like it, they can apply for our creator programme where we give out credits for free. Our first priority is to lower barriers for everybody.
Do you hope that Verse8 becomes a consumer brand? It’s a really long way off but you could be like a Roblox.
Branding-wise we’re really ambitious. Roblox, Steam, Epic Games, these are the brands we go after. We want to be a good platform for all gamers and players who are interested in spending some time. In the broader sense, I think our competitors include YouTube, because we’re all fighting for screen time. That’s our ambition.
Whether the games are created using AI tools or not, I don’t think that’s an issue. Obviously we’re all for providing a tool that works really well and has zero failure rate, but at the end of the day our platform needs to provide games that people like to play. Whether AI-generated or not isn’t the issue. So we’re all for attracting good IPs, good creators and talented individuals who are willing to use our tools and come up with attractive content for our mass audience. That’s the vision.
Many western game developers are against the use of AI. Is the attitude different in South Korea?
I see the exact same thing in Korea. I talk to all these studios, and the core development teams are really against developing games using AI. Some of the developers and designers aren’t using AI at all in the process. I think it’s slowly getting better, just because of the efficiencies. You can draw the base for your assets, but without utilising AI it’s just going to be too slow. You can’t keep up with the pace of the industry moving forward without using the latest technologies.
So I think it will take some time, but adoption is definitely taking place. If you talk to executives in big game studios, they obviously have mixed feelings about games being developed using AI tools, because the hardcore players for their games dislike assets, images and gameplay designed by AI. They prefer to look at the whole game as an art piece, so the human touch and the human development need to be there. I think there’s a good balance we can find moving forward. So I’m not particularly too worried about the current pushback against using AI.
What should we be looking out for from Verse8 for the next six months?
Internally, the team is laser-focused on proving the revenue cases for our creators. We’ve secured good early traction. The next challenge for us in the next quarter or two is to make sure our creators actually monetize through their content, and that players keep coming back to our platform with more stickiness.
We need to be helping our creators, our game studios and our investors come up with more attractive content. Part of that is utilising the legacy IPs that they’re willing to provide to the platform. Once we start seeing meaningful revenue cases — “I made this game and I made $100,000 in a month or two” — that’s when the platform really takes off.
In the next six months or so what you need to look out for is how we come up with content that’s attractive enough for our players to come in, and then we’ll start working more aggressively on retaining users on the platform. That’s the main challenge.
Find out more at the Verse8 website.
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