Saga is a Layer 1 blockchain where game companies and other developers can set their own rules and come up with a customizable platform.
The company has invested heavily in Web3 games via its Saga Origins label in hopes of helping its innovations take off in the market. Saga offers chainlets for developers to create dedicated blockchains with unique features. It has customizable monetization, interoperability with other chains, an adaptable tech stack and simpler blockchain creation. Earlier this month, Saga recently announced the launch of its announces the launch of Mainnet 2.0 and Uniswap DEX partnership, setting the stage for a fundamental transformation in how the blockchain industry approaches liquidity.
The growing number of independent blockchains has created unprecedented challenges for liquidity management and cross-chain operations. This major upgrade lays the foundation for the first quarter of 2025 launch of Saga’s Liquidity Integration Layer (LIL), which will create a unified liquidity environment across all blockchain ecosystems.
And Uniswap v3, the world’s leading decentralized exchange (DEX), is deployed on Saga’s natively multichain protocol in a historic first – marking their inaugural app chain. Uniswap v3 is deployed on a Saga Chainlet and will enable a completely gasless trading experience, removing one of the primary barriers to mainstream crypto adoption and demonstrating Saga’s new economic model to make decentralized finance accessible to everyone. Saga’s LIL will enable easy and automated asset movement from any ecosystem to the Uniswap DEX.
“Blockchain’s promise of financial accessibility has been held back by fragmented liquidity and prohibitive gas fees,” said Rebecca Liao, CEO at Saga. “Today’s fractured landscape of appchains and L2s forces users to navigate complex bridges, manage multiple tokens, and pay unpredictable fees just to complete basic transactions. With Mainnet 2.0 and our Liquidity Integration Layer, we’re creating a unified environment where liquidity flows freely between chains and applications, users never pay gas fees, and developers can finally build without constraints.”
Saga represents a radical departure from traditional blockchain economics. Instead of charging per-transaction gas fees that create barriers for users and developers, Saga’s model generates revenue by capturing a percentage of the total value flowing through the network.
And with its Saga Origins publishing label, Liao said that Saga is also taking a different direction with the games it is attracting to its platform. She said the aim is to get provocative, expansive and uncompromising games on the chain. I interviewed Liao recently to explore the boundaries of what this means.
Saga was founded in 2022. Early seed investors include Placeholder, Maven11, Longhash, Samsung, Com2uS, and Polygon. Originally built on Cosmos, Saga has furthered its presence by bringing typically disparate but the best ecosystems into its Saga Multiverse through ongoing strategic partnerships.
Saga Origins is the Saga game publishing arm. Launched in March 2024, it aims to build a portfolio of games that will make players think and feel in new ways. Creatively, Saga Origins projects are provocative, like web3, and the titles will push the envelope on what’s considered gaming on all fronts.
Liao said there are also surprising coming regularly, like the success of the mini Web3 games on the TON protocol on the Telegram messaging service, which has around 900 million users on a crypto-friendly platform.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: When we last talked, you were starting to announce some of the developers, but not talking so much about their games.
Rebecca Liao: The last time we touched base was Gamescom, the end of August. We talked about Angelic, Lussa, and God’s Legacy. Those are our first three flagships that we announced at Gamescom. Angelic is entering its second season. Its open alpha reached 17,000 unique players. That’s great for a narrative strategy-RPG. Second season, they’re looking to build on that on the Epic Games Store.
Lussa’s first alpha release is going to be in the spring. Very exciting things there. They’re harnessing AI to build companions in the game with Nvidia, which is awesome. They’re cooking on a lot of things. They have significantly expanded their studio recently, bringing on more devs with deep shooter experience. God’s Legacy is still under development. It’s slated for 2025.
Then we have some new titles we’ve acquired at Saga Origins. Those will be revealed early next year. We’re starting to drill down on two different kinds of Saga Origins games. One is a lot of Web2 coming to Web3. We’re looking in the category of mobile in particular. These are profitable mobile games, but they’re looking to save on their user acquisition (UA) and make their UA more effective through crypto rails. Some are looking to have their own token as well, but it’s really the UA piece that motivates them.
