OP Games Empowers Gamers to Shape, Define and Ultimately Own the Games They Love

A new era of blockchain games is emerging, and NEAR is powering this gaming revolution. OP Games, a Web3 project built on NEAR, is creating games that merge NFTs and DAOs to empower users to take control of the games they love.

For the first time, OP Games allows developers to turn entire games into fractionalized NFTs. This means players can own a fraction of the game and co-own the project. Through this co-ownership, players can enjoy price appreciation if the game succeeds, and even shape the game by participating in its DAO. For developers, this model means a revolution in terms of project financing and monetization.

“Now developers can fundraise from NFTs and DAO in a continuous process”, says Chase Freo, CEO and co-founder of OPGames.

“And at the same time, if the DAO of the players decides to add some more levels to the game or further develop it, they can just talk to the developer and say, ‘this is something we want to do — can you make it for us?’ Then the developer will be paid by the DAO through the game’s treasury, because the game is not owned by the developer anymore but rather by the collective.”

A New Gaming Era

Chase Freo (CEO) and Paul Gadi (CTO) have each spent over a decade in the gaming industry before co-founding OPGames in 2018. After a year of development on NEAR’s testnet with the support of partners such as NEAR Protocol, Filecoin/Protocol Labs (which recently launched collaboration with NEAR in co-grants and developer storage credits), and advisors like Gabby Dizon (Co-Founder at Yield Guild Games), OPGames is ready to go live, and will launch its first gaming project Arcadians by the end of August: an NFT avatar project that comes with in-game utility and play-to-earn mechanics.

In Q4 2021, OPGames’ gaming platform, OP Arcade, will launch on NEAR mainnet, with a selection of games ready to play including Classic Snake, Flip Flop and Forest Cuties.

Shortly after the platform launch, a suite of SDKs for game developers will be released alongside the OPGames governance token at the end of the month.

Having witnessed the rise of play-to-earn games on other platforms, Freo and his co-founder Paul Gadi are keen to emphasise that the games on OPGames will focus more on the ‘play’ aspect.

“The biggest worry about play-to-earn is that if you don’t diversify the game, there is going to be player fatigue,” says Chase.

“Even though it’s a game and it’s supposed to be fun, the moment that you inject a play-to-earn aspect to it, it turns into work. What we envision here is a platform with multiple play-to-earn components with different types of game play. So it could be a racing game one day, an action game the other day, or a puzzle game the next time.”

Once OP Arcade launches on mainnet, OPGames will be bringing on their game developer partners to populate the platform as diversely as possible. The aim of OP Arcade is to be, in Paul’s own words, “the appstore for Web3 games.”

Why OPGames is Building on NEAR

When asked why OPGames chose NEAR, Chase explained that their experience of building in the bear market led them to the chain:

“The infrastructure of NEAR allows for not only fast transactions (1–2 second finality) at negligible costs (1 cent fees), but also making blockchain easy to use so even internet users today can easily onboard a gaming Dapp. This makes NEAR a natural fit for blockchain gaming projects geared at mass adoption.”

About OP Games

OP Games is building an ecosystem to enable stakeholders of games to own, develop and monetize games together. We aim to help developers build games, find the audience for those games, and enable sharing of rewards for the spectrum of activity surrounding the enjoyment of the games.

Join OP Games’ community:

Telegram:https://t.me/outplaygames

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/GFZgZ84

Twitter: @Outplay_Games

About NEAR

NEAR Protocol is a high-performance blockchain platform for developing Open Web applications. Easy to build on and easy to use, NEAR will bridge the users of today’s internet to the blockchain-based web of the future.

NEAR Protocol is built by a world-class team of engineers and entrepreneurs, including world champions of ACM-ICPC, Google Code Jam, and TopCoder Open. NEAR is backed by top VCs such as A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures.

Join NEAR’s community:

Telegram: https://t.me/cryptonear

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UY9Xf2k

Twitter: @NEAR_Blockchain & @NEARProtocol