Having such a low market cap places Steem blockchain under the radar for most developers and as they tend to build their DApps and projects on other, more prominent blockchains like Ethereum, EOS, or Tron, they are oblivious to the tremendous benefits which come with running their DApps on Steem. For that reason, I would like to touch up on the most important reasons to why they should consider building new DApps and migrating existing ones to Steem.
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Let's take a look at Ethereum for example.
Problem
Any game built on Ethereum cannot and will never be free to play mainly because users need to pay a fee for each and every transaction they make. This issue is most prominent in games where every move is recorded on the block. Having played a couple of games built on Ethereum myself, I can attest to the fact that the experience was not the least bit enticing, especially when I can barely afford to buy in-game items, let alone pay for each move I make in the game. Depending on how clogged up the network was at any given moment, I had to pay fees ranging from a couple of cents all the way to few dollars, and on rare occasions even 10$ just for making a single move in the game.
How ridiculous, don't you agree?
This obviously not only drives many existing users away from Ethereum based games but it also hinders any chance for mainstream adoption as most normies would not care to invest so much of their hard-earned dollar bills into such a game.
Consequently, any game built on Ethereum, or any other blockchain which charges exorbitant transaction fees will never gain the massive traction it might have gotten if it was running on a blockchain that offers free transactions.
If that was not enough to consider looking into other blockchains to run your DApps on, then there is the problem of gaining a strong user base which is what most blockchain based games greatly struggle with. No matter how innovative, well-thought-out and designed your game is, chances are stacked against you and you will most likely struggle to gain any significant amount of people playing your game. That's factual knowledge at this point and it can easily be confirmed by checking the number of DAU's any DApp currently has.
Solution
On the other hand, all of the above-mentioned issues would be nonexistent if developers would have chosen a fast, feeless blockchain to run their DApps on. Having said that, let's look into the benefits of running a DApp on Steem.
- 0 cost transactions
Not only does this greatly improve user experience but it also makes mainstream adoption more plausible. Additionally, this makes free to play games possible which is another big selling point and reason to why most blockchain based games -- which are not free to play -- struggle to gain any significant traction among people outside of our little blockchain bubble.
- three second transaction times
This is nearly instant when compared to how long transactions take to go through on some other blockchains. Having such fast transactions makes for a seamless gaming experience. While playing games on other blockchains might feel like playing a game of chess, waiting minutes and on extreme occasions sometimes even hours for a transaction to go through, is nowhere near the ideal gaming experience people expect to get from games.
Needless to say, this greatly hinders the chances of games built on slow blockchains to gain momentum among normies.
Contrarily, nearly-instant transactions bring about that supreme gaming experience people are used to and without which I dare to say, most blockchain based games will never take off.
- instant community
In the core of the Steem ecosystem, there lies a massive -- in crypto standards -- community of highly passionate cryptocurrency enthusiasts. As can be seen from the stupendous success of games like Drugwars, SteemMonsters, Nextcolony and others, it's very easy to gain momentum with a game built on Steem. While the same cannot be said for games built on other blockchains, on Steem it's relatively easy to quickly gain a substantial user base.
This can easily be confirmed by the dominance of Steem based DApps on the StateOfTheDApps leaderboard. Having 10 out of the top 20 DApps built on Steem adds to the soundness of my claim.
- easy to develop
While building a DApp on Ethereum or any other smart contract blockchain requires highly competent -- read expensive -- developers, building the same DApp on Steem can be achieved with Javascript and HTML. This makes it very easy for any project without substantial monetary backing to launch a DApp on Steem as the developers needed to code it out are much less expensive and easy to come by than Solidity developers.
#SwitchToSteem
I hope that now that you got a better insight into the benefits of building on Steem rather than on any other blockchain out there, you will consider creating new DApps and migrating existing ones to Steem, rather than elsewhere.
