Faraway

Faraway is a game developer, publisher and platform company headquartered in Miami that builds infrastructure for blockchain-enabled game economies. Its platform lets studios integrate a web3 open economy without handling smart contracts, embedded wallets or multi-chain indexing themselves, offering a federated identity system (Faraway ID), embedded self-custodial wallets linked to email or social logins, crypto and fiat checkout, game web shops, a secondary marketplace for trading in-game assets, user-generated content tools and a developer portal for organization, role and project configuration. The wallet and integration layer supports both EVM chains and Solana, and the company invites studios to request integration of additional blockchains.

Alongside the platform, Faraway operates games and community-facing storefronts. Its first title, Mini Royale: Nations, is a browser-based multiplayer first-person shooter that launched on Solana and requires no third-party client or installation; players earn fungible and non-fungible tokens through missions, tournaments and other social activities and can trade them. The Faraway site also hosts rewards portals for HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara, where players buy items such as Rift Keys, Oda Keys, Ascension Material, HV-MTLs and Kodamara through the Faraway Shop. Creators can build storefronts, make and curate game items, and earn up to 90% of an item's sale price, with affiliate revenue available for curating other creators' items.

Founding story

Alex Paley and Dennis Zdonov began making video games together as high school students in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. After college they built a gaming studio that was acquired by San Francisco-based Glu Mobile in 2017, and in 2020 both joined Los Angeles free-to-play company Scopely as VPs of Product. They founded Faraway in June, headquartering it in Miami, Paley's home city, with a thesis that blockchain-based open economies would let games remain viable for decades rather than being governed by closed, developer-controlled economies.

Business model

Faraway operates a two-sided gaming ecosystem: it publishes and operates games and it licenses platform infrastructure to third-party studios that publish into the Faraway ecosystem, monetizing in-game commerce across web shops, a secondary marketplace and creator-made content.

Revenue is generated from sales of in-game assets, including NFTs that are playable in its games, and from monetizing in-app purchases, secondary-market trading and user-generated content sales through the Faraway Shop; creators receive up to 90% of an item's sale price, and studios can take additional game revenue from every creator sale.

Traction

Mini Royale: Nations was live with an established player base at the time of the Series A announcement, and Faraway had a globally distributed team of about 40 people across several countries. Its ecosystem later included rewards portals and shops for the HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara game communities.

Latest developments

The company's platform offering now centers on ecosystem services for third-party studios — developer portal, secondary marketplace, UGC tools, federated identity and embedded wallets — with live rewards portals for HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara operating through the Faraway Shop.