iCandy pins down opportunities, challenges in blockchain games

• Hopes to attract gamers who want to make an investment
• Inks MoU with MDEC to nurture local industry

MALAYSIAN game publisher and blockchain game creator iCandy has aspirations to nurture the local industry and take blockchain gaming to the next level.

Its chief operations officer Desmond Lee (pic) admits the company is still relatively new in the blockchain business. There are many companies out there that are trying to build their own platforms to enable payments or publishing games on it.

“While there are many great ideas for blockchain games, the fact is that many are still in the developmental stages or in the white-paper phase.”

iCandy at the very least has a leg up on the competition as they launched their first game, CryptantCrab in October 2018.

“Games using blockchain technology are very new, but if you look at it, at the end of the day it is still a game. Blockchain technology is just a platform and technology that you leverage on,” he said.

iCandy’s target audience for CyrptantCrab are gamers and they hope that they will look at blockchain games as a sort of investment in which they can gain some return in the future.

According to Lee, iCandy took nine months to develop CryptantCrab from scratch by its local development team that comprises of designers and programmers. He describes iCandy’s effort as being almost sacrificial, in a manner of speaking, as they have taken the first steps to test the waters before other developers embark on their blockchain game journey.

While he doesn’t proclaim iCandy to be absolute experts in the area, they have already tried what works and what doesn’t so that others can fast-track their development.

While iCandy has a first mover advantage in this space, given how small the local blockchain game developer community is, Lee does admit that the timing of the games release has proven problematic given the cryptocurrency crash in 2018.

He attributes loss in confidence in the cryptocurrency market as the main reason for the crash as people are not even confident in blockchain, let alone blockchain games.

But the crash isn’t the only challenge that iCandy faces. Even if a user does register for a digital wallet, the process of getting Ethereum can be challenging in itself.

Despite these challenges, iCandy’s CryptantCrab has recorded the sale of some 1,121 crabs which has exceeded their target.

Lee hopes to grow the number of players interested blockchain games as iCandy’s approach is to stick to in for the long term as long as the industry shows prospects for growth.

To accelerate this growth and promote blockchain game development in Malaysia, iCandy signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) in Oct.

“We want to groom the local industry and hope with MDEC’s help there will be more awareness that there are companies in Malaysia making blockchain games. It is an important branding exercise for us and to demonstrate Malaysia’s game-making capabilities,” he said.