The Web3 gaming sector is growing fast, accounting for half of the entire blockchain industry in terms of on-chain activity. Asia Pacific is leading the trend, with China alone having over 700 million players ready to adopt blockchain-based games.
Asia has the potential to become the driving force behind the global adoption of Web3 games in the coming years. Today, almost two-thirds of the largest gaming companies in the world are from China, Japan and South Korea.
Asia Pacific’s dominance is already spreading across Web3 gaming, with Animoca Brands and Sky Mavis — the developers of The Sandbox and Axie Infinity — being leading players of this emerging trend.
Asian companies heading overseas
Many Asian companies are exploring overseas markets to stimulate the global adoption of Web3 gaming. One of them is Giant Network, a publicly traded Chinese company that has been gaining traction in Asian markets for about two decades. In March 2023, Giant Network introduced its new Web3 gaming brand for the overseas market at the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Known as ZTimes, the new brand aims to create a new generation of video games by leveraging Web3 infrastructure. Its goal is to explore new business models and develop games with new concepts while empowering players.
At the conference, ZTimes introduced its three key business areas, including product, technology and investment. It also unveiled two new Web3 game titles currently under development:
- The Road of Conquering — a massive-multiplayer online game
- The Wandering Giant — a strategy game that integrates nonfungible tokens
ZTimes will be backed by more than 100 expert game developers and researchers. Their goal will be to develop Web3 games and support them while giving full control to the players, remaining unobtrusive. ZTimes aims to build a Web3 gaming ecosystem that gives game asset ownership back to players and where in-game items can be traded freely.
Players will be able to buy and sell in-game assets, equipment and props within the community without any transaction limits or price limits set by the games. They will be free to set their own prices and conduct transactions within the ecosystem or on secondary markets. This gives users the right to truly own their earned assets and experience a variety of interesting and social experiences through trading.
ZTimes co-founder Aiden commented:
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to create an international brand and advance toward our vision of a new gaming era. We are dedicated to bringing new value to players and the gaming industry as a whole. To increase our brand value globally, ZTimes will focus on research and development, building channels and strategic investments.”
ZTime will leverage the experience of its parent company Giant Network. It is working to make its games accessible to both Web3 and traditional gamers. Non-Web3 gamers will be able to experience more than 80% of the game content without the need to understand blockchain intricacies, as the Web3 content won’t hinder normal gameplay.
Indeed, gameplay should be the main focus in Web3 gaming. According to a survey conducted by the Blockchain Game Alliance, poor gameplay was cited as the second-most ardent challenge to mass adoption, with 36% of respondents stating that gameplay improvements would be the biggest driver of Web3 gaming adoption in 2023.
Blockchain-based games bring many new features and empower players, but they have to take what’s best from traditional games to become competitive. Now, Asia’s long-term success in traditional gaming is putting it in a leading position to dominate the Web3 realm as well.
