Although much attention continues to be directed on the nuts-and-bolts operation of Web3 games, much less discussion has been made concerning the striking transition of successful game makers into the sector.
Maybe that’s because the sort of people who complain about new business models are the sort of people who don’t know much about the developers who actually make games.
An argument for another day, but while most people won’t have heard of Omar Siddiqui, he’s been making F2P games for the past 15 years, games including Gardens of Time. Boasting 200 million MAUs, it was the main reason Disney acquired developer Playdom for $763 million back in 2010.
As for Siddiqui, since leaving Disney, he co-founded another F2P mobile developer, which was sold off to RockYou, launching his current company web3 game developer and publisher Joyride Games in 2017.
It recently announced a $14 million funding round, which was led by Bitkraft and Superlayer.
The sizzle
“Web3 allows players to become part of the game economy for the first time, which is really exciting,” Siddiqui explained.
“We think the potential is massive but it comes with a lot more for developers to worry about in terms of building sustainable economies and dealing with regulatory issues.”
We don’t want to power all games, just great games.
Omar Siddiqui
That’s the point of Joyride, which he describes as providing an end-to-end publishing platform for Web3 mobile games.
Integrating with Unity, as well as handling key operational aspects of games such as live ops, it also deals with technical obstacles such as dealing with wallets, tokens, and NFTs, and helping developers to build communities for their games within an overall ecosystem.
And, as with every good platform, Joyride has been eating its own dog food, by creating its own games using the tech.
Joyride’s first release is mobile game Solitaire Blitz, which runs on the Flow blockchain, and is available through Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and has attracted more than 250,000 users during its first month.
That might not sound much compared to Gardens of Time’s peak audience twelve years ago, but in the world of Web3 games, it’s enough to make Solitaire Blitz a top five blockchain game, and the number one app in any category running on the Flow blockchain.
The first billion
For Siddiqui, this is just the starting point, though.
“Our vision is to attract the first billion players into Web3,” he stated.
Our vision is to attract the first billion players into web3.
Omar Siddiqui
“That’s our specialisation; building games with the quality to scale for a mass audience.”
Of course, he’s happy to admit that not everyone is currently interested in owning NFTs but Solitaire Blitz’s players just play the game and get rewarded with tokens if they win tournaments without having to do anything different from any other F2P mobile game.
And, as well as similar games in the Blitz series – Trickshot Blitz, Darts Blitz etc – Joyride is also launching its Champs franchise, which are more involved experiences using character NFTs.
Tennis Champs will be the first release, with its first NFTs already live on the Ethereum blockchain. Joyride’s technology is blockchain agnostic, providing developers with the option to launch on different chains ranging from Flow and Ethereum to Solana.
But for all the technical smarts happening under the surface, one thing that Siddiqui is clear about is that to be successful in the long term Joyride’s publishing operation has to be built on great games.
“It’s a curated approach,” he ends.
“The market needs quality, not quantity. We don’t want to power all games, just great games.”
