At SkyPeople, a game development company, we’ve been at the intersection of blockchain and gaming for some time. In 2017 we released our first mobile game, FinalBlade.

We were blown away by its initial popularity.

FinalBlade was played in over 150 countries with a strong following in South Korea and Taiwan and reached second in the Gross Rank platform. In 2018, like many, we began looking into blockchain. At the time we were selected by Tron SR and ran a supernode to support and add new features to the game. We were overwhelmed with the success of it and in 2019 we released it globally with 300,000 users quickly joining our waitlist.

Fast forward to today and in the quickly changing world of blockchain we’re excited to begin building our new upcoming game, FiveStars, with new use cases and technology in mind.

Blockchain gaming use cases

As we considered blockchain use cases for FiveStars we knew there were the typical gaming examples like managing digital assets using non-fungible tokens or NFTs. This defines a digital assets, like a sword, on-ledger to provide user's with a proven set of characteristics and uniqueness of the item and an open ability to manage them. For this use case, we've decided to run on Klatyn.

Then we thought through new opportunities or how we could push gaming further. In large part, what we dreamed up required higher throughput than most blockchains can handle, but these use cases excited us and we pushed on.

As financial rewards in gaming and e-sports become the norm it becomes increasingly important for gamers to have transparency into the games they play. Popular sites like OP.GG are an early indicator of this. OP.GG provides millions of gamers with insight into how they’re playing – what if we took that a step further?

As you can imagine, our games handle a lot of user actions. We believe that for FiveStars by logging these transactions in a transparent way – similar to how AdsDax manages ad impressions – we can give users a new way to view their gameplay with trusted real-time logs and stats.

On the surface this is a nice benefit to gamers, they can see their results and know they have the same view as the rest of the world. We think there’s plenty more to unlock. As just one potential bonus, with this foundation of transparency and auditability in-hand we can work to better monitor and prevent fraud across not just FiveStar, but our entire set of games.

For this to work we prioritized a network that can:

• Provide our user's with transparent logs
• Manage high write volumes
• Support low-latency dashboards

This is what led us to Hedera, and specifically the upcoming Hedera Consensus Service. By having a simple, scalable API to manage our game's logs and stats we'll be able to provide the most transparent data to our gamers. We intend to log our user's key moments and stats to form a leaderboard powered by Hedera.

For gaming, or any consumer-facing app it is important to note blockchain isn't all benefits for end-users. Our team has been hard at work to solve the high barriers to entry and UX challenges that come with it. These include the creation of a wallet within the FiveStars game itself, as well as making the micro-transaction fee mechanisms invisible to
the user and ensuring that the costs of these fees are included in the overall
payment function of the game.

Our goal is to build FiveStars so that users who do not know blockchain, or distributed ledgers are not exposed to the complexities this can bring to the user experience making the game easily accessible for anyone who wants to play. At the same time, they'll be able to take advantage of the benefits of ledgers like Hedera.

We think Hedera Consensus Service will be an ideal solution for providing greater transparency to our game logs. We’ll continue to update the community as we go. If you’d like to stay up to date on our progress be sure to follow us on Twitter or learn more at skypeople.co.kr.