Casual Connect Shenzhen 2018 Recap
Successful inaugural blockchain gaming track at this year’s CC Asia edition
Casual Connect Asia successfully staged its gaming event last November 12th to 14th. Game developers, entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts from across the world were present in Shenzhen, China, where conference attendees got to access three days of lectures, official networking parties, and 120 of the world’s best indie games along with its developers.
What makes this edition of Casual Connect Asia 2018 so special is the addition of its first ever blockchain gaming track. While the first two days focused on traditional game development, publishing, and marketing, the last day of the event shined light to new and emerging trends of blockchain gaming and how it’s set out to challenge the way we will build games in the future.
Alto.io together with Casual Connect assembled a roster of leading gaming projects on the blockchain.
Among the key project were:
Alto.io: CEO Chase Freo talked about Alto’s vision of an Item First Economy and how it will revolutionize games on the blockchain. In his keynote he explored the many new possibilities and opportunities blockchain can give game developers, including the economic incentives that an Item First approach on the blockchain brings with it.
BlaCat: Xiao Xiao, Co-Founder of BlaCat discussed building solutions to alleviate the user experience barriers when playing blockchain games. As a decentralized gaming platform built on NEO technology, their goal is to allow users to play blockchain games like conventional video games without the pain points we are currently experiencing withing this emerging category.
Binance Labs: Ling Zhang, Director at Binance Labs covered a very interesting talk on what drives investors into backing gaming projects on the blockchain. Ling further discussed Binance Lab’s investment thesis, as well as their general sentiment towards current blockchain game projects.
Animoca Brands: Sean Dudley, Senior Product Manager at Animoca Brands talked about how blockchain technology and more specifically Non-Fungible Tokens are primed to empower players more than ever before and explained why Animoca Brands sees games as that gateway to blockchain tech’s mass adoption.
ImperialThrone: Francis Peng, CEO of INFUN the makers behind the Ethereum based game Imperial Throne, discussed and shared INFUN’s thoughts and ideology on developing the title and broke down the reasons why they are dedicated to the marriage of blockchain and games. He also shared his thoughts regarding utilizing economic incentives to drive the game forward, as well as the challenges they have faced in the process of developing their game.
Aptoide: Tiago Alves, VP for APAC at Aptoide spoke about how blockchain will disrupt the app store business. In his keynote, he talked about Aptoides initiative via the App Store Foundation and the AppCoins open source protocol that will allow game developers to earn 85% of revenue share vs. 70% from Google/Apple and how will they be able to acquire users by using Proof-of-Attention instead of traditional performance marketing campaigns.
Panel Discussion: The final day of Casual Connect Shenzhen culminated in a panel discussion, moderated by Flowplay CEO Derrick Morton. He was joined by industry stalwarts Fabio Luiz, Head of Marketing at Bitguild, Josh Galloway, Vice President of BD at Plutus Ventures, Garret Jin, Co-founder of Bitforex, and Paddy Markham, CEO of CAPSL Entertainment. Together they shared their thoughts on current and relevant blockchain and gaming trends. They had particularly different takes on various hot topics ranging from Ethereum scalability, game item interoperability, to ICOs and game item pre-sales. It was a great panel overall and one that we’ll surely hold again in a similar fashion in the future.
The blockchain track at Casual Connect was a great success - igniting curiosity and sparking questions in the attending developer audience. Currently the general sentiment of game developers outside the blockchain game community ranges from pure excitement to extreme skepticism and who wouldn’t be skeptical to a certain degree? This is still uncharted territory somewhat and it takes a while for paradigms to shift and for technology to mature. What these projects are doing today is paving the way and piecing every bit of the blockchain gaming ecosystem so that when the time comes, moving from traditional games to blockchain games will be easier and more intuitive. This is only the beginning of many more talks and discussions about blockchain and games. Casual Connect and Alto will continue to enable these conversations whether on or off conferences. Hopefully we’ll see more projects joining us in the future. Make sure to get in touch! Casual Connect will be back soon in London 2019.
About: Alto.io is creating a decentralized platform with a suite of tools for game developers, item creators and players, built around the blockchain’s item-first economy. Through the Alto platform, interoperable cryptoitems (blockchain-based game items) will be minted, used, and sold across multiple games and users. We are setting out to enable a self-sustaining ecosystem built around the blockchain’s item-first economy that is fair and mutually beneficial for everyone.
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Learn more about Alto: https://alto.io
Learn more about Casual Connect: http://www.casualconnect.org
