About us:
The Great Escape is a hyper-casual platformer game leveraging the Polkadot and Moonbeam tech stack, to create a new generation of web3 games with the following model:
- Free-to-play
- Gas-less
- Wallet-less (players can join without a wallet, they create one when they off-ramp)
- Chain-agnostic (players can join the game from any chain)
- Offers rewards in any token (players can claim rewards in their preferred token).
- Allows players to deposit/fund their player’s account in any token
Our team is made of passionate web3 builders who have been experimenting on Kusama since its early days and of experienced game developers.
We have been building on Moonbeam since its launch, creating the first DAO of the chain (GLMR APES DAO). It’s under the impulsion of this community that we started to work on building this game about 18 months ago.
We recently created a brand new hyper-casual game called Pinkdrop to help bootstrap a community for the PINK meme coin project that has proven very popular among the Polkadot community with over a quarter million games played in just 4 weeks by 14,000 players.
We have recently posted a detailed Open Gov Proposal which did not pass in spite of the support from a lot of actors in the Polkadot community and the favorable opinions voiced by 3 gaming experts.
Problem statement:
Although Polkadot has seen a lot of infrastructure and tooling applications developed over the past 2 years, it often still lacks concrete use cases and applications.
This is particularly visible when it comes to GameFi, which is one of the strongest narratives in terms of mass adoption for web3 products.
There is a clear mandate from the Polkadot community to expand the gaming universe in our ecosystem, and we believe the best way to unlock this massive opportunity is by simplifying the gaming experience to attract new users.
Games help bring some fun and contribute to the increase in the user adoption of more complex infrastructure/DeFi projects operating on the same ecosystem as they create bridges between communities.
However, web3 gamers often have to face many hurdles such as low accessibility, complex chain interactions, high gas fees, upfront investment costs, and tokenomics concerns. This makes it difficult for players to experiment with games on different blockchains.
As web3 gamers are scattered across multiple competing blockchains (Immutable X, Avax, Polygon, Solana, Ronin, etc…), the fragmentation of the GameFi offer increases the entry barrier for newcomers and weighs on the builder’s decision to select one ecosystem to build their dApp.
There is a strong incentive for builders to go build on already popular chains as it makes player acquisition easier. This is a challenge for Polkadot, given the limited number of games available.
How do we solve this?
Polkadot has actually a lot to offer when it comes to GameFi, by leveraging on the XCM format, the Great Escape has been able to create a concrete use-case of what Polkadot provides and poses itself as a factor of growth for the ecosystem while increasing the attractiveness of Polkadot to other game developers.
It showcases how an accessible, gas-less, wallet-less and chain-agnostic game could be built on Polkadot and provides detailed documentation for other builders in the form of a Jungle EVM/XCM Toolkit to further promote the adoption of Polkadot for dApp builders.
Furthermore, fun games like the Great Escape and Pinkdrop contribute to give a fun image to Polkadot. That’s why we are committed to keep pushing towards that direction by getting the Great Escape ready for public launch and establishing ourselves as a Polkadot-based vibrant game studio to create great games following the same accessible model.
