Six Reasons Why Your Next Game Should Be a Web3 Game
Game studios or developers considering a foray into Web3 gaming may have been put off by the recent market downturn. But despite the bearish mood in some quarters, there remain plenty of good reasons to build your next game on the blockchain. This post rounds up six key arguments in favor of developing Web3 games.
1. There’s a sizable addressable market among established gamers
Due to a lack of research, many questions about the Web3 gaming sector remained unanswered until recently. Are traditional gamers interested in games featuring NFTs? Are blockchain gamers a distinct segment? If so, how do they differ, and what types of games and features appeal to them?
Thankfully, there’s now a sufficient weight of interest in blockchain gaming that market research is beginning to emerge. Crypto.com recently teamed up with leading games market research firm Newzoo to survey 4,000 gamers in the US, the UK, and Indonesia. According to the survey, 13% of respondents already play blockchain games, while 40% were classed as either high or medium opportunity prospects.
These figures appear to indicate that the addressable market for Web3 gaming could be more than half that of the entire gaming sector. To put that into context, Newzoo estimates that the global gaming market will exceed $195 billion in 2022, reaching 3.2 billion gamers.
2. Current market conditions remain conducive to growth
Digital asset markets have steeply declined in recent months, so it’s understandable that some developers may be cautious about entering the sector. However, while it’s true that some gaming NFTs and assets have lost value, Web3 gaming generally is perceived to be an outlier to the broader negative trend. DappRadar noted that between May and June, when much of the digital assets sector was in the grip of an aggressive decline, blockchain gaming dropped off by only 5% compared to the previous month, showing far better comparative performance.
Moreover, this doesn’t appear to have been a delayed reaction or a blip. User numbers are also encouraging. DappRadar recently highlighted that gaming accounted for 57% of unique active wallets in the blockchain sector in July, increasing from 52% in June.
Overall, it seems that blockchain gaming is proving remarkably resilient to market movements, which should serve as an encouragement to developers considering it for their next game project.
3. Investors remain engaged
Given the size of the addressable market and gaming’s resilience to market headwinds, it’s hardly surprising that studios and VCs are continuing to invest in Web3 gaming. In early August, Playstudios, the publicly traded mobile game studio that owns titles including Tetris, announced a new blockchain division and $10 million investment fund. The fund will back studios and developers building games that focus on “rewarded play” using blockchain.
Investing behemoth a16z recently led a seed raise for Halliday, a “buy-now-pay-later” solution for asset ownership in Web3 gaming and the metaverse. Skrmiish, a play-to-earn platform that enables players to earn cash from playing traditional AAA+ titles, also recently secured $2.5 in funding to scale globally from its roots in South Africa.
These are just a few recent examples, but they are strong indicators that the Web3 gaming segment remains a compelling prospect for investors.
4. The opportunity to create new revenue streams and build gaming communities
Building NFTs or a tokenized in-game economy can present opportunities to generate new revenue streams and new ways to build communities of like-minded gamers. Selling in-game assets as NFTs is one of the most basic examples. However, developers can also apply fees to transactions on the platform, including the operation of any in-game marketplace where game assets or tokens are traded. NFTs can be programmed so that each time they change hands, even outside of the game environment, the developer takes a fee.
Beyond the transactional, there are many other creative ways that developers can harness the features of tokens and NFTs to generate tangible and intangible value. For instance, a studio could create a VIP club of players and award them NFTs based on particular criteria — play hours, in-game points, or even their online reach. With the right incentives in place, the developer can leverage these communities to gain feedback, test new titles, take advantage of viral marketing, and more.
Some blockchain game developers go as far as making their games into fully decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) owned by players. However, the example above illustrates that there are still plenty of creative ways that studios can leverage Web3 without necessarily going all-in on decentralization.
5. Latency is no longer a deal-breaker
For many years, the limitations of legacy blockchains have created a bottleneck for blockchain game developers. The problem was two-fold: speed and cost. Even if a user was prepared to wait several minutes for a clunky blockchain transaction to complete, video games require complex logic that would be exorbitantly expensive to process using smart contracts on a legacy platform. Axie Infinity even went to the trouble of building its own layer-2 solution, Ronin, to mitigate these issues on Ethereum.
The Ajuna network overcomes the challenges of both speed and cost, enabling studios to launch entire game engines involving complex logic in a Web3 environment. It uses powerful, off-chain trusted execution environments (TEEs) to speed up processing, linked to the low-cost, interoperable Polkadot network. These TEEs provide a secure environment for the game engine, allowing for high-speed processing, while still maintaining a record of all asset-related transactions on the blockchain.
This brings us to the last reason you should build your next game on the blockchain.
6. Launching a blockchain game on Unity or Unreal has never been easier
Ajuna doesn’t just offer low latency. It is the only blockchain gaming protocol that seamlessly integrates two of the industry’s leading gaming engines, Unity and Unreal. Our dedicated SDK, toolbox, and API enable you to fully integrate blockchain-based assets into any game and get up and running with a tokenized layer in just a few minutes.
Web3 gaming is opening up a world of opportunity for studios, and the fact that the segment continues to attract new users and remains resilient despite the fortunes of the wider sector suggests an even brighter future. If you’re interested in leveraging Ajuna’s tools to get your next game project on the blockchain, contact us today for a chat and a free demo, or find out more on our website.
About Ajuna
Ajuna Network is a Swiss-based decentralized gaming platform bringing blockchain gaming into the mainstream by integrating GameFi functionality with the world’s leading development engines, Unreal and Unity. Built on Substrate, Ajuna leverages the full potential of the Polkadot ecosystem to provide developers with a modular toolbox to add fully-featured GameFi functionalities to their games easily. Ajuna’s ultimate goal is to create real value for both gamers and developers by providing a fully interoperable decentralized ecosystem for games and virtual goods.