The way we distribute and publish games, it’s a blended distribution channel. It’s both traditional paid media, earned media, paid advertising for user acquisition, but also web3 rails that are more incentive-based, more community-focused. It leads to lower overall costs for UA, and hopefully higher intake from users as well. It’s a much more sustainable economic model all around.
GamesBeat: Is it the same kind of model that, say, Mythical has described, where you have a Web2 version that gets on the mobile app stores? Some kind of currency categorization happens so that the Web3 features are available for people who go to the website to get them, but then the game is essentially the same between Web2 and Web3?
Liao: It’s a very similar model. This is how you get around the app store restrictions on tokens or NFTs. The web3 elements are by and large kept out of the app experience. Having said that, the games that we’re taking on are going to adjust a bit. With the currency being decentralized, they’re able to do more interesting game economics. With the in-game assets, the whole purpose of getting them onto a web shop is to have a peer-to-peer marketplace. They’re adjusting their game mechanics to be able to take advantage of the fact that assets are freely tradable on a secondary marketplace. It does feed back into the original game design.
GamesBeat: Is there something about the unflinching or uncensored approach you had talked about that’s working out here? The kind of games that were maybe harder for other publishers to accept.
Liao: One of the titles that we’re most excited to reveal early in the coming year is an interactive narrative game. Very much the spirit of Detroit: Become Human. But the idea is, it should be unfettered storytelling on the part of the player. There are AI elements in there, of course, enhancing this as well. But this is the sort of game that comes from very high-profile, established gaming talent. It’s coming to us because we can publish it. They’ve tried with publishers in traditional gaming. Even with the credibility of this particular indie studio they have not been successful. They’ve felt like their creative vision wasn’t something that could be honored. Here we don’t care. It’s up to the developer to build the game that they want to build. We’re here to support them when they go to market.
GamesBeat: If you had to sum up the things being announced later, the kind of games that publishers seem to shy away from–what was the word you used?
Liao: Our tagline is “provocative, expansive, uncompromising.”
GamesBeat: That’s what the whole lineup looks like, do you think?
Liao: I think so. I would say so. What grabs people about this kind of content, it’s immediately obvious that it is provocative. You don’t necessarily even have to play the game to understand that it’s very provocative. All the games would fall under that description. Having said that, though, for traditional game studios, I think there’s one level deeper than that. We’re allowing people to experiment with gameplay and game mechanics, where most publishers would look at it and say, “This hasn’t been proven to make money. I don’t think this is going to make money. We’re not going to back it.”
It is crypto. A lot of people are trying to figure out business models. For us, content is king. We have some idea of how web3 rails can be used effectively, and we pass that along to the games. But otherwise people are free to experiment.
GamesBeat: Within this definition, did you set your own rails? “We don’t have X-rated content,” or “We don’t have adults only content”? What sort of things did you consider as far as where your own limits are, even if you’re taking games that other publishers pass on in some way?
Liao: Our perspective–generally speaking, Saga as a Web3 protocol, as a crypto protocol, we’re permissionless. Anyone can build anything here. They don’t need to contact the Saga core team to build here. Now, when it comes to Saga Origins, obviously because we’re a publishing house we have a lot more direct contact with the builders. There, what we always say is, we’re not here to censor your content, but you do have to follow the law. If people 13 and under should not be accessing your game, you do have to put in those gates in order to make sure that doesn’t happen. Crypto regulations–if certain regulations don’t allow for crypto, you do have to gate your game to honor that. There are legal issues we have to comply with. But as a general matter, we try not to censor anything.
GamesBeat: Is there a gate you have to give to developers because it’s the same gate the app stores have? It sounded like most of your games are going to be a hybrid of Web2 and Web3. That Web2 part has to get approved by the app stores. That’s part of the boundary.
