Gala Games is founded by Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga. Zynga is a games company that has utterly dominated the social gaming space as well as — for better or worse — pioneered the explosive growth of social gambling. Zynga created fantastically addictive games, capturing an unprecedented range of ages in its playerbase. With Gala Games, the modus operandi appears to — for the most part at least — take more of a traditional approach to games for gamers and to utilize blockchain technology, while presumably holding on to the Zynga trademark addictiveness. There is undoubtedly a hunger for Play to Earn (P2E) games, and the co-founder of a company that so consistently tapped into such moreish, pick-up-and-play games does make me a touch nervous. However, Gala and Zynga are not to be conflated as Gala appears to aim at some seriously impressive titles that aren’t just browser-based.
$GALA Lists on Binance
A few days ago, Gala took another large step forward in the space by having their own token listed on Binance. This has lead to a spike in price, with $GALA up 152% in the last 24 hours (15-16th September 2021) and 552% in the last month. The current Binance trading pairs for GALA are:
- GALA/BTC
- GALA/BNB
- GALA/BUSD
- GALA/USDT
Gala described GALA, the currency of their already multi-game ecosystem, as “based on the Ethereum blockchain and uses the ERC-1155 Standard. This reduces fees and makes it possible for a user to send multiple NFTs in the same transaction. Any game developer can integrate GALA and NFTs into their games, allowing for the stable long-term growth of the GALA Ecosystem.” While the word ecosystem is used, it could also be fairly suggested that Gala is building the foundations of a metaverse.
Games You May Not Expect
I was initially hesitant about what Gala might create given their ties to Zynga. The blockchain gaming space is already getting cluttered with highly simplistic, P2E games, and I’m not sure making those games both P2E and highly addictive is a net positive for the industry. However, my opinion was neutralized by two things. The first is less impactful, but it’s the company’s philosophy. Their tagline reads, “Making blockchain games you’ll actually want to play” which is exactly what I want to see more of. The second consideration is far more significant, however: the upcoming games.
I expected Gala to launch browser games with low skill ceilings, repetitive (albeit addictive) gameplay, and colored rather heavily by social interactions. But, that doesn’t appear to be necessarily true. Their only game you can play at the moment, Town Star, is indeed a browser game where the premise is to build towns and cities. It’s akin to a game you might see on Facebook, but it remains some way north of the complexity of many blockchain games available.
Then, there are the titles in the works. These include a Mac and PC-based MOBA, a space strategy game, a (browser-based) tower defense, and finally, Mirandus.
I will do an in-depth look at Mirandus as part of our Blockchain Gaming Watch, which in itself should indicate the scope of the title. It looks to be a deep, epic fantasy MMORPG as part of Gala’s ecosystem. With a MOBA and an MMORPG in the works, it is as if GALA is quietly attempting to build a blockchain version of RIOT Games or Blizzard. Whatever the case, Gala has forced their way into the blockchain gaming conversation and are not to be ignored.
