Dear Bankless Nation,

Unity is the world’s leading cross-platform game engine that’s done much to democratize game development during its rise.

MetaMask is the world’s leading non-custodial crypto wallet in kind, and it’s made accessing crypto simple for millions of people around the globe.

Combine these two convenient resources and you get the possibility of bringing crypto and NFTs to the vast majority of games today, plus the ability to more easily create new kinds of web3 games with larger developer and player bases than ever before.

The good news? This combination just happened! For today’s post, let’s get you caught up on all the basics of MetaMask’s newly-announced arrival on Unity!

-WMP

MetaMask arrives in Unity Asset Store

The Unity 101

Unity is a popular game engine that allows developers to create and publish video games on multiple platforms, such as consoles, desktops, mobile devices, and virtual reality (VR) headsets.

Unity provides tools for creating 2D and 3D games, including resources for animations, audio, handling physics, networking, user interfaces, and more. With its intuitive interfaces and extensive documentation, Unity has become a go-to choice for indie developers and large studios alike.

All that said, some of the most famous mainstream games made with Unity in recent years includes Among Us, Beat Saber, Fall Guys, Hearthstone, Pokémon GO, and PUBG. NFT-based projects that rely on Unity include Decentraland and The Sandbox virtual worlds.

Since its initial release in 2005, then, Unity has continued to evolve, adding support for features like augmented reality (AR), machine learning, WebGL, and now MetaMask support along the way.

Why Unity matters

Over the past two decades, Unity has become an essential tool for democratizing game development.

In the past creating a video game required expensive hardware, software, and specialized skills. But now with Unity, anyone can start making games, even if they have limited resources or experience.

Additionally, the Unity Asset Store provides a vast library of premade assets, including animations, models, sound effects, and textures, that can be used to readily jumpstart a game’s development. Unity also has an extremely active and supportive community that is filled with forums and tutorials for helping game developers.

For all these reasons, Unity has enabled many thousands of developers to more readily create games, making the gaming industry more innovative, more diverse, and more exciting in the process.

MetaMask in the Unity Asset Store

On February 28th, MetaMask announced that its popular web3 wallet and connection SDK (software development kit) had been added as a “Verified Solution” to the Unity Asset Store.

This newfound support will make it considerably easier for game developers of all stripes to create games that are compatible with crypto and NFTs, i.e. web3 games. In addition, it will also help web3 games reach a larger user base of developers and players since now any Unity game can embrace MetaMask wallets.

The move comes as part of the Unity Asset Store’s introduction of a Decentralization category page, which alongside MetaMask now features other ConsenSys-backed resources like Infura and Truffle, as well as SDKs from chains like Immutable X, Solana, and Tezos.

To start the MetaMask-Unity meld with a bang, ConsenSys also launched a web3 Early Adopter Program that offers workshops and $100k grants for game developers interested in making the leap to NFTs.

The big picture

Software developer and eventual Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney first proposed “crypto trading cards” back in 1993.

30 years later, we indeed have modern versions of such digital cards and relatedly the first web3 gaming experiments and franchises dawning courtesy of the recent blossoming of the NFT ecosystem.

What will the next 30 years of NFT gaming bring, then? You can look at the rise of Unity-based gaming over the past two decades to guesstimate that if NFT games really do break through into the mainstream in the coming years, MetaMask’s arrival in the Unity Asset Store will undoubtedly prove to have been a pivotal early catalyst in that direction.

In the meantime, expect a surge of Unity x MetaMask gaming experiments in the near future!