Rogue And London Royal Ravens Owner, ReKTGlobal, Bought For $470 Million By Metaverse Company

ReKTGlobal, the parent company of esports teams Rogue and the London Royal Ravens, has been acquired by Infinite Reality, a relatively unknown metaverse company, for $470 million in stock, based on a $2 billion equity valuation of Infinite Reality.

The deal, which is still pending approval, sees Infinite Reality acquire all of the ReKTGlobal assets and brands, including the two esports franchises, as well as the multiple other business owned by the company such as Greenlit Content, a content production agency specialising in the games and esports space, and TalentX Entertainment, a talent management company with many high profile internet stars on its books.

For many years ReKTGlobal has been a steadily growing company in the esports space, acquiring a number of successful businesses itself and becoming a serious player in the market. But now the tables have almost turned, with ReKTGlobal being acquired by a company doing something similar to what it has done in the past few years, with the belief that this will grow the companies owned by ReKTGlobal even further.

“You’ve seen FaZe Clan and 100 Thieves dabble in NFT’s and others thinking about doing what they want to do, even Steve Aoki, one of our investors, has built the A0K1VERSE,” said Amish Shah, ReKTGlobal Founder and Chairman. “But [what] we wanted to do is buy a company in this [web 3] space. Then I met John [Acunto, Infinite Reality CEO], we got talking and it just makes perfect sense on how we could be accretive to each other’s businesses and get there quicker and faster.

“We’re going to come together and our strategy is not going to change, it’s just going to get bigger,” added Shah. “So we want to be a 10, 20, $30 billion company and we think we can get there quicker [with Infinite Reality.] Staying standalone like, I think we could only get to one or two billion in the next three years, but doing this with John and crew we can get there quicker and faster.”

In terms of what this means for fans of Rogue and the London Royal Ravens, not much will be changing anytime soon. Although, the deal does mean the teams will have access to Thunder Studios, a massive studio in California that has been used for everything from music videos to esports events, and Shah hopes that should Rogue make it to the League of Legends World Championship in the States this year, they will be able to make use of the facility. But other than that little will change in the day to day.

The same goes for staff at all of the ReKTGlobal owned companies, with Shah stating there will be no layoffs and they will in-fact be looking to expand their staff group in many areas.

What is Infinite Reality?

Anyone looking for more information on just who is behind Infinite Reality and where the money has come from might find it difficult, as there is little information publicly available, but Infinite Reality CEO John Acunto says this is intentional.

“We did a whole series of name changes, and the Infinite Reality is a brand new name change. So I’m happy to hear that there’s not a lot out there,” said Acunto. “Previous to that we were Display Social and that was our social network. And then as we sort of made our pivot from being a social network into being more metaverse focused, and entertainment focused, we then changed our name to Infinite Reality which occurred back in in in late January. Infinite reality was one of the companies that we acquired in a series of transactions in January, we acquired Thunder Studios in January and we acquired Infinite Reality.”

Display Social, the original product from the company that has now expanded to become Infinite Reality, is a social network that aimed to pay those posting on the platform a share of ad revenue. If you managed to create a particularly popular post you could earn money from ads shown to users who viewed your content.

Since deciding to focus on the metaverse the company has acquired a number of businesses, including Thunder Studios and Infinite Reality. It has also announced a merger with Universal Security Instruments, a publicly traded company that produces smoke alarms and similar products, which should allow Infinite Reality to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company also owns NFT marketplaces and a handful of other assets.

When it comes to what Infinite Reality actually plans to do with the ReKTGloabl properties in the metaverse, neither party would go into specifics of any actual products or experiences that will be created, instead promising that more information on these projects would be coming soon and that they plan to use all areas of the ReKTGlobal business to make their metaverse work.

“We look at this deal as as a way to take all of the ReKTGlobal businesses that are amazing and to amplify them and create adjacencies with the other businesses that we have,” said Acunto. “And you know, today [it] looks like these are all individual pieces, how do they work [together]? Believe it or not, they all become one community in a metaverse and they all work in an adjacent ways.”

However, the Infinite Reality team has previously created virtual metaverse experiences for events such as Burning Man, where you could log on, wander round the virtual burning man environment and interact with other users.

It’s not exactly the groundbreaking tech many evangelists claim the metaverse to be, after all games such as Second Life and even PlayStation Home were doing the same sort of thing in the mid 00s. But it is an interesting look at where the Infinite Reality company could be heading and the types of environments we could see the ReKTGlobal brands such as Rogue and the Royal Ravens end up in.