Forgotten Runiverse: A New Era of Player-Owned Gaming
Many gaming Tokens are down. Web3 studios are closing. It’s time for a different approach that focuses on durability, sustainability and interoperability that lifts up web3 gaming together. Forgotten Runiverse and $XP are the answer.
Let’s start from the very beginning:
Our team at Bisonic grew up playing Ultima Online, Everquest, and RuneScape. Later, we helped build Elder Scrolls Online, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Warframe, witnessing firsthand how secondary markets shaped gaming. With many games in this genre, against the TOS, players buy and sell entire accounts just for the items they own.
But what if they didn’t have to? What if they could trade those items freely in an open market? Take Ultima Online. In 1997, game designers responsible for decorations forgot to lock down certain items before server restarts, turning them into rare collectibles. This sparked a thriving rares market, one that still exists today, with items selling for thousands of dollars. We saw the same life changing impact in Runiverse with players earning Plot NFTs valued at 10,000 RON. That’s the power of a player-owned economy.
Back then, developers fought these markets, banning farmers and viewing them as threats rather than opportunities. What if web3 had existed then? Forgotten Runiverse is our answer: an MMO where players, creators, and farmers fuel a sustainable economy, with builders thriving alongside them, all powered by web3 innovation. Even in its early stages, the game’s potential is undeniable. Forgotten Runiverse Alphas and Betas have been live for just over 30 total days, yet in that short time, the game has generated over $700,000 in revenue from in-game purchases and had a concurrent user count that would place it in the top 0.14% of Steam games.
Just since New Foundations, over 100,000 real players have already logged over 1,465,000 hours. This allowed us to top the DappRadar charts as the #1 Web3 RPG and the #4 Web3 game overall during our test, proving that a player-driven, web3-powered MMO can captivate and sustain a massive audience.
In Forgotten Runiverse, players drive the economy, where items and spells are crafted in player-owned buildings. They earn Quanta when others use their plots, rewarding their contributions. Farmers craft items and list them on secondary markets, supplying gear for players to progress, while others play for fun, occasionally selling or even keeping in their collection permanently.
Livepaper – Player Driven Economy
The Challenges in Web3 Gaming
Today’s web3 gaming scene looks bleak. Most tokens have crashed over 80% from their speculative highs. Projects rush to drop tokens before proving their gameplay or economy can hold up, leaving players holding the bag.
But there’s a better way to make Web3 gaming economies work. We’re focusing on the basics: build a solid game with a sustainable economy that supports a successful launch of $XP.
We’re partnering with established projects, integrating their live tokens so players can earn rewards from day one. Here’s how it works in Runiverse:
- Players earn Quanta through gameplay
- During Quanta Claim Events, players spend Quanta to claim token rewards from partnered projects
These partnerships will enhance token utility for partnered projects, create a fun and immersive experience that engages both communities, and serve as a major activation for partner ecosystems as a whole. Additionally, they provide us with data to optimize engagement and monetization. With a rock-solid foundation of play-to-earn, deep and proven core game loops, and Mana serving as a traditional premium in-game currency, we can thoughtfully and sustainably integrate $XP as the official token in the future, while continuing to uplift and collaborate with Web3 gaming projects and communities.
Livepaper – Partnership Tokens
We’re not waiting for a better market. We’re optimizing our economy and the web3 experience for our players from the start. Stay tuned for partnership announcements!
Early Access: Building Together
Global Early Access will mark the beginning of a long, live-service journey where the game will continue to grow and evolve alongside the community. Time, dedication, and content will be key, and titles like No Man’s Sky, Destiny, and Final Fantasy XIV have proven how a game can drastically grow from an initial launch. Early Access allows us to ship an earlier but still permanently live version of Forgotten Runiverse. While what will be available isn’t our full V1 vision for the game, when we launch into Early Access, Forgotten Runiverse will already be one of the deepest Web3 games available and will enable us to build with the community from an earlier stage of development.
Early access launches this quarter on mobile and PC browsers, with standalone apps coming later this year. Runiverse features a player-driven economy from the start: craft items on your land, explore an open world, and shape the Runiverse. A 21 Trillion Quanta airdrop to beta players kicks off the live service while PvP battles, raids, dungeons, familiars, guilds and new regions arrive with future updates. We’ll be frequently experimenting with item balance, economy tweaks, and monetization. It’ll be an exciting time of rapid change, some may find it overwhelming, but for those who remember the thrill of early MMO launches, this is where the magic happens.
From Play-to-Earn to $XP
In Early Access, you’ll earn Quanta when players use your plots or when you roll in the Font of Memories. Once you’ve earned Quanta, it’s time to choose your strategy:
- Hold Quanta and wait for $XP’s release where you can use it to claim $XP
- Spend Quanta to mint in-game items and construct and upgrade buildings
- Spend Quanta in Quanta Claim Events to claim partner token rewards
$XP is the official token of the Forgotten Runiverse. After TGE, when you spend
$XP in-game, you will unlock exclusive perks and utility, and progress toward spending milestones. Each milestone boosts your passive Quanta yield, a percentage of the Quanta you hold, earned over time.
$XP is the heartbeat of the Forgotten Runes ecosystem, a decentralized, player-powered Web3 fantasy universe that has generated over $110M in sales. The community has crafted over 5,000 stories, preserved in the on-chain Book of Lore, driving a transmedia expansion into comic books, with over 200,000 copies sold, and a separate graphic novel that achieved Q1 2025 Amazon best-seller status. An animated series led by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad is also in production. This holder-created fantasy IP has rewarded contributors with thousands in royalties. Beyond media, the community has launched 20+ live projects, including a Pony racing game and a trading card game (TCG). The Forgotten Runes brand’s integration into over 12 of Web3’s biggest games highlights its growing influence and the expanding reach of its decentralized fantasy universe.
A Game for Everyone
We’re not just making a “Web3 game” or trying to acquire “Web2 users”. Forgotten Runiverse is a new type of game, powered by Web3 technology to do what no Web2 game can. It’s a world where your actions, whether you’re playing, creating, or building, fuel a player-owned economy that rewards every participant. Our team was at the forefront of pioneering the free-to-play genre in the west on major platforms. At that time, free-to-play games were ridiculed by gamers due to poor graphics, predatory monetization practices, and shallow game loops. A few titles were able to set a high standard that would eventually have free-to-play conquer the industry. Web3 gaming is at this stage and the Forgotten Runiverse is built to once again have our team lead a transformative charge in the industry. Our studio, Bisonic, has secured development approvals from major consoles, paving the way for a V1 launch that brings Forgotten Runiverse to the mainstream across all major platforms.
Help us craft the future of gaming, one where players, creators, and farmers thrive together. Join us in early access!
Coming this month.
Stay !magic