Big Time Studios was founded in April of 2020 and boasts alumni of Epic Games, Riot Games, Blizzard Entertainment, and EA. The goal of the company is to boost adoption of cryptocurrency and NFTs in the gaming industry, while also creating its own games to prove that its NFT platform works. Despite being only a year old, the company already has one patent under its belt — a provisional was filed in July of 2020 for tokenized game assets backed by smart contracts, and a follow-up non-provisional was filed in November of 2020 with a request for accelerated examination. That patent was granted in March of 2021 without any rejections.  

Big Time Studios announced in May of 2021 that it had raised $21M in two rounds of funding. The studio has a pending continuation of its issued patent, showing that it is serious about building a portfolio. This makes sense given that Big Time Studios wants its platforms to be used by other companies and has said that it will use part of its new funding to invest in gaming companies that adopt its technology. The ease with which Big Time Studios was able to gain its first patent shows that there’s plenty of empty space for NFT-related patents, and it’ll be a race to file for companies looking to obtain valuable patent assets. Keep up with these movements on the NFT Patent Forecast® and the Cryptocurrency Patent Forecast®.