Steven Bartlett’s thirdweb launches GamingKit in collaboration with Coinbase

thirdweb, the technology platform for building NFT and Web3 apps, is launching GamingKit, a kit specifically for Web3 gaming developers, in partnership with Coinbase.

With over 3.2 billion gamers worldwide, gaming is set to become one of the biggest use cases for Web3. By giving players true ownership over their in-game assets, Web3 gaming lets players benefit financially from their hours of gameplay. 

In 2021, over $54 billion was spent on in-game purchases by gamers, with 100% of the money going to the developers and studios behind the games due to in-game assets being held in a closed ecosystem. Web3 gaming creates a new ownership model whereby gamers can sell their assets in an open marketplace, ultimately turning players into advocates and supercharging the growth of their game.

Web3 promotes the belief that individuals should have the same property rights for digital items as they do with physical items. When an in-game item is represented as an NFT, the player has full ownership over that asset: they can sell the item on an open marketplace, the asset can be used or displayed in partner game/franchises and the item can unlock perks and rewards throughout the Web3 ecosystem.

Having full ownership over your in-game assets introduces a paradigm shift in gaming where the economies of a video game are distributed between the player and the studio. Players can now benefit from the economic upside of the success of a video game.

Web3 gaming will achieve widespread adoption when games are released which are equal in quality to traditional games. thirdweb’s gamingkit will accelerate the development of Web3 gaming by taking care of the blockchain complexity and letting game studios focus on building a great playing experience. 

thirdweb collaborated with Coinbase to provide developers with tools which will significantly improve the user experience for players. For example, Coinbase’s payment infrastructure will make it simple for game developers to accept traditional payment methods, such as a credit card, for crypto assets. 

Jake Loo, CTO at thirdweb says: “We firmly believe web3 is the future of gaming. Gamingkit will accelerate the growth of the space by equipping developers with tools to build games which will onboard millions onto Web3 gaming. 

Partnering with Coinbase means we can launch tools which cover the full web3 game development stack. Gamingkit is designed to produce games which will first and foremost be incredible playing experiences, with zero friction caused by the blockchain infrastructure. 

“Our mission is to break down barriers to Web3 gaming by building a development kit that provides developers and players with the tools to unlock its incredible potential. By partnering with Coinbase, we’re able to build a more seamless user experience so accessible and more inclusive games can be made.”

In just 12 months, thirdweb has grown to over 50,000 monthly active developers using their tools and nearly 5,00 active developers doing over 500,000 blockchain transactions a month. Over 200k smart contracts have been deployed across 8 different blockchains.