We are excited to announce that Celer Network formed a strategic partnership with SkyDream Technology, a multi-million-daily-active-user mobile mini game studio on platforms such as WeChat, Facebook and more. This partnership will bring many of SkyDream Technology’s popular games and users to CelerX eSport gaming application and empower SkyDream Technology with an entirely new and sustainable monetization channel for their games using Celer Network’s blockchain technology.
Mobile Mini Games Today
– High Growth, Large User Base
Mobile mini games, represented by Facebook Instant Games and WeChat Mini Games, are gaining tremendous growth in the past 2 years. Reportedly on WeChat platform, in just one year, the user base exploded from 0 to 450 million and the daily active user (DAU) has exceeded 100 million by the end of 2018¹. Facebook Instant Game has reached 20 billions game sessions with the number of games growing 300X in merely two years. Often using the emerging technology of HTML5, the developers community of mini games also has seen more than 100X yearly growth in size. SkyDream Technology has significantly benefits from this booming trend in the past several years.
– Challenges in Monetization
However, some gloomy challenges are ahead: the mini game developers, like SkyDream Technology, are having limited options to converting the high-quality DAU and retention to revenue matching that user quality². This challenge is rooted in the nature of mini games: they tend to be highly interactive games that users can start to play instantly and in small fragments of spare time, such as on a train, before dinner, sleep and more. As the game itself is lightweight, in-app-purchases, which is a key part of the monetization for “black label” games with deep game content and various artifacts (e.g. relics, weapons, collectibles and etc) to purchase, often cannot serve as an effective monetization channel for mini games.
Unfortunately, the other key monetization channel, advertisement, is not looking good either. Inserting advertisements can simply destroy the smooth and simple user experience expected from the users. Many of us have experienced this before: when having fun with some free-to-play mini games and then suddenly interrupted by an abruptly inserted advertisement, you don’t actually care about the advertisement and just want to wait it out until you can play again. As a result, advertisements for mini games hurt user engagement, retention, but do not actually generate the deserved revenue for mini game developers.
Celer Network and CelerX: Blockchain Monetization Tool for Massive Mini Games Industry
Celer Network is a layer-2 scalability platform that can accelerate many existing layer-1 blockchains, such as Ethereum. Recently launched alpha mainnet on Ethereum, Celer Network accelerates not only money transfers but also complicated smart contract transactions by more than 1000X and reduces the smart contract transaction costs to 0. With Celer Network, applications built utilizing blockchain technology no longer suffers from high-cost and laggy user interaction that is common to most of blockchain applications today, and can tap into the global value flow with smooth user experiences.
Celer Network sets out to bring mass adoption to blockchain and starts from gaming. Celer Network starts not by building an entirely new gaming ecosystem on blockchain, but aims to bring blockchain technology to established traditional gaming world as a new experience for global players and a new monetization tool for traditional game developers and publishers.
Celer Network’s alpha mainnet launch delivers the initial steps on this vision. Along with the highly advanced layer-2 scaling technology infrastructure backed by the research and development of a world-class team, Celer Network also launched CelerX, an eSport gaming mobile app where users can compete in skill-based games and win cryptocurrency prices, and CelerX Game Developer SDK, where traditional mini game developers can easily tap into this new global and instant monetization flow.
Global Monetization Flow with High Conversion under 10mins
Though only 5 weeks into the public alpha, global users from 88 different countries have played more than 300,000 games generating $1,400,000 entry fee for one HTML5 mini game, Fish Jump. User retention and engagement are also multiple times of industry average. This demonstrates that the monetization channel, different from advertisements, actually enhances user experiences and can converts players to revenue flow in a much more effective way.
Most importantly, the underlying real-time, low-cost, non-custodial and secure Celer Network technology brings instant and fraud-free revenue flow directly to the game developers from global users without any friction of traditional financial rails.
Celer Network also aims to lower the integration barrier for traditional game developers. Celer eSport Gaming SDK requires no previous knowledge or experience of blockchain and takes only 10mins to completely transform a casual game into a Blockchain eSport Game.
A Mutually Beneficial Partnership
SkyDream Technology, as a premier gaming studio and publishing house for mini games, sees the integration with Celer Network as providing a promising new monetization channel and strategic partner in the new but fast-growing blockchain industry.
Two parties have already started the collaboration and the first integrated game Jump High from SkyDream technology will be available soon in CelerX.
Feng Chen, SkyDream’s CEO, says: “Integration with CelerX is a no-brainer for us. It already shows promising early results and holds huge potential to monetize our games on the flat global financial system established by the emerging blockchain technology and the integration efforts is truly smooth. I don’t see why any HTML5 gaming company wouldn’t give it a try. We want to partner with Celer Network early to secure a strategic position in the blockchain revolution and maintain a solid and tight business relation in the long term.”
Celer Network sees this partnership as the first and important step to take blockchain technology out of the closed circle and bring it to mainstream developers and users. Celer will work with SkyDream technology in a long-term relationship to deeply understand the needs and challenges in the traditional gaming market and provide the best solutions using blockchain technology.
Mo Dong, Celer Network Cofounder says: “Working with SkyDream has been a pleasure. We applaud their vision and forward-looking thinking. We view SkyDream as a long-term partner and early adopter for our CelerX eSport Gaming SDK. We are confident that we will learn a lot in this partnership and shape a better and easier blockchain integration path for all traditional game developers and studios, and beyond the gaming industry. ”
In the next few months, SkyDream and CelerX will release several popular games which has more than one million users on WeChat Mini Game platform. Please stay tuned!
[1] 2018 WeChat mini game report by Aladin
[2] Mini game developers are concerned about sustainable monetization
