Gala Games strikes partnership with Fortnite creator Epic Games amid Valve ban on blockchain games

Blockchain gam­ing plat­form Gala Games (GALA) and Epic Games have entered a deal to pub­lish Gala’s tiles on the Epic Games Store.

Gala Games to bring Web3 to the masses

The Epic Games Store launched in 2018 and is a store­front for PC and Mac com­pat­i­ble games.

The pub­lish­ing deal will open up Gala’s Web3 titles to more than 194 mil­lion users on the Epic Games Store, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing it from rival gam­ing token platforms.

“Gala will bring web3 games to the mass­es, expos­ing mil­lions of gamers to this new genre of enter­tain­ment and solid­i­fy­ing Gala’s place as the leader in the bur­geon­ing Web3 games industry.”

Gala Games Pres­i­dent John Osvald said the part­ner­ship with Epic Games would bring greater legit­i­ma­cy to blockchain gam­ing. He fur­ther added that the deal marks “a turn­ing point” for play­ers unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept of dig­i­tal own­er­ship, i.e., NFT gaming.

“Easy access to Web3 games is a turn­ing point for those play­ers who have not yet seen how dig­i­tal own­er­ship can enrich the gam­ing experience.”

Recent­ly, NFT gam­ing has come under heavy crit­i­cism, with gamers call­ing the con­cept a mon­ey grab designed to squeeze every dol­lar out of peo­ple. More­over, pro­po­nents of this view say that mon­e­tiz­ing gam­ing takes away the fun and escapism elements.

GRIT will be the first release on the Epic Games Store

Epic Games is best known for pub­lish­ing the smash hit bat­tle royale game Fort­nite. At its peak, in Decem­ber 2020, the game had 15.3 mil­lion con­cur­rent users for the Chap­ter 2 Sea­son 5 finale.

Since then, things have dropped off con­sid­er­ably, with esti­mates putting the cur­rent num­ber of con­cur­rent users at around 3 mil­lion at any giv­en time.

Nonethe­less, despite the drop in num­bers, Fort­nite still ranks as the world’s most pop­u­lar game by active month­ly users, beat­ing Minecraft and Counter-Strike: Glob­al Offensive.

Hop­ing to emu­late this pop­u­lar­i­ty, Gala Games’ GRIT will be the first title on the Epic Games Store. Much like Fort­nite, GRIT is a bat­tle royale game but set in the gun-sling­ing Wild West.

GALA spiked 9.6% fol­low­ing the news before dip­ping to $0.07764 at press time. The recent cryp­to down­turn has hit GALA hard, with the token down 52% in val­ue since the start of May.

Blockchain and NFT games are banned on Epic’s competitor Steam

Valve’s Steam, Epic’s main com­peti­tor in the PC gam­ing space and also the largest games store­front, does not allow any blockchain or NFT games on its mar­ket­place, accord­ing to Valve’s rules for publishers.

Valve co-founder and pres­i­dent Gabe Newell said in a Feb­ru­ary inter­view with Eurogamer that blockchain is a great tech­nol­o­gy but not­ed that the way it was being uti­lized cur­rent­ly was “pret­ty sketchy” and “you sort of want to stay away from that.”