The Blockchain SDK by Enjin is Live on the Unity Asset Store
Unity has listed the Blockchain SDK by Enjin on the Asset Store — putting the power of the blockchain at the fingertips of 4.5 million Unity game developers.
We announced our partnership with Unity Technologies one year ago — a moment that marked our first step toward the creation of a robust blockchain development tool.
Now, we’ve completed the journey of a thousand miles: The Blockchain SDK by Enjin is live on the the Unity Asset Store.
It’s difficult to describe the atmosphere of unrefined excitement that has overtaken our team. It could be illustrated as a metaphorical “mission accomplished” mixed with thrilling wonder about the future of Enjin-powered games.
The SDK is a culmination of innumerable work hours, imaginative technological breakthroughs, and methodical, harmonious teamwork.
“It’s an honor for our Blockchain SDK to be featured in Unity.
As the world’s premier game development platform, the popularity Unity has achieved is absolutely mind-blowing. We look forward to many years of fruitful partnership with Unity and their talented pool of game developers.
All games, developers, and players can benefit from managing their items on the blockchain — the technology has the potential to drastically redefine and augment the gaming industry.”
— Maxim Blagov, Enjin CEO
Four and a half million Unity developers can now harness the power of our carefully polished, modular SDK to create and integrate next-generation ERC-1155 blockchain assets into their games and manage advanced gameplay mechanics through transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
“This Unity SDK release is the culmination of thousands of hours of development work by our team.
We’re thrilled to be paving the way for a flood of Unity games using blockchain-based items in the coming years.
Blockchain will absolutely shine in the gaming context. It will give gamers ownership of their gaming items and blur the lines between the virtual and real world.
I feel like this will not only create more valuable items, but also more meaningful games.”
— Witek Radomski, Enjin CTO
With a reach of more than 770 million gamers via 25 mass-market platforms, the Unity game engine is the world’s largest game development platform.
Blockchain assets minted with the Enjin Platform will soon be available in games made for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and many more.
Democratizing Blockchain Game Development
By design, our suite of blockchain integration tools is used to create virtual items that are authorized, validated, and certified by the blockchain.
This means the items are stored on the blockchain, rather than within centralized game servers.
Because the blockchain acts as an incorruptible certificate of ownership and authenticity for all of the items it protects, players have true ownership of their virtual items and can own them forever, sell them, trade them freely, or even melt them down to retrieve the cryptocurrency from within.
This is a stark contrast to the current reality in which players lose their items if they get booted, leave a game, or if a game shuts down.
True ownership over one’s digital belongings enables gamers to own their digital identities and makes virtual worlds much more realistic.
Our one-of-a-kind suite of smart contracts, apps, and APIs can be activated, customized, and developed using our Blockchain SDK for Unity.
These tools are modular, meaning developers can pick and choose the specific tools that meet their needs.
One of our main goals regarding this SDK was to make it as easy to use as possible.
Now, developers can integrate blockchain with their game without needing to write a single line in Solidity — in just a few hours, with Unity-related scripts alone.
But this doesn’t mean they can’t.
Developers can also use the Blockchain SDK to code their own smart contracts over and above those we provide.
That said, the Blockchain SDK comes packed with tons of smart contract-powered features and options with respect to in-game item variables, making it a suitable solution for almost any type and genre, from MMOs and MOBAs to multiplayer shooters and even single-player games.
The Blockchain SDK by Enjin comes packed with Emoebas, a simple but consequential game demo that uses end-to-end blockchain integration and showcases how valuable items can be won and lost from your blockchain wallet in real time.
Minting Virtual Items Using Our SDK
“Minting” describes the process of creating a virtual item to be stored on the blockchain.
When creating virtual items, a number of smart contracts representing specific item attributes can be activated based on developer discretion:
- Tradable Items: Items that can be securely traded between users using a built-in escrow system.
- Bound Items: Items locked to the user account that can only be traded to certain whitelisted recipients.
- Transfer Fees: Creators can choose to implement a transfer fee that will be paid to the creator whenever a peer-to-peer transaction is made. The fee may be charged in Enjin Coin (ENJ) or any crypto item/game currency and applies — even if the trade happens on a third-party platform.
- Regulating Secondary Markets: Restricting item transfers to only occur between whitelisted addresses allows you to define specific channels and locations where trade is allowed. For example, developers may encourage users to trade through a network of approved marketplaces and block trade from occurring elsewhere.
- Consumable Items: Items that can be used up and then disappear from a user’s account after consumption.
- Item Loss: Select items can be removed from the blockchain, with their supply decreasing once they are melted. This function can be used to create extremely rare types of items that will never exist again if removed from the economy.
- Non-Fungible Items: Collectible items can have a unique serial number and provenance. This is especially useful when conducting pre-sales to fund projects, as crowdfunding is most effective when you can provide exclusive items that have real utility, guaranteed value, and that can be received instantly by backers.
- Reserve Value: Minting items backed by ENJ guarantees buyers the value of the assets they purchase and links them to real-world liquidity.
- Melting Items: Anyone can melt an item they own and retrieve the cryptocurrency stored inside it.
- Commission on Melting: The minter of an item can opt to earn a melting fee and receive a portion of the cryptocurrency that is released through the melting process.
Developer Benefits
The Blockchain SDK by Enjin and the powerful suite of tools that make it possible are introducing new ways for video game fundraising, promotion, monetization, revenue protection, and user retention.
Monetization
- Raising the Intrinsic Value of Digital Assets: Considering that less than 3% of players currently purchase virtual items, raising the intrinsic value of items through true ownership will increase players’ value perception of each purchase, leading to increased sales and a more positive player experience.
