[Courtesy of SK Telecom]
SK Telecom (SKT) will make equity investments in Morph Interactive under a strategic cooperation agreement, but financial terms were not disclosed. Morph Interactive with experience leading a number of game projects based on mobile game development capabilities has been SKT's key partner since Ifland was launched in July 2021.
SKT would nurture Ifland into a leading metaverse platform by enhancing user convenience, especially among Millennial and Z generations. "We will continue to expand cooperation with leading Metabus-related companies and establish ourselves as a global service," SKT's metaverse platform head Yang Maeng-seok said in a statement on April 13.
Through cooperation with Morph Interactive, SKT said it would expand game elements by allowing users to use props such as dice and darts, and introducing mini-games that many can participate in. In an open environment, users can produce avatar costumes and lands (space) to freely decorate avatars by producing costumes or items they want.
A non-fungible fund (NFT) marketplace will allow individuals to make profits by producing props, avatars, costumes, and spaces that can be used in Ifland. SKT will cooperate with famous intellectual properties to purchase or use premium avatars, costumes, and spaces. "We will do our best to make Ifland a means of communication that gets closer to the daily lives of many users and can be actively used in corporate business," said Morph Interactive CEO Kim Jung-youl.
SKT plans to boost the popularization of Ifland by running special programs and providing content that meets the needs of users. The company will hold large-scale events such as forums, lectures, festivals, concerts and fan meetings in Ifland, and provide diverse content and businesses with new and innovative ways of marketing by enabling them to meet customers in Ifland.
SKT is a key member of an alliance of private companies, broadcasting networks, research organizations and state bodies that was launched in May to cultivate a metaverse ecosystem based on extended reality and media in a government-sponsored event aimed at supporting the establishment of an open platform so that companies can utilize data and develop new services.
The alliance is aimed at opening a metaverse hub for the development of an ecosystem, based on media and extended reality (XR) encompassing a wide spectrum of hardware and software that enable content creation for virtual reality, mixed reality and cinematic reality. It supports the production, testing and demonstration of services in the fields of manufacturing, healthcare, construction, education, distribution and defense.
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