[Interview] Star Atlas CEO Unveils Multi-Game Ecosystem

• Wagner emphasizes a unified universe approach, considering all games as part of a single product with native interoperability across various platforms, powered by the Solana blockchain.
• He highlights Solana’s performance, scalability, high transaction throughput, low latency, subsecond finality, and low transaction costs as key factors driving the successful integration of Star Atlas.
• Wagner suggests that transitioning to a multi-chain approach would require careful consideration, auditing, and responsible deployment to maintain security and functionality.

Michael Wagner, the CEO and Co-Founder of the space-themed web3 game Star Atlas, shared the company’s current game progress, experience in the Solana blockchain, and plans during one of the special BitPinas Webcast interviews at the Yield Guild Games Web3 Games Summit (YGG W3GS).

(This is part of our recap series for the YGG Web3 Games Summit.)

Interview with Michael Wagner

Wagner discussed Star Atlas’ current status, its multi-game approach, and its successful integration with the Solana blockchain. He also hinted at plans to boost local adoption in the Philippines and provided updates on the game’s development, emphasizing its scalability and real-time gameplay. Additionally, he addressed the potential for Star Atlas to go multi-chain and outlined the challenges involved in such a transition.

PH Community of Star Atlas?

Wagner began by remarking that this was his first time in the country and that the experience had been “absolutely incredible” because, in addition to the summit, he had also been able to meet with the local Star Atlas community in the Philippines.

“We have a surprising amount of OG followers. I can’t tell you how many people have come up and told me you know, they hold held Atlas or ships going back to 2021 when we originally launched,” he stated. 

Wagner added that these interactions revealed a large opportunity in the country because, despite having a large number of original followers, there was a significant lack of new and updated information.

“We have so much on the horizon and so much that we’ve already built; so looking forward to bringing everyone up to speed on everything that we’ve been building over the last couple of years and reactivating the Philippines,” he noted, hinting at further boosting the local adoption of the game.

Star Atlas Updates

Wagner stated that most people are familiar with their flagship product line, which is a triple-A space exploration massively multiplayer online (MMO) game being developed in Unreal Engine 5. 

However, he further stated that they have a browser-based product, which is more of a real-time strategy top-down game, named Star Atlas: Golden Era (SAGE). This game it focuses on territory control, conquest exploration, extraction of resources, and crafting.

“We have an approach where we build out modules release those iteratively take in consumer feedback and continue to evolve and develop and release that product,” he added. 

In addition, he shared that the company is also developing a mobile fitness app that will offer a twist on the move-to-earn segment of the web3 gaming industry.

“In our case, it’s move-to-progress. So you have a crew member and when you go on a walk run or bicycle ride, you level up that crew member which then can be slotted into your ships in either SAGE or Star Atlas MMO via shipping configuration,” he explained.

Moreover, he added that they are also developing more games in their ecosystem. He clarified that these games are not viewed as independent product lines but as part of a unified universe, constituting a single product with diverse ways to experience it. 

Wagner explained that the game logic is predominantly built on the Solana blockchain, ensuring native interoperability of assets across various environments, including mobile, web, and Unreal Engine.

Additionally, there is the synchronization of game events and actions as they all reference Solana, facilitating a seamless experience across applications where the blockchain ensures the recording of gamer actions and changes.

Experience on Solana

Play-to-own is coming.

Our UE5 Star Atlas 2.2 update at #Breakpoint2023 shows:

🔹 3rd person shooter WIP and weapons
🔹 Combat racing up to 100 players
🔹 Onchain ship configuration, ship mastery, and player progression
🔹 New MUD, ONI, and Ustur characters
🔹 + more!

Watch.👇 pic.twitter.com/2F8dRpIds4

— Star Atlas (@staratlas) November 2, 2023

In response to the question of why they developed the game on the Solana blockchain, he stated that Solana is highly performant for them and they have experienced no difficulties with it.

Wagner attributed the choice of Solana as the network to its exceptional dependability, which is driven by several key factors. He highlighted that Solana is widely regarded as highly scalable, with the most scalable network worldwide. It provides high transaction throughput, ensuring rapid processing, low latency for quick data transmission, subsecond finality for efficient transaction completion, and notably low transaction costs, just a “fraction of a penny per transaction.” 

Moreover, he noted the emphasis on low latency is particularly critical for gamers, who are familiar with the disruptive concept of lag. Wagner stressed that given that their game content is designed for real-time play at 60 frames per second, Solana’s high transaction throughput and low latency have been instrumental in achieving this seamless experience of reading and writing from the chain in real-time.

“I’ve been a staunch advocate of Solana all the way back in 2020 when we first selected it. And yes, it’s at its ups and downs; we’ve experienced some instability in the network. But what we realize is as builders is that this is a beta Network, it’s not even fully live on Mainnet yet,” he added. 

Wagner added that building in Solana is similar to their approach in building and releasing products, users accessing the game are essentially participating in its testing phase. This means that not everything will always work seamlessly, but continuous improvements will be made based on user feedback. 

“In fact, we’re making two million transactions per day on Solana right now making up about 15% of the network transaction volume. Star Atlas is stress-testing Solana as we speak,” he stated.

Will Star Atlas go Multi-chain?

Regarding the multi-chain potential of Star Atlas, he stated that “it’s a big maybe; it’s a big question mark” for them right now. 

“A lot of that has to do with the fact that again, we have all of this on chain game logic, and we’ve deployed 13 programs on-chain. There should be management over the things like character progression, character creation, on-chain movement and coordinate systems, fleet management, inventory management, localized inventory extraction systems, combat systems, and crafting systems. And so it’s quite complex to develop these programs and make sure that they’re secure, they’re audited and we’re being responsible with releasing these to the public. To have to recreate all of those programs on some alternative chain possibly in an entirely different language would be a big lift for us,” he explained.

Who is Michael Wagner?

Michael Wagner is the CEO and co-founder of Star Atlas LLC. In an article, he was noted as one of the key people behind the development of the web3 game.

What is Star Atlas?

Star Atlas is a web3 space economy simulation game designed for Solana network and play-to-earn (P2E) gamers. 

It is a browser-based, open-world game that provides real-time gameplay and a lifelike economy where players can gather, craft, trade, and prosper entirely on Solana. The game is set in a futuristic space-themed universe where players collect, create, and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing in-game items within the Star Atlas metaverse. 

The game is being developed by Star Atlas LLC.

Local News about Star Atlas

In 2021, YGG announced its intention to purchase $1 million worth of Star Atlas NFT gaming assets to demonstrate its commitment to a long-term partnership with the web3 game. 

This article is published on BitPinas: [Interview] Star Atlas CEO Unveils Multi-Game Ecosystem

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