- Taxing Secondary Markets: The Blockchain SDK will enable game developers to set up secondary marketplaces, both within and outside of their games, where they can earn a percentage of all player-to-player sales. This can also have a viral marketing effect for games, as they are giving players a powerful financial motivator to promote and advertise the game’s digital assets.
- Selling Collectibles: CryptoKitties used this tactic perfectly by enabling trade of rare collectibles, some of which have sold for over $100,000. Over $25 million in transactions has occurred within the CryptoKitties marketplace. The very nature of the blockchain ensures that everything is open for audit, including the type and volume of digital items created. This can be a massive opportunity for developers interested in introducing rare items to their games. Scarce items on the blockchain are transparent and trackable, their scarcity is verifiable, and their relative value is assured. Their history is also public, so if the items were involved in an event of historical significance, the proof remains on the blockchain.
- Regulating Third-Party Markets: The Blockchain SDK enables developers to regulate gray markets by selecting specific locations in which items can be bought and sold. By enabling certain third-party websites to promote and sell their items, developers will be able to earn a commission from their sales and gain extra exposure for their game.
- Cashing in for ENJ: Developers can set an exchange rate for players to cash in their items for ENJ and, in turn, receive a portion of that ENJ back into their own wallet.
- Enabling Time-Based Subscriptions: The Blockchain SDK will eventually be upgraded to provide facilities for time-based subscriptions, which can be useful for enabling access to games, levels, power-ups, rentals, and more. Time-based subscriptions can be minute-to-minute or even second-to-second, giving users exactly what they pay for.
- Creating Taxable Rental Markets: By enabling players to rent out their items, developers can earn a percentage of the rental fees. This feature will be added in future updates of the SDK.
Revenue Protection
- Ending Chargebacks and Fraud: It is estimated that for every successful sale of a digital item, seven more are lost to fraud. This wreaks havoc on in-game economies and costs the gaming market tens of billions of dollars annually. Items created using our SDK are protected by the blockchain and actioned through smart contracts, making this kind of fraud impossible.
- Restricting Third-Party Markets: As previously mentioned, the Blockchain SDK enables developers to regulate and restrict third-party markets by selecting specific locations for items to be bought and sold. This makes it impossible for unauthorized third-parties to sell their items without permission — meaning that developers can use this feature to combat activities fueled by grey market trading of virtual items, such as hacking, botting, and scamming.
Fundraising & Promotion
- Item Pre-Sales: Crowdfunding is a popular way to raise money for game development. With the Blockchain SDK, developers can create digital assets before they have even built their game, enabling them to reward supporters instantly by delivering rare, valuable, or discounted in-game assets. Players can hold these assets securely in their Enjin Wallet for later use when the game is released.
- Crowd Marketing: Developers can use Enjin’s solutions to mobilize their community and provide an incentive to promote their game. By providing influencers and publications with digital assets to use, customize, give away, and sell, developers will create a powerful motivator to push their products, helping solidify their user base before well before launch. Every player that receives a pre-release digital asset is more likely to use it and try out the game, especially if the item was paid for. Developers will be able to generate revenue by taxing a portion of every sale and automatically receiving the profits.
- Creating a Digital Multiverse: Using the Blockchain SDK, developers can enable certain digital assets, such as characters and their possessions, to be easily ported between games. This allows them to team up with other game developers to create a digital multiverse in which players can be transported through different universes while retaining their base attributes and possessions. This level of cross-promotion and collaboration enables a new form of game development partnership, allowing developers to share user bases and pool marketing resources.
- Utilizing Digital Asset Gift Cards: We will eventually develop the ability for developers to create gift cards for digital assets. We envision a future in which developers can sell their digital assets in retail stores or allow gamers to purchase gift cards online to give to their friends. Importing these assets into their games will be a simple process handled by the Enjin Wallet.
User Retention
- Boosting Community Engagement: Economics is fundamental to community, and ownership is essential to economics. By utilizing our SDK, developers will give players more reason to interact, cooperate, collaborate, and increase their emotional connection to games. Increasing a player’s emotional investment is a proven way to also increase their financial investment — but this is not just about creating more valuable products for developers to sell. True ownership makes virtual worlds more meaningful and gives players a greater sense of immersion.
- Enabling Continued Storylines: Enabling characters and their possessions to be ported between games gives developers the unique ability to create continued storylines in which a player’s character and story continue to grow and evolve as they travel through new games.
- Creating Vertically Integrated Communities: The Blockchain SDK also enables developers to create digital assets that can be ported between limitless platforms and devices, meaning players could use their items on integrated websites, forums, apps, and even Wi-Fi-enabled devices like TVs and smart fridges. The potential of this innovative approach to digital asset management has yet to be thoroughly investigated.
The Era of True Blockchain Gaming
We believe the Blockchain SDK is a monumental step toward a paradigm shift that will fundamentally transform the way games are designed, funded, developed, marketed, monetized, and evolved.
Instead of simple web-based games that are little more than tokenized images, we want to see blockchain technology used for massive mainstream, AAA-quality 3D works of interactive art that can be played by millions.
This is the reason we chose to build an SDK for Unity first.
While numbers alone can say a lot — 4.5 million developers use Unity, reaching 770 million gamers — Unity’s technical characteristics are what has blown our minds and drawn us to the world’s most used video game development platform.
It can make these blockchain-powered 3D worlds possible.
Saying that we “can’t wait” to see Enjin-powered games built with Unity would be a major understatement. If we had a time-machine, we’d use it.
In the meantime, we invite you to join the movement.
