Solana Up 9% as News of Partnership with PUBG Developer Emerges

Krafton, the billionaire Chang Byung-Gyu-founded South Korean gaming conglomerate, is expanding its empire into crypto. Yesterday, the gaming publishing company announced it would team up with blockchain startup Solana Labs to create play-to-earn crypto games.

The cooperation would see both companies collaborate on creating, operating, designing, and marketing blockchain and NFT-based games and services.

With its faster speed and low transaction cost, the Solana ecosystem has become the choice of many companies transitioning to the blockchain. This has led it to challenge Ethereum’s dominance of the smart contracts space, even outperforming it by 500% last year. 

More Traditional Game Makers Continue to Explore Web3 But for Varying Reasons

The partnership sees the migration trend of traditional gaming companies to web3 continue at pace. Recently Epic games said it would welcome crypto games on its platform after rivals Stream decided to ban them. This shows a growing acceptance that blockchain gaming may be the next step in the evolution of the over $500 billion industry.

The new collaboration came a little over a month after Krafton declared its ambition to enter the blockchain gaming space. It stated that it would partner with Naver Z on a non-fungible token (NFT) project while developing an NFT metaverse platform.

Krafton is the PUGB game series developer. The popular battle royale shooter franchise spans multiple platforms and has more than one billion downloads on its mobile version. The pc and console options have had 75 million combined downloads themselves.

However, there are suspicions that the new move may just be a PR move intended to boost the company’s stock price. Reports suggest that Kraftons’s revenue has plummeted drastically this year due to fierce competition from Chinese rivals. Following the Beijing regulator crackdown, these Chinese developers have migrated to South Korea, Kraftons home market.  

Consequently, Korean developers like Krafton are rushing to create “play-to-earn” games that include blockchain technology to boost revenue. However, following the announcement, there was no noticeable movement in the company’s share price, as seen in the chart above. 

If the move is a PR deal, Krafton may be off to a bad start. The company may need to announce that its most popular titles would be developed on the blockchain to generate any real interest in the market. However, in any case, the partnership augurs well for mainstream blockchain adoption.

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Gaming Industry Skeptical About NFTs But Crypto Continues To Benefit

There is still a lot of skepticism amongst the gaming industry about the place of NFTs in the sector. Popular platforms like Stream have opposed NFTs, while gamers have opposed Ubisoft’s venture into web3. 

Recently, following outrage from both fans and creators, some Western developers have had to separate themselves from blockchain gaming goods officially. GSC Game World, the developer of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl, openly backed out of plans to use NFTs in an upcoming game. Also, Team17 abandoned its NFT project after at least three of its production partners expressed disagreement with its intentions.

Some mooted reasons for the opposition include gamers seeing NFTs as a new type of microtransaction, which they have opposed for over a decade. Also, the introduction of blockchain tech gives room for its potential scams and bad actors and then the issue of its environmental impact. 

However, the crypto space continues to thrive off these companies venturing into the blockchain. Following the partnership announcement with Krafton, Solana saw a nice upward surge in its price. Data from Coinmarketcap shows that in the last 24 hours, Sol went up by over 9%, moving from $95.08 to $104.15.

Finally, as a result of deals like this, developer activities on the Solana ecosystem continue to rise. Recent data suggest that an inverse relationship has formed between developer activities and the value of Sol. as seen below, the fall in price has seen a corresponding increase in developer activity.

The increased activity would most likely see fast-paced development and innovation within the network in the long run. This will likely further lead to more adoption and could eventually cause the value of the ecosystem to skyrocket. 

Do you think traditional gaming companies venturing into NFTs and blockchain is a PR move? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.