Amidst the volatility of the crypto industry, one sector has remained consistent—whether bear or bull, cold winter or optimistic summer: People like games.

It’s long been hoped that gaming will help power the next web3 adoption wave, and there are now enough examples that blockchain network Moonbeam has felt confident to invest heavily in the space. Alongside partner N3MUS, which offers embedded game wallets and serves as an on-chain game platform, Moonbeam plans a tournament beginning Dec. 5 to highlight both the network’s latest games and enhanced gameplay.

Moonbeam hosts over 200 apps on its network, manages a $10 million innovation fund and runs grant programs and accelerators. It was actually a Moonbeam accelerator which N3MUS participated in that began the relationship between the two companies.

With tournaments, N3MUS is going live with four games initially on Moonbeam that are already playable, with the idea of creating  a ladder system—or player-vs-player competition system—where each week, gamers can try to get atop the leaderboards for a chance to win prizes.

“There will be four tournaments at the same time, so it’s going to be hectic, but it’s going to be really exciting for all of those players engaging with those games, shifting between games, and trying to be number one on the leaderboard,” Neal Peters, chief executive officer and co-founder of N3MUS, said to me during a recent interview. “There’s some serious prize money available for those gamers, and we’ve already noticed people trying to acquire [nonfungible tokens] because they know—eventually—if they own a specific [nonfungible token], they can get a boost on the leaderboard.”

Sicco Naets, head of ecosystem development at Moonbeam, said the leaderboard system is not something they plan to roll out indefinitely for each individual game on Moonbeam. They will run the program for several weeks or months—and if a game is attractive, the assumption is those players will stick around.

“We’re launching with four games but the idea is to grow that over time and run these tournaments in a very rapid cycle,” Naets said. “Basically it's compete for a week, win some prizes, then a week or two later there’s another tournament, and round and round we go. There’s competition from blockchains in attracting studios, and we felt this was a unique offering we didn’t see anyone else doing, one of the main reasons we made the investment in N3MUS.”

Peters credits being in the Moonbeam accelerator for N3MUS’ continued work with the company.

“We never left Moonbeam after the accelerator ended,” Peters said. “Bonding there and our ongoing relationship has been really helpful for what we’re doing and what Moonbeam is doing. Ninety percent of the time, Sicco and I agree on the way forward, so it’s been really cool to have the same thoughts and visions about everything.”

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To understand Naets’ and Peters’ current visions for the future of crypto gaming requires a look back at where their careers began.

While Naets studied journalism in college, his entire career has been in tech. He spent 10 years as a backend software developer and 14 years leading large engineering teams. What appealed to him in crypto was its decentralized nature.

“I’d worked at and helped grow a start-up from 36 people to 750 across almost 20 countries, and before that, worked at a company with around 130,000 people,” Naets said. “The thing I witnessed in over 25 years working in both large and small enterprises was that the more people you add, the more bureaucracy you have.”

As an alternative to the traditional corporate business model, Naets saw crypto as a possible avenue to help conduct business in a different, more efficient way.

Similarly, Peters—whose background in IT began at the age of 19—ended up focusing on sales and cloud technology, and realized blockchain’s decentralized nature provided a better backend to the tech he was immersed in.

“During my final job, I got acquainted with crypto when one of my colleagues was talking about XRP around 2016,” Peters said. “Most of them were investing, but I was looking at the technology. It was decentralized, and basically what we were doing with our cloud solution was putting servers all over the world, making sure they never had down time. With blockchain, you had the same sort of aspects because you had all sorts of nodes that were always running.”

That was all the catalyst Peters needed to dive into the space, subsequently spending two years getting acquainted with blockchain tech before he began advising gaming studios and other decentralized finance (DeFi) companies on their blockchain infrastructure.

Over the past three to four years, Peters advised over 20 gaming studios with Marco Colaco—his N3MUS co-founder— as well as investing in them. As gamers themselves, they knew what was going wrong with the gaming studios and knew their needs. 

“Building a game is a very capital intensive process that can take anywhere from 1.5 years to 2 years—and in some cases, 6 years,” Naets said. “During that time, you’re not making any money, so studios need help with upfront capital investment.” But once a game is launched, the next problem you have is attracting users. “We felt we needed to partner with somebody that could assist us with that, which is why we’ve invested in N3MUS,” he said. 

With Moonbeam, N3MUS focused on building out the tournament system, allowing them to track who played a game, the scores they achieved, and integrating all of that information into the leaderboards. But the tournament itself isn’t necessarily what will drive more traction to the Moonbeam games. Rather, a major incentive might exist in the ease of web3 gameplay.

“We analyzed over 100 web3 games, and logging into a game was sometimes quite challenging,” Peters said. “There were even some games where we weren’t able to play.”

Peters began researching manuals online on how to play the games, which is when he realized taking away the pain of logging into games could be a huge value add.

“If you want to onboard 1,000, 500,000 or 1,000,000 gamers, you need to take away the complexity,” Peters said. “We knew we needed to make it easy.”

This led to the creation of N3MUS ID—a login with account abstraction and blockchain integration in the background. If web2 gamers played a game with the N3MUS wallet, they wouldn’t even know blockchain was involved, which is exactly what the company wanted to achieve.

Read more: Horizon Blockchain Games Is Taking a Flexible Approach to The Next Generation of On-Chain Gaming

“Success in web3 gaming comes down to delivering real ownership with assets that actually belong to players and can be taken anywhere—true interoperability,” Aaron McDonald, chief executive officer and co-founder of Futureverse, said to me over email. “Rather than just tokenizing assets, it allows players to take their items, avatars, or wearables across different games and platforms seamlessly, providing a real sense of ownership that isn’t confined to a single game environment.”

This is the kind of interoperability that N3MUS believes it’s achieving with Moonbeam through its game login system, which can be rolled out through the company’s portfolio of over 200 games.

“If we run 200 tournaments for 200 games, we get 200 communities combined on our platform, which gives us so much strength,” Peters said. “That’s how we try to guide the community from one game to another game, and it’s not only tied to Moonbeam.”

The company is also partnering up with other blockchains like BNB chain and is anticipating others to eventually come through the platform. If a user is using a N3MUS ID to play “game 1,” they can use the same ID to play “game 2,” further helping reduce complexity for gamers themselves and enabling interoperability for a gaming experience across the different blockchains.

“The cross-pollination between games is very important,” Naets said. “When studios are looking at different blockchains, they tend to be a bit tech agnostic. I could tell you all the features that make game development on Moonbeam easier, but from what I’ve seen, most studios don’t care about that—they care more about the support they’re getting from a specific chain and the opportunity from that chain to attract more users.”

And gamers, he said, are even less picky. 

“At the end of the day, gamers don’t really care about the underlying chain—and why would they?” Naets said. “If you’re using the Netflix front end, do you really care if it’s hosted on AWS versus Microsoft? No, you just care that it works.”

lead image: Neal Peters