In Brief:
- On Aug. 7, ONEstore rolled out “AI Games,” a storefront section reserved for titles made with AI tools, opening with 20 games including Ragnarok Breaker and Heros Unite.
- Parent company NEXUS picked up an 89.03% stake in the Korean app market back in June for roughly 62.6 billion won ($40.74 million), and has since seated the store as a validator on its ONEchain network.
- By its own count, ONEstore has cleared 38 million installs in Korea — the audience NEXUS intends to funnel into on-chain games without the policy headaches that come with Google and Apple.
A dedicated home for AI-generated games went live on ONEstore on Aug. 7, opening its doors with 20 titles that play inside the app itself, with nothing to download individually.
Called AI Games, the section was assembled alongside Verse8, an AI game creation platform whose backers include NEXUS, NEXPACE, NEOWIZ, Netmarble MARBLEX and the Story Foundation. The workflow is simple: a user describes the game they want in plain language, and the AI takes care of planning, graphics and rules. ONEstore has branded the method “Vibe Coding.” Genres on offer stretch from idle RPGs through visual novels to 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 ↗
Among the opening lineup is Ragnarok Breaker — the roguelike auto-shooter YGG Play put out from the Nine Chronicles (official site) universe created by Planetarium Labs, and the first title constructed entirely on Verse8 — plus Heros Unite.
From Aug. 11 onward, every time a user opens a different game in the section they receive a 15% discount coupon, up to a ceiling of 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 once AI multiplies the sheer volume of game content, human review and curation cannot keep up on their own — and that the company wants both human-made and AI-made games sorted in real time.
The 38 million number
ONEstore pegs its install base at north of 38 million, a total it says places it among the largest independent app stores in Korea. For NEXUS, that base is the entire point of the exercise.
In June, NEXUS said its board had signed off on the purchase of 20,247,990 ONEstore shares — an 89.03% stake — for approximately 62.6 billion won, or about $40.74 million. On the selling side were SK Square with 45.78%, Naver with 24.06%, Steel Number One with 17.02% and Krafton with 2.17%. SK Square, Naver and Krafton subsequently returned as strategic investors in NEXUS by way of a paid-in capital increase and a convertible bond issuance.
Chang’s position has been that pushing Web3 games through Google’s and Apple’s storefronts forces compromises that hurt the user experience. Owning a store sidesteps the problem.
Store becomes validator
ONEstore signed on as the network’s third validator on July 15, following H Lab and CertiK, and now runs node infrastructure handling block production, transaction validation and network security on Mainnet 2.0. Rather than merely listing games that operate on the chain, it deploys and maintains a node of its own and stakes into the proof-of-staked-authority set.
Mainnet 2.0 — the Breakpoint upgrade — launched June 1 with a 21-validator PoSA set, following a governance vote that carried with roughly 98% approval. Base fees are burned permanently across the board. A first-year reward pool of 300 million tokens is divided between validators and delegated staking.
The chain has also been rebranded. CROSS now goes by ONEchain and $CROSS by $ONE, with $ONEUSD named the ecosystem’s common unit. According to NEXUS, ONEUSD serves as the medium of exchange while ONE acts as the store of value. There was no migration and no new asset — the validator set and the supply are unchanged. The project’s X handle shifted from @CROSS_gamechain to @ONE_gamechain.
As of July, ONEwallet+ had crossed 2.18 million cumulative users.
The global build
A global edition of ONEstore is on the roadmap at NEXUS, with wallet, stablecoin, decentralized exchange, staking and bridge functionality baked in — pitched as one build platform spanning games, chains and markets. Domestic content lines carry on as before, apps, webtoons and web novels included, and the company maintains that ONEstore’s carrier and partner deals survived the acquisition.
The first release under the new structure was Frost Kingdom, the strategy title NEXUS self-published on July 23 for iOS, Android and PC. Its closed beta pulled in players from over 100 countries — Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines were the most active — and platform payments made up 78.1% of every beta transaction. Another nine titles are queued behind it.
ONEstore dates to 2016, when SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus set it up together with Naver as a homegrown counterweight to the two app stores that already dominated the market.