In Brief:
- ONEstore launched “AI Games,” a section dedicated to titles built with AI tools, on Aug. 7 with 20 games at open, including Ragnarok Breaker and Heros Unite.
- Owner NEXUS acquired an 89.03% stake in the Korean app market in June for about 62.6 billion won, or $40.74 million, and has since installed the store as a validator on its ONEchain network.
- ONEstore says it sits on more than 38 million installs in Korea, the base NEXUS wants feeding into on-chain games without the policy friction of Google and Apple.
ONEstore opened a dedicated section for AI-generated games on Aug. 7, launching with 20 titles that run inside the app with no individual downloads.
The section, called AI Games, was built with Verse8, an AI game creation platform whose backers include NEXUS, NEXPACE, NEOWIZ, Netmarble MARBLEX and the Story Foundation. Users describe a game in natural language and the AI handles planning, graphics and rules. ONEstore calls the approach “Vibe Coding.” Supported genres run from idle RPGs to visual novels and 3D shooters.
𝟯𝟴𝗠+ installs already sit under ONEstore in Korea.
That base now doubles as the launchpad for AI-built games going on-chain.@ONEView on X ↗
Launch titles include Ragnarok Breaker, the roguelike auto-shooter YGG Play released from Planetarium Labs’ Nine Chronicles (official site) universe and the first game built entirely on Verse8, and Heros Unite.
Starting Aug. 11, users get a 15% discount coupon each time they open a different game in the section, capped at 10 coupons per person.
What NEXUS said
“AI is fundamentally changing how games are developed, and it will enable the creation of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of high-quality games every year. As of today, ONE Store has become the world’s first AI game distribution platform, and it will grow alongside the advancement of LLM models and the evolution of creators,” said Jang Hyun-guk, CEO of NEXUS, who is referred to as Henry Chang in the company’s English materials.
NEXUS has argued that as AI multiplies the volume of game content, human review and curation can’t keep pace on its own, and that it wants to sort both human-made and AI-made games in real time.
The 38 million number
ONEstore put its install base at more than 38 million, a figure it says ranks it among Korea’s largest independent app stores. That base is the point of the whole exercise for NEXUS.
NEXUS said in June its board approved buying 20,247,990 ONEstore shares, an 89.03% stake, for roughly 62.6 billion won, about $40.74 million. Sellers were SK Square at 45.78%, Naver at 24.06%, Steel Number One at 17.02% and Krafton at 2.17%. SK Square, Naver and Krafton then came back in as strategic investors in NEXUS through a paid-in capital increase and a convertible bond issuance.
Chang has said shipping Web3 games through Google’s and Apple’s stores forces changes that damage the user experience. Owning the store is the way around that.
Store becomes validator
On July 15, ONEstore joined the network as its third validator, after H Lab and CertiK, running node infrastructure for block production, transaction validation and network security on Mainnet 2.0. It deploys and maintains its own node and stakes into the proof-of-staked-authority set rather than just listing games that run on the chain.
Mainnet 2.0, the Breakpoint upgrade, went live June 1 with a 21-validator PoSA set after a governance vote that passed with about 98% approval. All base fees are permanently burned. The first-year reward pool is 300 million tokens split between validators and delegated staking.
The chain itself was renamed. CROSS is now ONEchain and $CROSS is now $ONE, with $ONEUSD designated the ecosystem’s common unit. NEXUS says ONEUSD works as the medium of exchange and ONE as the store of value. No migration, no new asset, same validators and same supply. The project’s X account moved from @CROSS_gamechain to @ONE_gamechain.
ONEwallet+ passed 2.18 million cumulative users as of July.
The global build
NEXUS plans a global version of ONEstore with wallet, stablecoin, decentralized exchange, staking and bridge functions built in, pitched as a single build platform across games, chains and markets. Domestic content lines, including apps, webtoons and web novels, continue unchanged, and the company says ONEstore’s carrier and partner arrangements survive the acquisition.
Frost Kingdom, the strategy title NEXUS self-published on July 23 across iOS, Android and PC, was the first game out under the new structure. Its closed beta drew players from more than 100 countries, with Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines the most active, and platform payments accounted for 78.1% of all beta transactions. Nine more titles are lined up.
ONEstore was founded in 2016 by SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus together with Naver, built as a domestic answer to the two app stores that already owned the market.
