Plug-and-play Web3 platforms offer new revenue streams for developers

Image Credit: Adobe

There’s a growing demand for secure, scalable and player-centric gaming solutions. That’s where blockchain’s decentralized nature comes in. Its Web3 capabilities and extensive in-game commerce support is a boon to both sides of the gaming industry, says Lee Jacobson, SVP of business development, Web3, at Xsolla, enabling developers to foster deep engagement and giving players true ownership of their assets.

“Combining those two is a game-changer, delivering enhanced digital asset ownership, cross-game interoperability and flexible game monetization,” Jacobson says. “It unlocks opportunities for publishers, developers and even players, by moving assets across games to engaging new revenue models and drives secure Web3 adoption in gaming in general.”

While Web3 has long been something of a controversial topic of discussion, it’s here to stay, Jacobson adds. Publishers and developers are increasingly embracing the potential offered by tokenizing an array of player-favorite benefits and commodities like achievements, assets and items offers.

“Play to earn models and secure cross-game asset usage opens up totally new revenue and monetization avenues,” he adds. “It’s especially great for personalization and a sense of ownership and belonging, which dramatically boosts engagement. That creates better, sustainable economies for publishers and developers.”

Zero knowledge rollup and the elastic chain

Blockchain gaming applications have faced scalability and privacy concerns, which undermine performance and can wreck user experience. Enter the ZK rollup, a Layer 2 scaling solution that increases both privacy and security, plus seamless in-game transactions, faster gameplay and reduced or eliminated performance slowdowns when player numbers increase. Together, this is a massive win, increasing player satisfaction and enhancing overall gameplay. The scalability of ZK rollups also enable assets to go cross-game, reducing the cost and increasing the speed of in-game microtransactions, and are essential for effective anti-cheat systems.

It does all this by processing the bulk of the computational work off the main chain. Over on a side chain, transactions are processed and stored, then rolled up into one proof that first confirms every transaction in the bundle without exposing any transaction data.

“Efficiency, scalability and security is really important for game developers to make Web3 viable for their games, and set them up to handle high traffic,” Jacobson says. “Plus, it makes blockchain adoption feasible for developers and publishers without having to worry about added complexity.”

An evolutionary step beyond ZK rollups is the elastic chain, a cluster of ZK rollups secured by cryptography. United in an elastic network, ZK chains interact and transact with each other, and chains can be added or expanded to handle increased transaction volume without affecting costs or hardware requirements for verification. An elastic infrastructure offers the increased functionality of a multichain ecosystem with the unified, seamless user experience of a single blockchain.

The plug-and-play blockchain solution

“The developers we work with at Xsolla are looking for the technology that can help create real value for them and for their players and help gaming ecosystems thrive,” Jacobson says. “A robust, plug-and-play solution is the answer, helping deliver rich new commerce features across a broad ecosystem of games.”

The launch of Xsolla ZK is aimed at encouraging the growth of Web3 technologies that can transform the game industry. It will be part of the elastic chain ecosystem, powered by Zksync, an Ethereum Layer 2 zero-knowledge roll-up technology that offers fast, secure and scalable transactions.

The solution offers account abstraction in the form of the first “digital backpack” for gamers, which gives players complete control over their virtual assets. In other words, no matter where a player is logged in, they’ll have their items, collectibles and achievements from the games they’re playing. It’s both a scalable way to offer players true ownership and interoperability across games in a cohesive, secure experience and a way for game designers to own and transfer their own assets across a game portfolio.

Developers can elevate their in-game economy with asset tokenization, giving players more items than ever to own, trade and sell, while secondary market sale commissions add a solid new revenue stream with the potential for explosive growth. Comprehensive SDKs and analytics dashboards let developers build custom-branded primary and secondary marketplaces to enhance player engagement and monetization, and smooth integration across web, desktop and mobile platforms, expanding game reach and accessibility.

The goal of the platform is to bridge traditional game publishing and Web3, enable developers and publishers to benefit from the decentralized model, on a framework that’s trusted and secure on the backend. And it’s got a huge amount of potential, Jacobson adds.

“It’s transformative in its potential for game economies. It’s not just a technology upgrade,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to deepen engagement, allowing players to own and manage and trade their assets across titles, incentivizing retention and cross-title engagement. Web3 provides a deep way to create lasting player relationships.”