The Man Who Gave NFTs Away: Gabriel Leydon, From Game of War to Limit Break

In February 2015, millions of Americans watching the Super Bowl saw Kate Upton promoting a mobile strategy game called Game of War: Fire Age. Eight years later, in February 2023, the same man behind that ad bought another Super Bowl spot. This time it showed a QR code, and the prize for scanning it was a free NFT.

That man is Gabriel Leydon. He co-founded Machine Zone, one of the most aggressive and profitable mobile-game makers of the 2010s, and then Limit Break, a blockchain games company built on a counterintuitive idea: give the digital items away and make money when they are traded.

The Machine Zone money

Machine Zone's games, Game of War and later Mobile Strike (fronted by Arnold Schwarzenegger), were built to keep a small number of very big spenders engaged for years. The marketing was as loud as the monetisation, with celebrity ads and a Super Bowl slot that made the studio a household name.

The company did not stay on top. In May 2020, AppLovin bought Machine Zone in a deal Bloomberg reported valued it at around $500 million, far less than the studio had once been tipped to be worth. Leydon came out of the mobile era with money, a reputation for monetisation design and a strong view on where games were heading.

Limit Break and the free mint

Leydon co-founded Limit Break with Halbert Nakagawa, a fellow Machine Zone veteran. In August 2022, deep into the crypto crash, the company announced it had raised $200 million across two rounds, a remarkable sum at a time when most web3 studios were cutting staff.

Its first big move was DigiDaigaku, an anime-style NFT collection that was minted for free. In a market where projects usually sold NFTs upfront to raise money, Limit Break argued the opposite: give the items away, build a community of holders, and earn from trading royalties and later games. The collection traded at high prices soon after the free mint, which made early holders a lot of money and gave Leydon's theory a loud proof point.

Royalties and the long game

Leydon's business model depended on collecting a cut every time an NFT changed hands. In 2022 and 2023, NFT marketplaces started making those royalties optional, which threatened the whole plan. Limit Break responded by building its own token standards designed to let creators enforce royalties at the contract level, turning a business problem into a technical product that other projects could use.

The games have been slower. Limit Break spent years teasing a DigiDaigaku mobile game, and in 2026 it soft-launched a mobile title called Puzzle Panic in selected markets, alongside promises of a testnet for its own network.

Where Leydon is now

Leydon remains Limit Break's CEO and one of web3 gaming's most outspoken voices, regularly arguing that free-to-play economics, not paid entry, is the right model for blockchain games. No personal net worth has been published by Forbes or Bloomberg.

WGC's take

Leydon is a different kind of money-maker in this section. His fortune was built mostly before blockchain, in classic mobile games, and his crypto bet has been to apply free-to-play thinking to NFTs. The free mint made some early DigiDaigaku holders a lot of money. Whether it makes a lasting game business is still an open question in late 2026.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.