Dengan hengkangnya beberapa game populer, apakah Polygon telah menjadi Akademi Militer Whampoa untuk game blockchain?

Original author: Zen, PANews

On August 2, two weeks after announcing the relocation of the entire ecosystem, Web3 gaming platform PlanetMojo鈥檚 MOJO token successfully migrated from Polygon to the Base network. PlanetMojo changed its logo from purple runes to a blue color that matches Base, and its auto chess game Mojo Melee, parkour game GoGo Mojo, in-game avatar system Mojo Maker, and upcoming role-playing game Prophecy of the Ancients have also become part of the Base ecosystem鈥檚 active contribution.

Once the preferred network for deploying the GameFi project, Polygon has been favored by developers in the past few years. The 2022 Developer Report released by Electric Capital also rated it as a top developer ecosystem. However, with the rise of public chains, after many popular games such as Pixels and Crypto Unicorns left, Polygon, as the Huangpu Military Academy of Web3 games, has lost its former leading advantage and its market share in the game market is decreasing.

Are the stars scattered all over the sky? Many games go their separate ways

Pixels, a pixel-style farm game that migrated to the Ronin blockchain network operated by Sky Mavis and achieved a win-win situation with it, is a typical example of this. Pixels was launched in 2021 and chose to migrate from Polygon to the Ronin network at the end of last year. Luke Barwikowski, CEO of Pixels, said in a statement at the time: Sky Mavis is the only company that has achieved scale in the Web3 gaming field. It is a wise move to work with a team that is not based on assumptions, but on practice and experience. Migrating to Ronin and leveraging their wisdom is the logical next step in our journey.

Later facts proved that this major change was indeed a wise choice. According to DappRadar data , Pixels has 1.8 million monthly independent active wallets (UAW) and more than 700,000 daily UAWs. It is one of the hottest Web3 games at present, and its rapid growth momentum has basically lasted for more than half a year. Ronin has completely emerged from the shadow of hacker attacks a few years ago. Its ecosystem has also begun to introduce more high-quality chain games based on the model of Pixels. For example, Apeiron, the first Web3 god simulation game, followed the path of Pixels and announced in December 2023 that it would leave Polygon and join Ronin.

MapleStory Universe, which just completed its pioneer test on August 2, is a PC-based MMORPG owned by South Korean gaming giant Nexon. It combines blockchain technology with the MapleStory IP and claims to have received $100 million in investment at the end of 2023. The MapleStory IP has attracted more than 180 million registered users in the past two decades and is one of Nexons most popular games. In March 2023, Nexon announced that it had chosen Polygon as a partner to work closely with the Polygon Labs team around MapleStory Universe, including its development and marketing. However, in March of this year, Nexon parted ways with Polygon and switched to using a dedicated Avalanche subnet.

Coincidentally, Delabs Games, a South Korean web game developer led by former Nexon CEO Joonmo Kwon, announced its entry into the Polygon ecosystem at almost the same time as MapleStory Universe. The development team had created Nexons popular game series KartRider, and its plan to launch a Web3 arcade racing game called Rumble Racing Star (RRS) on Polygon. However, in May of this year, Delabs Games announced a partnership with Arbitrum, not only migrating RRS to Arbitrum, but also its two upcoming Web3 games Metabolts and Space Frontier will also be built on Arbitrum, completely abandoning cooperation with Polygon.

In addition to the blockchain networks mentioned above, game public chains such as Immutable zkEVM and Xai are also popular choices for migration. For example, Hunters On-Chain, which once contributed a lot of activity to Polygon, the battle royale game Blast Royale, and the collectible card game Storm Warfare have successively migrated to Immutable zkEVM, while the pet collection and simulation business game Crypto Unicorns, the action/cyberpunk MMO Yaku, and the mobile RTS game Land Before War have chosen to join Xai.

Why are blockchain game developers leaving?

Regarding the reasons for leaving Polygon, most development teams tend to remain silent to maintain respect for their predecessors. However, from the information disclosed by individual development teams, we can more or less see some clues.

