Web3 Weekly 9/28

🟨 Yuga Labs Enforces Royalties, Sui Play Beyond, Microsoft Wallet Leak, and more

Author

Web3 No Re
September 28, 2023

Gm players.

The day has finally come - Tom has finally had his internet installed, and CS2 has now launched. For the newbies to No Re, we wrote about CS:GO in July (when we thought CS2 was going to be dropped), so make sure to give it a read, as we will be diving back into its economy soon.

As gamers first, if you want to chat about collabs or just game with fellow web3 people, slide into our DMs, and we’ll queue it up!

Anyways, we’ve got some bits to get through before we can rank up and open cases:

  • Yuga Labs Enforces Royalties

  • Change Log

  • Sui Play Beyond

  • Microsoft Wallet Leak

  • Other News

Yuga Labs Enforces Royalties

Yuga Labs has taken a hard stance on royalties for their Mara NFT collections. Trading is only enabled on royalty-enforced platforms (SudoSwap V2 & X2Y20), leaving leading platforms OpenSea, Blur, and LooksRare in the rearview mirror.

The NFT world is no stranger to royalty disputes. Platforms like OpenSea, Blur, and LooksRare have been at the center of debates around fair compensation for creators. While these platforms have facilitated billions of dollars in trading volume, they've often been criticized for not adequately supporting or enforcing creator royalties. Yuga Labs' recent move underscores the growing demand for platforms to prioritize and protect creator rights.

Yuga Labs Royalties YTD (Source: @Beetle on Dune Analytics)

When collections are doing volumes, the royalties paid back to creators or treasuries stack up, with Yuga's total royalty income for 2022 hitting $107.8 million. Building utility for previous collections and engaging gameplay for new collections means that secondary sales are a big driver for revenue - as long as the royalties are enforced. It will be interesting to see the spin out of this take as many of the industry are starting to look again at value distribution across the different players in the gaming space. Cutting royalties may have made an exchange more popular in the early stages, but once the race to zero is complete, you will actually need to provide value to prospective buyers and sellers. Unique selling points not related to costs - what a crazy thought.

Change Log

Sui Play Beyond

Sui is the latest L1 blockchain to boost support for their web3 gaming ecosystem. The Sui Foundation announced the launch of Play Beyond: a game launcher and platform aimed to aggregate the Sui gaming ecosystem into one location.

Though we can’t promise that Play Beyond will let you “experience games like never before” (it really just seems like a launcher with some social features), it does help an ecosystem of already 40 games gain more exposure. Perhaps a bit more hyped up to compete with the launch of Beam on Avalanche and Solana’s PlayGG initiative, it still doesn’t discredit Sui’s potential for gaming.

Sui’s advantage for game developers is that it’s an object-based chain, meaning it could offer easier integrations with in-game objects developed with engines like Unreal or Unity. Under the object-based paradigm, NFTs are natively dynamic, and in-game items can evolve via metadata.

Sui also offers native account abstraction to improve user experience and reduce barriers to entry for new entrants. zkLogin is an initiative that allows users to create a wallet with web2 logins, similar to the Immutable Wallet system. Additionally, account abstraction allows for sponsored transactions, meaning developers can pay gas fees for players, eliminating the burden of funding a wallet or allowing players to try the game before even fully setting up a wallet.

Microsoft Wallet Leak

The FTC has recently been serving up more gaming leaks and alpha than GDC and Nintendo Direct combined. We got news of a new Nintendo console, and earlier this week, we got a massive leak of internal communications at Microsoft.

For those unaware of why a United States federal commission is even at the center of gaming rumors and Game Rant headlines, Microsoft has been under some pressure for trying to buy the small indie studio Activision Blizzard for $68.7B. Earlier plans to make this acquisition were blocked by the UK CMA last year, but apparently, this time, it’s different.

So why is this leak big news in web3 gaming? For one, crypto is gamer money, and gaming news is good for crypto. More importantly, a leaked roadmap for the next gen Xbox included plans for a wallet integration.

Crypto is gamer money, and gaming is a bigger industry than Hollywood and the music industry combined.

Tyler Winklevoss, Co-Founder of Gemini

The roadmap was attached to an email from May 2022, the same week that Terra imploded, but even the following bear market conditions can’t stop the web3 gaming community from bullish on these early plans.

Microsoft isn’t new to the crypto space, having recently partnered with Aptos to integrate their OpenAI Service into Aptos Assistant. Microsoft has also been working with EY since December 2020 on an Xbox enterprise blockchain platform for rights and royalties management.

Other News

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