The Opportunity of Gaming in Solana
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When we first did research on what network to use for our project, we looked at multiple factors including speed, features, developer community and carbon footprint, amongst others. Solana ranked highly in all of them, yet we wouldn’t know all of its benefits for a fact until we started actually building on it and experiencing how it develops.
Here we are, several months later, and we feel that Solana is poised to dominate the Web3 gaming platform market. Why?
Solana’s NFT market is on track to overtake Ethereum’s
Content quality, low transaction costs and lower floor prices, are driving steady growth relative to the traditional NFT marketplaces on Ethereum. For example, during the last 30 days Magic Eden on Solana has registered 12X more transactions, 12% more volume in USD and 16% more users than Open Sea on Ethereum*. That’s for a marketplace born in September 2021.
More inclusive
Low transaction fees and low floor prices combined with fiat payment methods are also opening the door for broader adoption, exactly what is needed for games to reach mass market and be successful. Gaming is about inclusivity, it’s about breaking barriers. Everyone is invited to play. Not only the ones with a big ETH wallet. The transition to zero gas blockchain transactions will be a key factor powering the mass adoption of Web3 gaming, just like the free-to-play business model contributed to expanding gaming to billions of players. It should be free, fast and easy to start playing.
Better player experience
Fast and efficient transactions are one of the key differentiating aspects of Solana. That alone is crucial for a responsive player experience. But it comes with the challenges of high transaction volume and traffic congestion. We know the challenge this represents, having built high volume transactional platforms for gaming that must keep a consistent player state at all times. And it is the speed of learning, of innovating, of iterating what solves these problems. This is what makes us feel confident about Solana performing robustly at scale.
But we are doing our part. We have added a robust retry logic that will address potential congestion, and will prevent users from having to click multiple times. We’ve also added measures to protect honest buyers and de-incentivize botting, generating costs to bots when they attempt forbidden transactions that fail, for example when trying to mint during the whitelist time window without a valid whitelist token.
The vast amount of libraries, including toolkits for DeFi and NFT trading, are helping us design smoother user experiences that abstract the blockchain layer and enable the value of Web3 in the product. Players shouldn’t need to have a technical background. It should be easy to have fun.
In addition, the scope and quality of the DeFi and NFT trading libraries in Solana, help us design better user experiences that abstracts away the technological aspect of blockchain, and delivers the value of Web3 transparently integrated within the product. Players shouldn’t need to have a technical background. It should be easy to have fun.
Vision for Mobile
The bold step of Solana launching their own phone, is exactly aligned with our vision of a full stack experience that delivers the value of Web3 without all the friction. That’s why we have partnered up and are working to make Eternal Dragons available from day one in Solana’s Saga phone. Mobile platforms and free-to-play games were the key drivers of growth for the previous gaming expansion wave. Mobile native web3 will drive the next one.
Strong framework for building scalable IP
Solana’s sub-collections and the ability of extending NFTs by linking additional “accounts” (on-chain data) are a perfect fit for building and developing on-chain IP.
We use sub-collections to organize our franchise collections, and create a taxonomy that differentiate between the genesis dragons, their descendants and future collections.
The ability to extend NFTs with on-chain data additions will be crucial for providing extended utility of NFTs, both in-game and through the franchise expansion.
We are looking forward to building the future of gaming in partnership with Solana. Whilst challenging, these market conditions are perfect for building with quality for the long term. We believe in accelerating the vision of bringing people together through play, around a shared sense of identity and ownership. And Web3 gaming will accomplish just that.
Join us in this journey! Our NFT release will be on July 12, 2022.
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