The Steam of blockchain games? What is the popular Gala Games?

On November 30, the 24-hour transaction volume of GALA/USDT was $240 million, ranking fifth in the Eurotrade transaction list. According to market data, the price of GALA tokens has been rising steadily in recent months, and began to accumulate momentum in mid-November, reaching a maximum of $0.8427, an increase of 790% from October to date.

Behind the strong growth of tokens, the game ecosystem of Gala Games has exploded in the past two months, and popular games such as Town Star have emerged. So, what kind of platform is Gala Games, which is called "Steam in the blockchain field" in the circle? Why can it quickly gain a large number of users, funds and attention? Is there any investment and participation value behind it? This article will give a more detailed introduction to Gala Games around these issues for your reference.

What are Gala Games?

Gala Games is a decentralized game social platform and a blockchain game development company that is committed to launching and attracting different types of blockchain games, allowing players to experience the fun of the game while truly owning the NFT assets in the game. Players can play different blockchain games on Gala Games, including those developed by Gala Games itself and those developed by third-party game manufacturers and launched on the platform.

In 2018, Eric Schiermeyer, co-founder of the well-known gaming platform Zynga, together with early crypto miner Wright Thurston and popular game development participant Michael McCarthy, founded the Gala Games project in the hope of gaining a foothold in the blockchain gaming market.

When Schiermeyer introduced his company, he said that Gala Games is not a "blockchain game company" but a "game company using blockchain." This may indicate that he emphasizes that compared with traditional game companies, the Gala platform is committed to giving game rights and assets to players. According to Schiermeyer's vision, Gala Games may become a publisher in the future, allowing anyone else to use its platform to create their own blockchain games.

Therefore, we can understand Gala Games' model as a game distribution platform similar to Steam and Origin. Steam is one of the world's largest comprehensive digital game and software distribution platforms. It was developed and designed by Bram Cohen, the BitTorrent developer hired by Valve. Players can purchase, download, discuss, upload and share games and software on the platform.

With the GameFi boom this year, there are more and more blockchain games, but there is no leading game platform in the market. Gala Games is different from other platforms that focus on mobile games. It focuses on PC/Broswer games and launches different types of games for players. Currently, Gala has launched 5 games, namely Town Star, Spider Tanks, Mirandus, Fortified and Echoes of Empire, covering a variety of traditional game elements such as simulation business, MOBA, RPG, strategy, PVP tower defense, etc.

In order to promote the construction of the game ecosystem and conform to the trend of P2E, the Gala Games platform issued its own universal token GALA, with an issue price of US$0.001497 (September 18, 2020), a total of 50 billion, and will be halved every July. Gamers on Gala Games can use GALA tokens to buy and sell game props, ecosystem products, such as NFTs and node licenses. According to its official website, there are currently two main ways to obtain GALA tokens: the first is to become a node of the Gala Network (Gala Nodes), protect the security and stability of the chain, and obtain corresponding GALA rewards; the second is to directly purchase GALA through the secondary market, such as the EuroEasy platform, Uniswap, etc.

Gala Games Ecosystem Introduction

Gala Games' ecosystem mainly includes node ecosystem and game ecosystem, as well as additional assets such as NFT. The following will mainly introduce the main situation of its network nodes and games.

1. Network Node

Gala Games has built its own node ecosystem based on its platform, and the community and players are responsible for the maintenance and design of network nodes. Nodes play an important role in Gala Games. So how can you become a node? Gala Games' official website shows that users can use GALA/ETH/BAT/TOWN tokens to directly purchase Gala node operating licenses on the platform, and receive corresponding rewards based on their contributions to the platform network. The rewards include: GALA tokens, limited edition NFTs, and opportunities to help the development of the Gala game ecosystem.

Nodes were originally divided into founding nodes, paid nodes, and free nodes. However, considering that the long-term stability of the network depends on the nodes being online all day, paid and free nodes cannot meet the goals or minimum requirements of network operation. Therefore, the official has recently removed these two types of nodes from the ecosystem roadmap. Currently, players can only purchase founding nodes directly on the platform. With the growth of Play to Earn in other games (such as Town Star), Gala Games will also open the purchase of specific game nodes. It is expected that the price of the first batch of Town Star nodes will be in the range of US$7,500-12,500.