Liao: It is a boundary. I’ll put it this way. There is no Web3 equivalent of Steam. We certainly don’t have a game distribution platform anywhere near the scale of a Steam or the iOS store. You have to stay on those platforms. You cannot get kicked off those platforms. It’s a publishing agreement. There are revenue shares involved in all that.
GamesBeat: Did Steam ever come to permit the same things the mobile app stores have agreed to? That notion of, you can have a Web3 game, but you can only market the Web2 part on their platform. Does Steam have an option where you can go out of Steam to a website to access the Web3 features, but the Web2 game is approved inside of Steam?
Liao: Our experience has been that the app stores are more restrictive than Steam about that. Mechanically it works out the same way. Your game in Steam, your game in the app store, it looks like anyone else’s experience. Then the Web3 elements are elsewhere. But for Steam they’re much more open to let you market as you like, as long as you don’t have in-game transactions that are on-chain.
GamesBeat: Did you have more games in the market before the establishment of Saga Origins?
Liao: We always had what we call innovator titles. They’re smaller games. They’re not big RPG games like Angelic. We had a bunch come out earlier this year, around the May to June time frame. We have what’s called Indie Autumn right now, which is a campaign of about 10 games that are coming out from indie studios, innovators. They’re all a little smaller, hypercasual games that anyone can play. They’re a lot of fun. One emphasis we’ve seen bubble up from these developers is the use of AI. They’re using AI agents. Generative games are a big trend we’re seeing as well. People putting in a prompt for a game and the game gets spit out on the other end.
GamesBeat: We have a different environment now for the crypto outlook in the U.S., after the election. What sort of outcomes do you expect from that?
Liao: Right now, because the administration is not in yet–there’s a general feeling of optimism carrying the market. Crypto is happy to see that. In terms of actual regulation or legislation, we’ll have to wait and see. Obviously the incoming administration is very friendly to crypto. To the extent that we can implement better regulation, I think they’re all for letting the crypto industry flourish. It’ll be interesting to see what appointments come through that are relevant to crypto. The nominee for SEC chair is Paul Atkins. Not a crazy person. Definitely a very experienced hand.
GamesBeat: If there’s more crypto-friendly regulation coming, do you think that influences the app stores? Would they change their rules in a concrete way if they had more concrete guidance from governments?
Liao: I think so. I think it will be a net positive effect on app stores and so on, their ability to take more crypto assets directly on the platform. But to be very candid, I don’t think regulation is the only reason these platforms are keeping web3 elements off. I think there’s an element of trying to protect their consumers. If crypto continues to be scam-happy, then they won’t want these people on there. That’s understandable.
Obviously everyone hopes for more latitude for crypto, but at the same time, the administration can’t remove guardrails. Then you have another FTX every year. That’s not good for the industry either.
GamesBeat: It’s maybe too early to predict whether there’s a tidal change coming. More optimism, perhaps more investment, but full-blown expansion might not happen until there’s more clarity in regulation.
Liao: There needs to be clarity in regulation, yes. Honestly, a lot can probably get done in the first two years. This is a big emphasis for this administration. Again, that’s a net positive outcome. From the industry perspective, the crypto perspective, people in the space right now have been here for a long time. That’s just a function of the fact that we haven’t had a full-blown bull market yet. There haven’t been a lot of new entrants in the last year. It’s a lot of people whose last memory of crypto was a bear market, where very little was winning. Given that, I think there’s a real desire on the part of crypto people to have users. We want users in here. I do think that it would be a very sad outcome for crypto people if all the guardrails come off, all the regulation we’ve been hoping for, and everyone just mints new coins. We didn’t go into this space wanting to become Las Vegas.
GamesBeat: What does Saga’s road map look like? Is there anything you’re holding back because you’re waiting for regulation? Is it possible that you could have a more aggressive road map if you get that clarity of regulation?
