As a game studio coming to Web3 for the first time, BlueJay Games wanted a way to provide users verifiable ownership of Heroes they play with, without forcing them to download a third-party wallet, acquire tokens for gas, manage a seed phrase, and context switch to sign transactions. Requiring elements of web3 would severely limit the number of users they could onboard and retain.
But the goal wasn’t to hide all Web3 elements. BlueJay Games had a hypothesis: showing users ownership over Heroes and the work they’ve put into the game would increase retention beyond the normal retention for similar games.
To get the best of both worlds, they would need multiple pieces of infrastructure on top of the blockchain. They would have to either build those pieces or find one or more partners they could trust. A key goal for them was to not devote unnecessary time to infrastructure. They wanted to devote all the time they could to building a standout game.
“We prefer to build everything in-house, but using Shinami has saved us countless engineering hours. They've been our closest partner and invested in our success from day 1.”
Shinami’s developer platform provides a one-stop shop of reliable infrastructure to make web3 unseen for Arcade Champion users. To give users ownership without added friction, BlueJay uses three main tools. First, they create an embedded wallet for each user when they sign up for the game. This wallet is where their Heroes (NFTs) are stored. Second, they use Shinami’s Gas Station to sponsor each transaction that creates, levels up or merges Heroes. Lastly, BlueJay Games also uses Shinami’s Node Service to read and write to the blockchain, which records the state of Heroes.
Arcade Champion saw the following results after integrating Shinami’s infrastructure:
