Taking Gaming to its Peak
The gaming industry has progressed in recent decades, continuing to innovate in line with consumer expectations and gaming habits. Some of the most significant milestones include:
- Home and arcade gaming triggered mainstream participation in the 1970s.
- Pacman and Donkey Kong ushered in the 80s era, leading to a video game market boom.
- Sony released the PlayStation, creating a buzz around video games globally in the 90s.
- Microsoft released the Xbox in the 2000s to compete against Sony’s PlayStation.
- Smartphones made games accessible to many people in the 2010s.
- Fortnight, an online battle royal game, entered the gaming scene in 2001. By 2018, it was earning $2.4 billion a year in revenue for its publisher Epic Games.
Amidst all these innovations, blockchain gaming first emerged on the Ethereum network. Proponents argued that the technology could decentralize the ownership and trading of in-game assets, giving more power to players.
More Money, More Hype, More Expectation
Global games revenue has grown to record heights in recent years, as publishers have expanded their income by taking advantage of new distribution and monetization options such as mobile gaming and microtransactions. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing and larger budgets have produced bigger expectations. Recent AAA releases like Cyberpunk 2077 exemplify the disappointment and backlash that can occur when a big game fails to live up to the hype.
Thus, at a time when online gaming communities are more important than ever before to a game’s success, Web3 will give gamers a greater role in game development.
Focus on What Matters: The Players
By creating a community of gamers who are literally invested in a game’s future and allowing them to participate in the design and development process through on-chain voting, Web3 promises to shift gaming toward user-centric design. The direct link between gamers and developers simplifies communication, allowing players to express their desires about what they want to experience, what new features should be added, and how gameplay can be improved. This will allow developers to understand the demands and needs of the market and deliver engaging games that appeal to a wide audience. Digital assets play a key role in this approach, aligning incentives between game publishers and players so that they can collaborate to create the best possible gaming experiences.
Unfortunately, however, few existing Web3 titles can compete with traditional games when it comes to graphics and latency, leading to an underwhelming gameplay experience.
Ajuna — Powering Innovation in Gaming
At Ajuna, we began with a simple mission — to build Web3 games that could compete with conventional titles in terms of gameplay and performance. However, the team soon realized that the limitations of existing decentralized platforms, such as slow block times and a lack of compatibility with game engines, made Web3 game development tedious, slow and expensive.
In response to these challenges, our team built a specialized software development kit (SDK) to make it easy to develop Web3 games with industry-standard tools such as Unity and Unreal Engine. In addition, we significantly improved latency and performance by enabling games to be hosted in fast, dedicated sidechains. This benefits all developers in several ways:
- Connectivity — it enables developers to connect games developed in Unity and Unreal with the Polkadot and Kusama blockchain networks.
- Performance — it provides a codebase that handles all the fundamental interactions with the blockchain, allowing developers to focus more attention on creative aspects of their game like world-building and gameplay.
- Community — Game developers can launch their own tokens which players use to vote on feature updates and key development decisions.
Ajuna creates an ideal environment for developers and gamers to collaborate to produce better Web3 games and share in the value this brings. By harnessing and rewarding their combined creativity in this way, we will provide the springboard to enable Web3 games to become truly competitive with traditional titles.
About Ajuna
Ajuna Network is a Swiss-based decentralized gaming platform bringing Web3 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.
