Unio aims bigger in Web3 gaming with new CEO Mark Long

Unio has made some big moves in Web3 recently, hiring former Shrapnel boss Mark Long as its CEO.

Unio is a Web3 gaming platform that enables players to create, own, and share digital assets within the “Unioverse”, a community-owned sci-fi franchise. Its game, Vortex: Hoverdrome, is slated for October 2025. It’s a fast-paced, futuristic combat arena where players control hoverbikes.

The project is led by a team of seasoned industry veterans who have worked on franchises like GTA, Star Wars, and Call of Duty. Mark Long, the former head of Neon (Shrapnel) just joined as CEO.

The Unioverse is not just a single game but a platform designed to support a variety of games and content, tied together through a shared sci-fi narrative. This is made possible by blockchain, which enables digital assets—such as characters, skins, and maps—to be owned by players and transferable across multiple games. 

Long recently parted ways with Shrapnel after a dispute with investors who were accused of trying to take company’s cash as they faced debt problems. It’s an example of a civil war between a CEO and investors resulting in a significant business disruption. The case was settled.

Long said in an interview with GamesBeat that he made the connection to Unio through the former CTO at his first game company, Zombie. The friend, Wyatt Ridgeway, had worked with Long on and off for two decades.

“When I started Shrapnel, I kind of evangelized him on blockchain, and he launched this new studio Unio, on a similar model to Shrapnel, with a user-generated content (UGC) community centric model built on blockchain.”

After Long left Shrapnel, Ridgeway asked him to lead Unio.

“I’m here to help him take one of their games to market and try and get revenue positive,” Long said. “It’s the biggest project you’ve never heard of because they’re so far along. With shrapnel, we still didn’t have the editor tools out yet, but he’s got three. Wyatt has a vehicle editor, weapon editor, character editor, and two sample games.”

One of the games is a Rocket League style game. The game is launching soon on Steam. The team is only 13 people but it has made a lot of progress. The previous CEO took a personal leave and stepped down.

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Long said that the Web3 gaming market didn’t materialize like many expected. Long believes it was hyped like the early internet where everyone jumped in without understanding it. He said the “dirty secret” of Web3 is there are only about a million players.

“For web three gaming to be successful, you’re going to have to convert Web2 players. I believe that you have to give them value for them to want to create a wallet,” Long said.

But Long didn’t view that as a reason to stay out of Web3 games.

“You know, the internet proved itself with the next generation. I feel like that the first generation of blockchain game companies unfortunately experienced that expectation and then non delivery,” he said. “But I think the next generation will change the economics of the industry.”

He noted that Matthew Ball’s slide deck captured how gaming stalled and players are playing the same games over and over again. They have a small amount of time to devote to playing brand new games.

“So imagine a future where that continues, but blockchain catches on,” Long said. “There will probably only be a handful of games that are successful. And the NFT trading is a way for players to find new games and keep the money moving around the ecosystem.”

So far, Long acknowledges that blockchain and crypto has been really hard to use. If you make a simple mistake, you can send thousands of dollars off into the ether and never get it back, he said. He thinks that has to be fixed, and that’s one of the things that Unio has accomplished with frictionless onboarding.

Long is trying to get attention for the company and its games without spending a lot of money on marketing. The company is bootstrapping its way through the process and trying to get the game discovered.

“I’ve always maintained that if the game is fun, and I talk my friend into playing it, it’s going to succeed,” Long said. “If it’s not fun, then it doesn’t matter. You can do anything you want and it won’t work.”

One of the things you can do in the Rocket League-like game, Vortex: Hoverdrome, is modding. That’s one of the ways that Unio’s Discord channel has grown to hundreds of thousands of players.

“We build tools that are already complete and really easy to use to build your own maps, your own vehicles, your own characters, your own weapons,” Long said. “One of my favorite things about Web3 gaming is that the fans are passionate.”

An outside view

Catalin Alexandru, a game economist and outsider on Unio, noted that Shrapnel’s token price collapsed much like other Web3 game tokens. He said in a message to GamesBeat, “This new project also having a token speaks for itself, since it’s the same leadership.”

He disclosed he was at Economics Design when they did the tokenomics for Shrapnel but Alexandru was not directly involved in designing the model.

“The lockup period for investors is laughable. They’re also making people pay to create UGC which is completely backwards to standing up a functional UGC economy from scratch,” Alexandru said. “There doesn’t seem to be a well thought out plan as to how the UGC economy actually works. Also no acknowledgment of Shrapnel mistakes and plan to address them, just the old Web3 ‘if you build it they will come’ cliches and the roadmap is ‘coming soon’. Extremely low confidence.”