WazirX’s Siddharth Menon is advisor at SuperGaming for crypto gaming

Pune-based SuperGaming, one of India’s largest mobile game developers, announced on Tuesday that it has inducted Siddharth Menon, co-founder and COO of WazirX, as an advisor to help build out a crypto platform and games. SuperGaming, which developed the mobile FPS game MaskGun, says it plans on leveraging this partnership to create an in-game economy based on blockchain technology.

An in-game economy model traditionally uses artificial scarcity — a limited number of skins, for instance — and makes them tradeable among players. In theory, this could lead to players profiting (and no doubt sometimes incurring losses) from buying and selling in-game items to each other, much like trading stocks in financial markets. 

The developer insisted that this partnership would be different from the sea of NFT-based offerings by everyone from Amitabh Bachchan to Ubisoft. Menon, who built his career on the back of blockchain trading on WazirX, said that other in-game economies were “built around NFTs in an unsustainable way,” something he vowed would be different with SuperGaming’s titles. 

"While the crypto space brings new opportunities, we want to be extremely thoughtful — and careful — with how we bring aspects of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain to our games," said Roby John, CEO and co-founder, SuperGaming. 

The company said that it was “deeply aware of the current issues with blockchain and crypto games,” and said that it would try and find a solution in its implementation for environmental problems posed by the technology. No specific solution was outlined in the announcement, and the company has not announced which games will be leveraging this partnership in the near future.

The government recently announced that it would tax all crypto transactions at 30%. John told Entrackr, "We don't see this impacting player earnings or SuperGaming's own business just yet as it's still early days." He told us that the games would be made available to players globally, not just in India.

This pivot to blockchain-based in-game technologies is a part of a wider pivot by technology companies to web3, a loose set of standards that espouse decentralized systems that leverage blockchain technology significantly.

SuperGaming raised $5.5 million last August from a clutch of investors, including Skycathcher, Dream Incubator, BAce Capital, AET Fund, 1Up Ventures and Icertis co-founder Monish Darda.