Decentraland , a decentralized user-owned virtual world on the Ethereum blockchain, plans to invest $5 million to fund blockchain gaming projects built on the Decentraland platform. To this end, it created the Genesis Content Program, through which gaming developers can submit proposals for “blockchain games” and “interactive experiences” that can be built on Decentraland.
In a Medium post published recently, the company says it plans to “welcome larger and more ambitious projects” to its platform. The company says the new program will help encourage “innovation and growth in decentralized online gaming” in addition to $5 million in project financing, to be shared among top applicants.
With the Decentraland platform, game developers are presented with a new and unexplored opportunity for designing “virtual experiences” through blockchain based games. Developers can provide these experiences on the platform while monetizing them with tokens.
To build these blockchain games in Decentraland, developers have to control the LAND they host their games on. A LAND is a virtual piece of property that can be purchased through the Decentraland Marketplace. Game developers have to develop their games to “fit within the parcel boundaries” of their LAND as the “play space” each game takes up is limited. While the platform does make room for games that can be remotely accessed within the virtual city, developers will still require one LAND parcel, at the very least, to host and run the games.
Decentraland believes diversity will be encouraged in the games built on the platform, as there is distributed ownership. Unlike traditional MMO games or VR platforms that have central ownership, Decentraland offers a shared and “open source hub” for building distributed games that can be hosted across multiple parcels. The virtual reality company says it’s taking a “web-first” approach by following Google’s lead in “incentivizing a low-poly aesthetic,” which will optimize the experience for users irrespective of the device used.
Decentraland has a list of genres that it believes are well suited to its platform, and these include scavenger hunts, loot crate games, crafting, and more.
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