The founder of PC gaming platform Steam has joined Ryu Games as chief product officer.
The company is launching Flame, a new Web3 games store and marketplace, to better serve the PC gaming market with easily usable NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
Flame is a multi-chain wallet, store and launcher of games that users onboard through a simple social login.
Rick Ellis will leverage his decades long experience in console, PC and mobile gaming development to drive the growth of Web3 adoption in gaming.
In October 2021, Valve announced bans on blockchain games and NFTs on its Steam platform.
“Games that use NFTs and crypto are in their infancy, but their potential has already drawn millions of gamers to play these sometimes very simple games,” said Ellis.
“The past few years have seen incredible advances in reducing blockchain’s negative environmental impact and lowering the cost of transactions. Meanwhile, serious game developers are heads down building the first generation of AAA titles built around open economies.
“The last missing piece before mass adoption is a user experience to launch these games. The technical and UX challenges Flame is solving are going to bridge the gap between gamers everywhere and the next internet – one that is owned by the users and not central authorities.”
Before founding Sharkbite Games, Ellis started his gaming career building the dev kits for Xbox and GameCube. He went on to build the digital distribution service and marketplace for video games that eventually became Steam and was hired by Valve Software.
Over the span of his career, he developed the physics engine for Half-Life 2, worked on well-known titles like Counter-Strike and Guild Wars 2, and was also VP of production at Z2, which was acquired by King.
Ross Krasner, CEO of Ryu Games, said: “The fact that millions of people are fighting through the friction and pain of onboarding to play crypto games and using NFTs is a testament to how fundamental a shift in blockchain tech can be to human-technology interaction. For the first time, people truly own digital assets and can interact in permissionless systems.
“Gaming is always first to adopt new technologies, and to me, Flame is the last missing piece before Web3 games are just ‘games.’ We’re thrilled to bring on Rick, who built Steam, which today had almost 30 million concurrent users.
“To put in perspective, only about 3 million people have ever interacted with an NFT.”