Welcome to this edition of Epik’s newsletter. Here you will find the latest on brand collaborations, digital merch, the metaverse, and everything in between!
Crossovers and Merch Drops
1. Epik Crossover Feature
Last week another one of our game clients dropped a huge game title release which included a deluxe edition with an Epik crossover.
Read the full story on our blog.
2. Bruce Lee X Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
The collaboration between these two iconic athletes and advocates for social justice kicks off with the release of a limited edition t-shirt on November 27th – Bruce Lee’s 80th birthday.
“We had an unlikely friendship – a 7’2” basketball player and a 5’8” martial artist – but we had a shared interest in music, the arts, philosophy, and improving the lives of people who looked like us,” said Kareem. “We believe that tackling systemic racism starts with making a friend who doesn’t look like you and creating empathy for others. That’s what we’re hoping to promote with our social justice champion/social justice warrior efforts.”
Hot Brands
Brand in focus: Miraculous
During 2020, “Miraculous” has grown its digital reach by 178%. TikTok was a big part of the success and showcases how innovative brands can expand their digital ecosystem and strategy.
The new TikTok channel will unveil never before seen footage including music videos with choreography, split-screen videos with script and storyboards, short videos from the TV series reflecting seasonal events, characters speed drawing; promotional videos/teaser trailers, ‘making of’ videos; gaming previews, special VIP invitations and more.
Metaverse Happenings
In focus: IMVU
IMVU recently received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to enable payments in its virtual world through a blockchain-based cryptocurrency dubbed VCoin.
With its ruling in November 2020, the SEC enabled IMVU to allow users to buy and sell goods with VCoin and also to cash out and convert it to Ethereum, a well-known cryptocurrency, or into U.S. dollars. The so-called “no-action letter” from the SEC lays the groundwork for other companies to do the same thing, and that’s one of the foundations of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected.
Other operators of virtual worlds — such as the game worlds of Roblox and Fortnite — could benefit from the ruling, so long as they follow the same guidelines that IMVU is, IMVU CEO Daren Tsui said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Having something like VCoin is important because the metaverse isn’t expected to be a single world operated by a single company. It will likely be a collection of virtual worlds, all interconnected in a way that makes travel between the worlds easy and seamless. If you buy something in a virtual world from a company or another user, you want to be able to trust that transaction and take the object to another world. If you sell an item, you want to be able to get paid and then cash out. And from the viewpoint of companies, creating a marketplace where users can supply the digital items could be far easier than one company’s own developers trying to populate a metaverse full of digital items.
IMVU will be talking about this development at the GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse event on January 27-28. IMVU will launch its VCoin cryptocurrency soon for its users.
Digital Collectibles Rundown
DJ Deadmau5 Launches $100,000 Worth of NFT Collectibles
This series from deadmau5 are the first digital collectibles under the new brand name RAREZ; rare and authentic digital collectibles for the emerging virtual music industry.
Rundown:
Users will be able to buy 6,000 NFT packs worth nearly $100,000 in total.
Inside the packs, users will find an assortment of random NFTs—from “Common” to “Very Rare”—such as stickers and pins as well as black, silver, and gold Deadmau5-themed cards.
The collectibles will feature creative content from Deadmau5’s recent shows and video clips.
The special edition collectibles feature creative from deadmau5’s recent shows and video clips, his collectible pins plus an ‘UltraRare’ collaborative artwork by a renowned 3D designer Sutu Eats Flies who has previously worked with The Weeknd, John Legend, Pnau, Safia and many others. Each rarity features a different animation style, which you can view samples of here.
What is Epik?
Epik started working with brands and games on a mission to produce premium digital items because we believed that digital items were the future of consumer products and would play a central role in ownership and the way we express ourselves individually. We see collections of digital items as representations of personal memories and achievements while conveying attributes like status, identity, membership, class, and performance.
Today, hundreds of brands and game companies trust Epik to produce premium digital items and experiences for over one billion gamers.
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Thanks for joining us for this edition’s round-up of digital news.
(Credits: VentureBeat)