Growing the Web3 Gaming Community: Venly at GDC2023

An event the entire gaming world had been looking forward to finally took place at the end of March. The Game Developers Conference (GDC), brings leading publishers, developers and other industry players together for a full week of events and meetings. 

More than 28,000 attendees benefited from more than 700 sessions, workshops, roundtable discussions and networking opportunities, featuring more than 1000 speakers. The GDC Expo floor was home to over 330 exhibitors, including Amazon Web Services, Adobe, Discord, Google, NEXON and others. 

Among them was the team from Venly, keeping the web3 banner flying high from our booth, alongside many of our partners in the blockchain gaming space. After an explosion of interest in blockchain gaming in 2022, there is still plenty of work to do to consolidate the market around quality gaming experiences. 

As one traditional game developer at the conference put it: “Now that the hype has died down and the scammers have moved on I think now is a good time to seriously investigate its utility for any positive player experiences.”

Venly hosts developer events

Much of the industry remains unaware of or uncertain about the benefits of Web3 gaming. To remedy that, Venly co-hosted several events throughout the week that brought together game developers and web3 technology providers.

These included the Gam3 Night cocktail party, hosted alongside gamer-profile platform Soulbound and web3 gaming fundraiser Polkastarter, and the Game Developers Brunch, organised in partnership with engine infrastructure provider Beamable and blockchain developes Polygon Labs. 

At the Venly booth

Venly also shared a booth with on the GDC Expo floor with the Blockchain Gaming Alliance, the leading advocacy group for blockchain technology in games, itself led by some of the most prominent web3 gaming projects, notably The Sandbox. 

Arno Lacompte, one of Venly’s representatives at the booth, said there were “a lot of gaming studios showing interest in web3 elements such as the products [Venly] provides.” 

Those web3 elements include NFT-powered marketplaces for in-game items, from which games studios can continue to earn royalties from re-sales between players. Venly has also recently launched a Unity SDK to facilitate the seamless integration of blockchain technology, even without a blockchain developer on a studio’s staff. 

Lacompte was also representing Venly Ventures, the company’s VC investment arm, and noted that “many games [are] raising capital and the quality of the games is improving exponentially.”

Interview with Absolute Labs

Another of Venly’s partners present at GDC was Absolute Labs. A web3 CRM marketing automation platform, Absolute Labs indexes user data from the blockchain and provides it to their clients for acquisition and engagement purposes. Customer Success Manager was happy to speak to us about the intersection of web3, gaming and marketing.

“It’s really interesting because gamification is big in the loyalty sphere,” he said. “People are going to their favourite brands to receive web3 digital assets that they can play with. Everyone is talking about what Starbucks is doing with loyalty.”

According to Laing, game developers would do well to take heed of what such marketing trends being adopted by other industries.

“One of the biggest challenges for gaming companies is, when players stop playing, how you you reach out to them? How do you engage with them so they come back? Because once they’ve left, it’s really hard to get them back.”

“So web3 provides an amazing opportunity: you have their interests, their data, and you can airdrop them an NFT right away. Not just a random NFT, but one that is going to have meaning to them. So that’s one of the opportunities.”

“People are going to get excited about being rewarded with NFTs that they can then go and trade and do stuff with. That’s going to be big. Web3 is going to feed into the ability to further contextualize the way you engage and reward your clients.”

But, regardless of the potential, there are, as Jason acknowledged, still hurdles to overcome.

“We have a barrier to mass adoption because the public doesn’t know alot about web3. They don’t know how to engage with it. They’re confused about it. They’re nervous about it.”

The state of the gaming industry

That is true also of the games industry specifically, as shown by the GDC 2023 State of the Game Industry report, which revealed that just 2% of studios are currently using blockchain technology in their projects. 

“The clear value of blockchain for us is in rewarding creators and support for player trading,” explained one respondent.

But, while almost a quarter of studios expressed some level of interest in the technology, as much as 60% were still against its use in games. The prohibitive cost and complexity of integration is often cited as a primary reason for hesitation. That is one of the primary obstacles Venly is seeking to remove.

“We want to help game studios navigate the complexity of the blockchain,” said Venly Head of Marketing Stefan Colins, who appeared on a panel discussion at GDC, alongside representatives from Chronos Chain, D.G. Pals, and reNFT. “If we we want to bring in the mainstream, we need to remove the barriers to entry. We believe the technology should be put under the hood. With Venly, you don’t need a blockchain developer.”

“User-centric tools will help grow the industry by reducing friction for end-users.”

The future of Web3 games

These efforts are already beginning to bear fruit in the games industry. CCP Games, developer of the cult classic EVE Online space-faring MMORPG, is just the latest major studio to announce a AAA web3 game in development. It’s this latest generation of projects that will see blockchain truly arrive in the gaming industry.

And, as Jason Laing affirmed, it’s companies like Venly that will help pave the way.

“Venly has been an incredibly good partner for helping people get into web3,” he reflected. “We really love our partnership with [them].”