How crypto can level up indie gaming

Angelic just had the exclusive reveal of its open Alpha featured alongside an array of big-budget titles. The dark sci-fi game dazzles graphically, has already exceeded its developer’s user-base expectations (with 27,000 users over six weeks), and otherwise checks the traditional boxes for success — but it is far from a typical game release.

Rather, it is a true indie that plans to compete with blockbuster titles (with far bigger budgets) in story, graphics, and gameplay. But Angelic has something most indie devs don’t — the backing of Saga, a Layer-1 blockchain protocol looking to upset gaming’s status quo.

Saga Origins, its dedicated in-house game-publishing studio, is taking a counterculture programming approach at a time when the gaming industry is at an inflection point. “Our motto and criteria for game selection is: provocative, expansive, uncompromising,” says Rebecca Liao, CEO of Saga. “We will publish the games that many big studios pass over because they do not approve of the content, or the IP does not follow a tried-and-true formula for monetization.” And it’s using the power of blockchain to help power its user acquisition and distribution strategy.

Convincing the average gamer (or non-gamer) to care about blockchain is tricky, as it might seem like just the next clickbait-y, overly futuristic, and generally annoying buzzword. But blockchain-based game development has the potential to put the power back in the hands of some of the most deserving — indie developers.

Angelic was chosen as the first “flagship title” of Saga Origins, which allowed its developers to take advantage of Saga’s significant go-to-market resources that focus on both getting titles the right tech to create as daringly as possible and the right marketing to reach their ideal user base. And that support started with a simple introduction.

“[Saga] were the key people who brought us the Nvidia team,” says Erkan Bayol, CEO of Metaverse Game Studios, the developer behind Angelic. Nvidia’s technology was an ideal fit for Angelic’s ambitious graphics needs and helped it shine in its Open Alpha (the first test iteration of the game available to the public), which over-performed.

Despite some positive signs (five of the 10 highest-grossing games on Steam in 2024 qualify as “indies”), a few breakout hits haven’t changed the fact that indie developers still contend with a disconnect between their games and mainstream commercial success. While AAA titles enjoy multi-million dollar marketing budgets, established advertising and launch channels, and the brand-name recognition advantages of sequels, indies, in comparison, often struggle for visibility. This is compounded by the fact that indies are often already working on smaller overall budgets, with less manpower, and at technological disadvantages. Saga saw opportunity for blockchain within this inequality, both from technical inefficiencies it could address, and enabling story disruption in a sometimes stale mainstream gaming market.

Technologically, blockchain can make a number of key interactions smoother and less obtrusive. “In the early days, people talked about crypto and blockchain like a replacement for the internet — it’s absolutely not,” Liao says. “What blockchain does allow for is secure interactions and transactions between people in this network over and above what the internet can offer.” Because player-to-player and developer-to-player interactions are expected to play a large role in the future of gaming, Saga wants to make sure blockchain technology is applied in ways that tangibly improve the gameplay experience, eschewing the cheaper, NFT-for-play or pay-for-play models of recent popularity.

For titles who don’t share this sentiment (and likely aren’t built on blockchain), separate marketplaces can prove an ordeal for gamers. “You want to upgrade your levels. You want to continue the story. You want to play with your friends, and imagine the game tells you all of a sudden — ‘Wait’. Now you need to connect your wallet, minimize the game, open your browser,” Bayol explains. “It breaks immersion and annihilates gameplay experience.”

Blockchain tech can handle these kinds of interactions in the background, allowing for digital assets (often with real-world value) to be instantly and securely sent to players without breaking the narrative flow of gameplay. As a result, Angelic’s players can remain immersed in the game. “From our perspective, players don’t even need to know there is a blockchain component at all,” Bayol says.

Saga Origins announced three flagship launch titles at Gamescom 2024 in August: Angelic, Lussa (a genre-pushing online shooter), and God’s Legacy (a dual-timeline Nordic epic). All three were initially selected by Saga’s executives on the merits that they share Origins’ “provocative, expansive, and uncompromising” ambitions as a publishing house.

Note that Saga Origins titles are different from those hosted on Saga’s ‘Mainnet,’ which went live in April. The distinction being that, while Origins focuses its resources on shepherding and supporting the aforementioned “flagship” titles through the entirety of their go-to-market process, any game developer is invited to and welcome to build on the open-source Mainnet (which has attracted hundreds of titles). However, Saga’s mission bleeds into both, Liao says. “Our rails for user acquisition and distribution combine web2 and web3 channels, enabling grassroots gamer communities to more directly and broadly power game growth.” These principles aided Angelic’s successful debut, and Origins’ other titles have similarly ambitious plans.

