In this week's Ecosystem Update, Enjin COO Caleb Applegate and CTO Witek Radomski dig into our vision and capabilities for blockchain-powered games and apps.
If you're new to our community, you may not know that Enjin was born in gaming back in 2009, when our co-founders launched a social community-builder called the Enjin Network. Over time, this product grew to support 20 million users across 250,000 gamer communities.
Through this, we also saw the potential to improve the gaming experiences of these communities and enhance the virtual worlds they spend so much time in.
While we have no immediate plans to build a game of our own, we've been working hard for the last four years to establish a robust ecosystem and infrastructure for developers to build better and more interesting, more compelling games.
With mainstream games of today, players invest significant time and resources, but they receive little-to-no real value in return.
Blockchain is shifting the paradigm, allowing players to truly own their items, and to get rewarded for their progress with real-world value.
Created as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the blockchain, digital gaming assets have never been more real. Each NFT is unique and can be kept forever, sold on the open market, and even used in different games.
The transparency of blockchain also allows users to see the entire history of their gaming items—where they came from, and who owned them before. In a P2P gaming competition, this raises the stakes when cherished items are up for the taking.
As players collect NFT items, build up their blockchain characters, and progress through the game, this opens the door to a whole new social experience that becomes part of their digital footprint and identity—which persists across other NFT-powered games, apps, and virtual worlds.
Not only does blockchain offer true ownership and transparency for gaming items—it's bringing about entirely new game mechanics.
In the multiverse, users can move NFTs from game to game, and out onto the internet, nurturing a unique collection of assets that provide real utility and value, rather than simple entertainment.
Cross-game compatible items that expand beyond the walled gardens of individual games have the potential to be compatible with any blockchain project. The network and community building effects aren't hard to imagine.
These powerful new capabilities are enabling developers to do so much more with gaming and create unforgettable, truly rewarding experiences that impact the real lives of players.
Games become sticky when they feel more real.
Our goal is to make it easy for developers of all sizes to harness the power of NFTs for their projects—without any blockchain coding experience.
"Much like payments for the everyperson where they can pay in Bitcoin or Ethereum, we want to make gaming NFTs available for anygame players, and make it easy for game developers to integrate."
We've created a one-stop-shop for developers to create blockchain games and apps. It's more than just a network or marketplace—it's a complete, end-to-end tech stack.
Whether you're a lone wolf developer or a large publisher with millions of active users, we want you to be able to create NFTs and use them in creative ways in your games. And we don't think you should have to spend years developing a blockchain or hire a full blockchain team to realize your dreams.
Our ecosystem is meant to do the heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on what matters most: building a great game.
We want a single plug-and-play platform that is compatible with the entire blockchain universe. To make sense of how our products will facilitate this, we'll expand below.
"Gaming is is going to be the Trojan Horse to the mainstream for billions of people to know what crypto is, exactly what NFTs are, and how they work."
At Enjin, we're constantly building and adapting to the evolving needs of our adopters and the NFT space.
We have some exciting new products and updates launching soon, improving the infrastructure needed for wider adoption of blockchain in gaming and NFTs as a whole.
Each of these products—from our wallet and NFT.io marketplace to JumpNet and Efinity—will work together to improve on the existing building blocks available to game devs.
We're building a cross-chain ecosystem that will be compatible with networks like Ethereum, Polkadot, JumpNet, Efinity, and more. So once you decide how to structure your game, you'd pick your base chain where your NFT collection will originate. Bridges between chains will allow you and your users to move the items and use them on different networks.
You create your mechanics, supply, token economy, and ecosystem, then plug it all in with our SDKs. These SDKs are your bridge to the blockchain and provide your game with all of the comprehensive data that it needs. We're developing open-source SDKs for C#, C++, Java, with more languages like PHP to be added in the future.
All the tools above work together, putting the technicalities of blockchain in the background so you can focus on development.
"Our long-term vision is for the blockchain aspect to completely melt away so people can just start playing your game."
On the other hand, we don't want players to have to worry about about acquiring crypto and jumping through hoops just to play the game that you've worked so hard on. We want to make it easy for the end-user, so we're actively assembling and improving the building blocks to make it all come together seamlessly.
We're determined to turn blockchain gaming into the key that unlocks mainstream crypto and NFT experiences for users across the globe, and we'd like to thank our incredible community of adopters and supporters for championing this vision.
Stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll dive deeper into JumpNet!
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