When asked why she gave up Polygon, Angela Son, head of partnerships at MapleStory Universe, only emphasized the advantages the team believes in using Avalanche in assisting with server and infrastructure needs. However, people familiar with the matter told Decrypt that Nexon chose other networks after Polygon Labs stopped supporting Polygon Edge, which allows the construction of custom Ethereum-compatible chains, in December last year. The source added that Nexon and Polygon Labs had agreed to part ways before officially deciding to use Avalanche. Web3 game and creator platform Hytopia (formerly NFT Worlds) also seemed to have decided to migrate to Arbitrum for similar reasons.

Scalability issues and high gas fees are one of the important reasons for the departure of blockchain games. Before Crypto Unicorns left the Polygon ecosystem, its NFT had generated about $35 million in trading volume. Aron Beierschmitt, co-founder and CEO of game developer Laguna Games, said that the team encountered challenges when operating games on Polygon, especially the network gas peak, which made the game more expensive to operate and caused friction for players. Aron also said that Laguna Games needs to provide players with a monthly subsidy of about $5,000 to $10,000 for network gas fees, which is difficult to sustain. Xai, a third-layer game network built on Arbitrum, completely exempts players from such fees.

The role-playing game Pirate Nation has similar troubles to Crypto Unicorns. The game was developed by Proof of Play, which announced in September 2023 that it had completed a $33 million seed round of financing, led by Greenoaks and a16z. Pirate Nation chose to break up with Polygon in March 2023 and moved to Arbitrum Nova. Amitt Mahajan, co-founder and CEO of Proof of Play, said that Pirate Nation needed to move to a more affordable and scalable platform. As more and more people migrated to Polygon, we began to encounter expansion problems with the Polygon chain. We were paying $3,000 to $4,000 in gas fees every day. So this became unsustainable. This prevented us from scaling the game.

In addition to issues with technical support and excessive expenses, the fact that game developers do not receive much support from the platform seems to be an important factor. The horse racing NFT game Pegaxy was developed by Mirai Labs and moved to Avalanche at the end of last year. Corey Wilton, the developers CEO and co-founder, bluntly menyatakan that in comparison, Polygon Labs did not provide much help to develop games and crypto projects on its Ethereum sidechain. It feels like we didnt get any help in a sense.

Polygon still holds the trump card

In addition to the explosive data of the Ton ecological mini-games , the traditional blockchain game track is generally not popular, and no blockchain game has been popular in this cycle. Polymarket, the decentralized prediction market platform of the Polygon ecosystem, has become the crypto application focused by the market in this cycle, and has received more attention than the games mentioned above. Since April this year, the platform has begun to enter the public eye, and the transaction volume and the number of users have grown explosively. Especially under the catalysis of annual events such as the assassination of Trump, it has been widely reported by mainstream media as a typical prediction market, and its popularity and influence have been further enhanced. From June to the end of July, Polymarkets cumulative transaction volume surged 58% from US$663 million to US$1.05 billion , and the transaction volume in July alone exceeded US$380 million.

However, a tall tree attracts the wind. According to CryptoSlate, US lawmakers called on the CFTC to ban election betting . Senator Elizabeth Warren and others said that gambling around elections would damage public trust and the democratic process, and asked the CFTC to immediately formulate rules to prevent the commodification of elections. Polymarket, which has become popular due to the hot topic of the presidential election, has its largest market on predictions about the next US president, with a trading volume of more than US$474 million, accounting for more than 45% of the total trading volume. With the intervention of regulators, the future development of Polymarket has also begun to be shrouded in fog.

In addition, the technical foundation accumulated by Polygon is also the killer feature of the network, especially the customizable toolkit Chain Development Kit (CDK), which enables developers to create their own second-layer blockchain based on Polygons zero-knowledge technology. In March last year, Immutable and Polygon Labs announced the joint launch of Immutable zkEVM, which is technically supported by Polygon, laying the foundation for the rapid growth of the Immutable ecosystem this year and breaking through one million players .

In the past two months, the team of The Open Network (TON), a blockchain supported by Ronin and Telegram, has also announced that it will launch its own Layer 2 network based on Polygon technology. Ronin uses the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK) to create its own zkEVM chain on Ronin to improve scalability, security and decentralization; TON will use CDK to create the TON Applications Chain (TAC) to enable EVM-based decentralized applications to access the TON ecosystem, paving the way for innovative applications such as games and decentralized identity solutions on the TON blockchain.

This article is sourced from the internet: With the departure of several popular games, has Polygon become the Whampoa Military Academy of blockchain games?

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