PLUS: Steam Hates AI Art?

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Here are key highlights of this week:

• Solana on a redemption arc

• Yuga’s new game LOTM is coming

• Steam bans games with Gen AI art?

Let’s get started!

Solana on a Redemption Arc 🆙

Projects are written off often in crypto. This can be because of valid reasons such as poor ecosystem, low degree of decentralization, and inability to support mass applications.

However, some projects are written off because of things that are not in control of the team. That is the case with Solana. When people hear about Solana, they think of Sam Bankman Fried and associate the collapse of FTX with Solana’s future prospects. Or they bring up previous outages of Solana and call it a centralized blockchain.

But this perception couldn’t be further from the truth.

Solana has seen incredible growth across the board, despite going through one of the toughest phases in crypto history. The total locked value may be down, but the number of innovative projects is at an all-time high. Plus, Solana has 100% uptime over the last 6 months.

And the wider community and OG founders are realizing that. Recently, the co-founder of MakerDAO proposed to fork Solana’s codebase to create a native chain for the protocol. This was surprising because most early Ethereum OGs usually align with the same ecosystem. But to see someone compare the technical quality of different blockchains and keep their ideology aside and build for innovation is refreshing.

Even on the gaming front, Solana is rapidly onboarding many projects from games to different tolling platforms. And most recently, Portal announced it’s integrating Solana to go cross-chain.

Furthermore, the gaming SDK of Solana eases the transition for many developers because of how smooth the onboarding is. Gaming NFTs also have a huge advantage on Solana with compressed NFTs. They can be a great distribution model for games as the cost of minting is so low.

In all, the stage is set for Solana to thrive on all fronts. We have to wait and see what kind of projects build on it and how much further the community will grow.

Yuga’s New Game is Coming 👀

Yuga is shipping their gaming line up aggressively as of late. With Dookey Dash early this year and HVMTL Forge most recently, Yuga is shaping their ecosystem with one game after another.

Now they’re back with probably the most anticipated game of the lot: Legends of the Mara. The Open Beta of LOTM is expected to be released in September. The community expects this to be another high stakes game where players can earn many rewards. So let’s dive into what the game is about and how to play.

Legends of the Mara is a collection-based 2D strategy game that picks up where the events of 2nd Trip leave off. The goal here is to rank as high as possible and defeat “The Shattered.”

To craft a winning strategy, you'll need to make some strategic choices. First up, the environment tier – the higher the tier, the greater the potential rewards, but the steeper the cost. Then, decide your playstyle: are you a farmer or a fighter? Finally, master your Kodamara strategy by identifying the resources that yield the most powerful evolutions.

The ever-evolving meta-game is bound to keep you on your toes, and I, for one, am buzzing with excitement to jump into the action. Legends of the Mara is designed to be inclusive, welcoming players with various playstyles and reaction times. Just remember, it's in beta, so let's keep our expectations in check while we embark on this epic adventure.

Steam Bans Game With Gen AI Art? 🔴

Imagine you put your heart and soul into making a delicious cake but no one could taste it because it wasn’t delivered on time. You would be devastated, right?

Night Run, a Web3 driving game, faced a similar situation when Steam banned the game from their distribution platform just one week before its release. You might think the use of NFTs or cryptocurrency was the reason, right? Well, that wasn’t the case here!

Steam banned Night Run because the game used Generative Art. It makes sense to ban when someone steals art and uses AI under copyright rules (which are still not clear in the age of AI) because that would lack originality.

For example, if a game uses the IP of Pokemon and leverages AI to generate similar characters, it would be completely wrong. But that’s not what happened with Night Run. The driving game used AI to assist with art but not duplicate something else.

Fortunately, the game is accepted on Epic Games Store and will soon go live. But imagine if the stakes were different. Imagine if the team didn’t fund the production through an NFT sale. Imagine if they had put everything on the line for the game to go live and start earning. As Steam is one of the biggest app markets, it would have impacted significantly.

More importantly, I believe the bigger picture here for game developers is that they are always at mercy of the app stores. In addition to taking huge chunks in platform fees, the boundaries set by such platforms make it extremely difficult for game creators to go out of the box.

We hope such policies change towards AI usage because there will be many games using the new technology in a positive and more entertaining way. And it’s crucial to support them as much as possible.

Game Updates

• Metahorse Unity went live with its public sale on One Planet NFT launchpad.

• One of Korea's largest app markets ONE STORE has partnered with Polygon Labs to support games with global app distribution.

• Treasure DAO performed $MAGIC halvening, reducing emissions from year 2 to year 3 by more than 10 million tokens.

• Fableborne went live with its Primordials Tournament where top performers are rewarded with free mints, pre-sale discounts, and allowlist spots.

• Yuga Labs announced it will release the open beta of Legends of the Mara in September.

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