Welcome to Tri-News, a Trikon newsletter covering the latest updates, insights, and conversations in the Web3 gaming ecosystem. Subscribe if you want to join a fast-growing community of gamers and developers. 

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Web3 gaming is off to a hot start in 2023. Despite the macro economic conditions, the deal flow for gaming projects remains strong and long-term thesis for Web3 games hasn’t budged. 

In addition, we’re finally getting to see games go live and show what they’ve been working on these past few years. We are also observing mainstream gaming giants pay close attention to the developments in Web3 and build their own plans. 

That said, the first week of 2023 has been eventful to say the least for Web3 gaming. So many major game updates were announced and new narratives around Web3 gaming are starting to formulate. So let’s get started. 

• Illuvium Zero is Live for Land Owners: The third world of Illuvium interoperable blockchain game, Illuvium Zero is now available for download across all platforms. Those who won Illuvium land plots can immediately start playing and others have to wait for official public launch. 

• Legends of Elimia Launches Public Beta: The highly anticipated MMORPG for this year is now open for public beta testing. You can get more updates upon joining their discord. 

• Oath of Peak Extends Early Access: The early access player of Oath of Peak had high praises for the mobile game. Seeing this positive response, the team decided to give 1000 more early access spots. You can try out your luck here. 

• Gods Unchained Decides To Go Mobile: It’s clear mobile gaming is resonating far better with gamers than other platforms. So it’s no surprise major Web3 games like Gods Unchained is expanding its reach to mobile. It will be interesting to see how the dynamic will shift among players. Will they completely abandon desktop-version? Let’s see.

• Aurory Hits ATH Unique Players: The top-tier game on Solana, Aurory, reaches an ATH of 3,500 unique players this week. In addition, Aurory observed a major uptick in $AURY spending (55,000 $AURY in Dec 2022). Aurory also did a $BONK airdrop to the early access players. 

• Gala Games Acquires Mobile Gaming Studio & Hints Major Changes to $GALA: Gala Games has tapped into a Web2 gaming studio that specialises in mobiles. The CEO, aka, Benefactor, believes this acquisition will reduce development time by 15 years and expand Gala Games library by more than 15 complete mobile games. 

• He also shares a deflationary strategy to burn all $GALA tokens used by the games, which would allegedly burn 6-35% of total supply. These announcements drove the price by more than 30%. 

A fascinating narrative being discussed in the gaming streets of the crypto world now is how artificial intelligence will impact game development. It’s an obvious spill-over effect of the recent emergence of OpenAI with ChatGPT. For gaming, it makes an interesting argument because certain things can be automated to improve overall development efficiency. 

Some of the areas AI can improve in gaming are: 

• Variety of art 

• Gameplay challenges 

• Storytelling 

By adding elements to automation to these fundamental pillars of game development, AI softwares like ChatGPT can greatly assist game developers. The CEO of Immutable, Alex Connelly, says that this technology can modify learning curves for each player based on their performance. 

This is really important because when games are too hard, players quit and never try again. But, if the AI agent can accurately adjust the level of difficulty, the player engagement increases and they’ll eventually get used to playing at higher levels. 

In terms of storytelling, Connelly says that AI can help with narration. Instead of having the same script for every player, we can create personalised ones by feeding the AI past game events. Connelly said in an interview with Cointelegraph that his team experimented with this technology but immediately ran into problems as the software kept providing spam narration. 

From this, we can understand AI and gaming will converge. But now is not the right time. Most companies will not implement this nascent technology right away. They will keep exploring all possibilities and tracking progress to find the right way to integrate AI. 

• Trikon’s top 10 web3 games list: We recently shared a list of some of the best games launching this year. Do check it out and try to apply for early access. 

• Summarizing Web3 gaming and 2023 predictions: From the founder of Guild of Guardians, check out an amazing thread that sets industry context for gaming and what we expect this year. You can also read the detailed version here. 

• New year letter from Square Enix’s president: Yosuke Matsuda has again commented that Square Enix is extremely bullish on Web3 and continues to bet on blockchain games. 

That’s a wrap! Gaming definitely seems to have momentum this year compared to other crypto sectors.

Now it’s time for players to play these blockchain games and participate in the open economy. Many are still in development. But that’s expected to change soon. 

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