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Animoca Brands acquires Sandbox game developer Pixowl for $4.875 million

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Animoca Brands acquired Pixowl, the developer of The Sandbox user-created world mobile game, for $4.875 million in cash and stock.

The deal represents a nice outcome for Pixowl, which launched The Sandbox in 2012. The pixelated-art game didn’t make nearly as much money as rivals such as Minecraft or Roblox, but it did generate 40 million downloads and still has more than a million monthly active players, said CEO and founder Arthur Madrid in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.