In Brief:
- Following a shared business booth at ChinaJoy in Shanghai, NEXUS intends to deepen its collaboration with Dubai’s DMCC Gaming Centre and additional global partners at gamescom in Cologne, held Aug. 26 through 30.
- Inside a joint Dubai government pavilion, the Korean firm will run a NEXUS Hub and pitch studios on an acceleration program anchored by ONE store’s 38 million registered users.
- Via the Blockchain Game Alliance, ONEchain — the renamed CROSS mainnet — is set to showcase an AI agent economy on the opening day.
At gamescom, NEXUS says it will broaden its cooperation with the DMCC Gaming Centre and other partners around the world, extending the games, AI and blockchain message the company carried to ChinaJoy in Shanghai.
The Cologne show takes place Aug. 26 through 30 at Koelnmesse. There, NEXUS will install a NEXUS Hub within a unified pavilion of Dubai government entities coordinated by DMCC, using the space to present its acceleration program for game studios worldwide and to court new partners.
Games, AI and blockchain on one platform — that was the direction NEXUS brought to Shanghai.
And it doesn't stop here. Building on this, NEXUS plans to widen the work with DMCC Gaming Centre and other global partners at 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗺.@ONEView on X ↗
A large integrated pavilion is bringing together DMCC and several Dubai government agencies. The emirate deployed a comparable arrangement at gamescom 2025 alongside the Dubai Future Foundation, Dubai Culture & Arts Authority and DMCC.
What the program offers
The acceleration program was first revealed July 16 by the DMCC Gaming Centre and NEXUS during PLAY THE FUTURE, a conference the pair co-hosted at DMCC’s Uptown Tower headquarters in Dubai. Roughly 100 attendees turned out, among them local IT companies, game studios, investors, institutional officials and regulatory specialists.
Two tracks are outlined by DMCC. Studios prepared to scale are steered toward co-publishing, while teams at an earlier stage go through Web3 onboarding. Neither requires any upfront payment: NEXUS bankrolls infrastructure and marketing investment and earns it back through revenue share.
Studios that make the cut receive on-chain infrastructure onboarding, ONE store distribution and joint publishing opportunities, alongside assistance with tokenomics design, regulatory structuring, marketing and global publishing. ONE store counts 38 million registered users.
Underpinning the effort is a partnership made official Oct. 8. Under it, DMCC treats NEXUS as a gaming ecosystem cooperation partner, offers joint marketing and networking support, opens doors to government bodies, VCs, exchanges and incubators, and provides office space in Uptown Tower. The company’s Dubai subsidiary, NEXUS HUB FZCO, was established in April.
“Blockchain is a digital financial infrastructure that streamlines payments and settlements,” said Kim Jae-young, head of the NEXUS Dubai office, who added that pairing gaming, AI and blockchain will expand into a new industrial ecosystem within the digital economy.
The Cologne lineup
A joint event with the Blockchain Game Alliance is on the NEXUS agenda for gamescom. On Aug. 26 in Cologne, the alliance has slated a ONEchain demo of an AI-native gaming economy, built around autonomous agents that “compete, create, trade and earn on-chain.”
The title carrying that message is ClawRoyale, an agent battle royale running on the NEXUS stack, where matches play out across a 210-tile hex map. Within two months of release it surpassed 16 million cumulative participating agents, and NEXUS CEO Jang Hyun-guk described agent gaming as “a world-first for Nexus.”
Scheduled for the show’s first day, the demo shares the calendar with The Agent AI Summit, subtitled “Architecting Autonomous Worlds,” listed for 11:00 to 16:00. Both follow the AI & Agentics Council that the BGA established with Deloitte and DMCC to write rules for agents that control wallets and execute transactions without a human confirming them. The remaining founding partners are Xsolla, SKALE, The Sandbox and WAM.
The European pitch differs from the Chinese one. According to NEXUS, the market shows less resistance to Web3 and a keen interest in breaking into Korea, so the company will frame ONE store as a distribution channel that eases the review burden imposed by the two dominant app markets while handing European developers Korean and Asian reach without needing a local publisher.
Shanghai came first
ChinaJoy 2026 took place July 31 through Aug. 3 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, where NEXUS and DMCC operated a B2B booth. The concept originated in a DMCC proposal as the agency pursues Chinese game companies.
Signage carried no mention of the NEXUS brand. “Given the regulatory environment surrounding Web3 in China, we were cautious about putting the NEXUS brand front and center, so we decided to utilize the acquired ‘ONE store’ brand instead,” Kim said.
Chinese developers were pitched on Dubai’s high-ARPPU user base, with co-publishing and platform onboarding on the table. For China, the company outlines a flexible three-track setup that layers general mobile distribution through ONE store onto the two Dubai tracks.
Background
Control of ONE store passed to NEXUS in June, after its board signed off on the purchase of 20,247,990 shares — an 89.03% stake — for roughly 62.6 billion won. On the selling side were SK Square at 45.78%, Naver at 24.06%, Steel Number One First at 17.02% and Krafton at 2.17%; SK Square, Naver and Krafton subsequently joined NEXUS as strategic investors.
The CROSS mainnet was subsequently rebranded ONEchain, $CROSS was converted to $ONE, and $ONEUSD became the ecosystem’s common unit. Revenue in the first half reached 17.42 billion won, a 9.4% year-on-year increase, with net profit of 5 billion won.
When DMCC opened its Gaming Centre in 2022, it held slightly more than 50 companies. The figure has since climbed past 150, within a broader DMCC ecosystem numbering over 4,000 technology firms.
“The NEXUS and ONE store teams are actively scouting titles for onboarding to the Korean market, and I understand that a few contracts have already been finalized on-site,” Kim said.