While the Ethereum blockchain has an advantage for the community, competition with Solana is increasing with the advent of blockchain-based money-making games, now called GameFi.
Founded by Scopely and Glu Mobile veterans, Faraway announced that the studio has raised $21 million in a Series 1 funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and major crypto exchange FTX. Along with an initial $8 million round, Faraway now has $30 million in total funding from well-established cryptosystem investors a16z, Sequoia Capital, Pantera Capital, Jump Capital, and Solana.
The company is developing its flagship browser-based multiplayer game Mini Royale: Nations on the Solana blockchain. According to the announcement, the team previously worked on popular titles such as Disney’s Sorcerer’s Arena, WWE Champions, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival and Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem.
When asked why they chose Solana over Ethereum from a developer’s perspective, Alex Paley, co-founder of Faraway Cointelegraph, told Faraway Cointelegraph that Ethereum is simply not an option due to slow transaction times and high gas taxes:
“We were specifically looking for a blockchain with fast and cheap transactions, strong ecosystem momentum, and a team we can trust in terms of technical excellence.”
Rust, Solana’s programming language, is also well known among game developers as compared to Ethereum Solidity. Paley acknowledged that Ethereum and Team 2 solutions have a large community. However, deleting earned tokens is more difficult for most Ethereum solutions. Bali said Solana provides speed and access to its own liquidity on the platform.
While most other blockchains are trying to remain an industry leader, Bali emphasized that Solana puts a lot of effort and resources into building specific tools and infrastructure to meet the needs of game studios that create games with complex economies and real-time systems.
Commenting on the funding round, Solana’s creator, Anatoly Yakovenko, described decentralized gaming as the next frontier of blockchain technology. “The game Faraway is building has the potential to bring Web 3.0 to hundreds of millions of users,” he added.
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The browser-based installation of Mini Royale: Nations allows players to play on any device using a browser without any installation requirements. “The biggest challenge when creating a browser game is the reliability of the graphics that you can get from your browser,” Bali told Cointelegraph. “However, when the WebGPU appears, we should see the browser’s graphical accuracy improve significantly.”
However, there are significant advantages to browser-based development, where uninstalled playback comes first. All a player has to do is share or click on a link, and within seconds, they and their friends will be playing together in the same session,” Bali said.
Since MetaMask, Phantom Wallet, and other Web 3.0 wallets are built into the browser, it also makes sense to develop a browser-based game as it makes it more convenient to buy, sell, or exchange in-game assets.