A total of 50,000 founder nodes will be issued across the network. The price will increase by $100 for every 100 nodes sold. Based on this estimate, the price of the last 100 node licenses is expected to be around $33,000. At the same time, network nodes can also be sold. If players no longer want to run nodes, they can sell them on the secondary market. The order submitted by the author on Gala Games shows that it currently costs 100,274 GALA to purchase a node, and an additional 0.00661 ETH handling fee, which is a total of $62,800 based on the current currency price.

2. Game Ecosystem

Of the five games currently launched on the Gala Games platform, Town Star and Mirandus were developed independently by Gala Games, and the other three were developed by third-party game studios and launched on the platform. From the current development status, only Town Star and Spider Tanks are in the Beta stage, and only Town Star has entered the player public beta stage. The other games are still under development and cannot be experienced for the time being.

The steps to play games on Gala Games are relatively simple. Players only need to register a Gala platform account to experience all games. Currently, these five games cover a variety of traditional game classic elements: Echoes of Empire is a sci-fi strategy game with the galaxy and the universe as the background. Players control the galaxy they are in by building and upgrading spaceship fleets; Spider Tanks is a PVP battle game. Players can choose "spider tanks" and weapons and fight on a series of different maps to obtain resources; Town Star is a simulation business game. Gamers choose land on the map and build towns, and realize commercial trade and obtain stars through agricultural planting, building factories, etc.; Mirandus is a fantasy RPG game with a huge world ruled by monarchs as the background. Players have absolute freedom of choice: they can go to the wilderness alone, fight monsters in the deep forests and dungeons, serve as knights in the court with one of the monarchs, or open a shop in one of the five major cities in the kingdom; Fortified is a typical PVP tower defense game. Players compete with each other to establish the best tower defense strategy.

From the introductions of the above five games, it can be seen that "players have ownership of in-game assets" is basically the core mechanism of the game, and it is also a point that Gala Games emphasizes on its platform itself.

3. NFT

Players can purchase all kinds of NFT props and game skins needed in the Gala Games game in the store. Currently, GALA, ETH, BAT, and TOWN tokens are supported.

Market prospects and investment opportunities

Thanks to the success of the P2E model, the blockchain game market has experienced a big explosion this year. According to DappRadar data, as of December 1, 2021, there have been 1,138 game Dapps on the entire network, with a current daily transaction volume of US$132 million and 1.31 million users. The NFT transaction volume of P2E games exceeded US$1 billion in November, a month-on-month increase of 71%.

Gala Games, as a game developer and aggregation platform, has also grown rapidly this year. According to its official website, the platform currently has 1.3 million monthly active users and the total value of NFTs sold has reached 26,000 US dollars. Currently, there are 23,833 online nodes in the Gala Network, an increase of about 300 from December 1.

Gala Games is popular mainly in the context of the rapid growth of the blockchain game market as a whole, with a large number of P2E players and funds pouring in. However, the various blockchain games on the market are relatively scattered, and there is a lack of such a one-stop game platform, which also provides it with market space and opportunities. According to the introduction of the Gala Games platform, the game design concept it promotes is mainly: Fun First, players control assets, community governance, and driven by players and nodes. If it develops according to these concepts, then Gala Games will reconstruct the game through blockchain technology and further subvert the traditional game world system.

Compared with traditional game platforms such as Minecraft and Roblox, the uniqueness of blockchain game platforms lies in economic incentives, which give users and players the right to truly own game assets and directly participate in the platform's ecological governance and game rule design. While experiencing the charm of the virtual game world, they can also earn real income in the real world.

Therefore, as the blockchain game market grows, platforms like Gala Games will still have a lot of room for development. Their role is complementary to the blockchain game market, just like the YGG game guild before, they benefited from the explosion of the blockchain game market, quickly captured value from it, and in turn promoted the further prosperity and development of blockchain games. Gala Games also plans to invest more funds to expand the game market. On November 29, Gala Games President Jason Brink tweeted that Gala Games announced at a recent Seoul event that it would deploy $1 billion in South Korea for game development.

But at the same time, it should be noted that in terms of investment value, we need to continue to observe the development progress of Gala Games' subsequent games and the development of the game ecology. After all, at present, only Town Star is available for players to experience, and whether the P2E income is stable has not been verified by the market. From the perspective of the return on investment of becoming a Gala node, the current payback period is still relatively long. Then there is the GALA token, whose price has increased by more than 500% in the past month, and its market performance has also been very outstanding in the past few months, but its investment value depends greatly on the development of the game ecology and network ecology within the platform. Therefore, readers are reminded to participate according to actual conditions and pay attention to risks. At the same time, the content of this article is for understanding and reference only, and is not intended as investment advice.