Zlatko Stjepanovic, CEO of Visionarie Labs, the studio behind Lussa, explains that the prevailing notion in his circles — which include minds such as Douglas Kennedy (Visionarie’s CRO, of Ark Survival fame) — is that the next great gaming innovation won’t come from a major studio, but from an indie studio. And instead of any hardware benchmark, the next breakout hit will likely be one that employs novel gameplay mechanics to distinguish it from current mainstream games. Much like the sheer power and up-to-the-second multiplayer speed of the Unreal Engine (which both Angelic and Lussa happen to be built on) brought us the first Team Deathmatch and subsequently influenced decades of shooter culture, so too will the next breakout game be required to produce a significant, resonant innovation in order to make a mark.

“First (gaming) was very console-heavy, then very PC-heavy, then it became mobile — it was always some sort of physical hardware that made the difference for your game,” Liao says. “The thing about blockchain is that it’s not a generation of devices that you’re looking at. It’s a generation of gaming culture.”

To capitalize on this, forward-thinking developers like Stepjanovic and Bayol are looking to utilize blockchain tech to usher in what industry insiders believe will be two of the biggest innovations for the next generation of games: User Generated Content (UGC) and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

UGC in gaming is the creation of items, abilities, or other gameplay features by players, for players. Notably, Stjepanovic is uniquely positioned to champion UGC. As a former world number one in Need for Speed (and a top 10 in World of Warcraft PVP), he ground out a meager income as a professional gamer for years despite his prodigious skill. Now, years later, he dreams of a world where players can earn a living solely off of their in-game skill or creativity and has built this idea into Lussa.

An example of this type of new, blockchain-empowered UGC in action could be giving a tournament-winning player the ability to “mint” the custom skin (character model) that they used to win said tournament. In the traditional gaming world, they then would be the only one able to equip (wear) that skin. However, blockchain’s mentality would flip this definition on its head — instead of limiting use, it encourages it — hosting the skin on a shared marketplace for purchase by other gamers, with a share of the proceeds being seamlessly siphoned into the winner’s digital wallet.

The other innovation on the tip of developers’ tongues are DAOs — organizations of players that operate outside of game developer control. If you understand what a gaming guild or clan is (groups of players organized in-game to easily communicate, team up, and accomplish goals), DAOs are the logical evolution of this model, the difference being that they can span across multiple games or even platforms. The willingness of blockchain developers to build DAO-friendly games and infrastructure speaks to something that both the gaming and blockchain communities understand — the innate draw of community and collaboration.

Betting on and building around these innovations takes significant investment, and Saga is hoping more developers will lean on services like theirs to help reach their creative potential. Much like indie films benefit from “arthouse” studios who are dedicated to discovering and promoting independent projects, so too can games benefit from partnering with studios like Saga Origins. “With the bigger studios, there’s a lot of sequelization going on, there’s a lot of money, which makes marketing and brand recognition easier,” Bayol says. “Whereas indie games and indie movies have to get that voice out there by whatever means possible. And it just happens that blockchain is a super creative and maybe useful means to do so.”

The promising launch of Angelic indicates that taking the chance to build with blockchain can pay off and that it, and other titles like it, have the chance to change how gamers relate to games and to each other. This is because blockchain, when applied correctly, is a superb communication technology, making a marriage with gaming ideal because gaming and gaming culture have long been collaborative and community-focused. “Twitter, Discord, even, you know, Facebook, Meta, DMs, etc., these are all communication innovations that were birthed because gamers just wanted to talk to one another as quickly as possible, in as free a way as possible,” Liao says.

Looking to capitalize on this, Saga Origins has an aggressive release schedule of 13 titles planned for the next six months — with several launching this fall as part of its “Indie Autumn” campaign — and more in development. As both developers and gamers are starting to catch on that the future of gaming might lie with blockchain tech — and vice versa — blockchain gaming going mainstream may be nearly upon us. If you’re curious and want to be front-row for what’s to come, follow Saga to get a jump on the next great Alpha or Beta, check out Saga Origins, or pick up an existing web3 title from your app store of choice and see what blockchain gaming has already made possible — which is only a taste of what’s to come.