Liao: Put it this way. For us, there are no barriers in terms of technology. We have our liquidity integration layer coming out very shortly. That’s our finance layer, our DeFi layer for the whole ecosystem. It’s a big piece. Not necessarily strictly applied to gaming, but the fact that you can now have multiple chains be automatically interoperable and have liquidity flow between them is a big release on our road map. That’s coming early in 2025.
We’re noticing a lot more use of AI agents and generative gaming. Today we saw one of our innovators–not coordinated with us. They just release it. But they stood up the first AI agent on an L1. This is a chain completely controlled by an AI agent. No surprise, first thing the AI agent wants to do is make money. They started posting meme coins on Solana. You have to start somewhere, I guess. But this particular innovator, we work very closely with them. These AI agents are in service of becoming NPCs in games. He’s building out his game worlds. That’s a very exciting development.
Honestly, the main impact of U.S. regulation on our product releases so far is that they’re geo-gated. If you’re a U.S. resident, citizen, etc., you can’t access our products, unfortunately. If we could remove that gate, obviously it would be good news.
GamesBeat: Does this mean tokens in the U.S. are considered securities, if you meet certain conditions? If that part goes away, do things change?
Liao: Things will be a lot easier. Many projects, including us, we take a pretty conservative stance on this. We don’t think tokens are securities, but we want to make sure no one faces any repercussions in the event of strict regulation. We’ve always operated on the more conservative side. If an administration definitively came out and said these are not securities, it’s a completely different world.
GamesBeat: The pace at which you need to have new games launch, is that clear to you yet? How fast do you want to have your developers come out with new games on top of Saga?
Liao: Our experience so far is that it takes a long time to build a good game. As much as we’d like to hurry things along, game development takes time. For any original titles we put out–Lussa will be one of those, and the couple of titles we’re bringing out early in the coming year. Those are original, brand new games. But I do think that if we just bank on that, there isn’t going to be enough content for the audience.
One thing we’re doing–more is to be announced early next year. But one of the strategies we can reveal for this year has been to buy up distressed game studios. Distressed indie studios or distressed titles. These are “distressed” because they don’t fit into the portfolio of some big conglomerate, but they’re actually making money. In some cases they’re profitable. It’s good IP. It’s certainly better than most of the games we find in crypto. Adding the crypto element, helping them with the UA piece – that’s generally where these indie titles are falling down – is going to be a good strategy, paired with original titles.
GamesBeat: Do you have a count yet of how many studios you’ve acquired in this way?
Liao: We’re disclosing that early in the coming year. There’s a key hire that we’ll also announce around Pocket Gamer Connects in London. He’s a very senior executive at a big mobile conglomerate. He’s been in gaming for 20-plus years. He is king of user acquisition and deals. He’s been shepherding a lot of these deals for us. In terms of the number of titles and studios we’ll acquire in this manner, I’d keep it to three or four at this point. That’s a number we’re comfortable putting out there. There will probably be more. But right now we’re starting with what we can digest.
GamesBeat: If you look back on that, as far as your lineup goes, is it more like the pace of a triple-A game publisher? Or is it something different from that?
Liao: For actual publishing, publishing original titles–the pace of game development is what it is. We encourage people to build with their community. Try to get the first build out there as soon as you can. Don’t aim for perfection. In that sense, we get something to market faster. But a game is finished when it’s finished. I don’t think we can do anything to speed that up. In the meantime, we’ll have these studios that already have ready-made games. We’ll just announce that they’re now on-chain. That will happen much more quickly.
GamesBeat: Were you interested in Telegram as a platform? That seems to be gathering steam for different kinds of games.
Liao: Yes and no. We did build an integration between Saga Chainlets and TON. We noticed that earlier in the year, a lot of games were looking to build a mini-game on Telegram, using that as their pre-game if you will. Launch this, try to seed a community, and then bring that community over to the main title. I do think the TON ecosystem is drying up a little, though. What ended up happening, you had the same users circulating among the games. You had to hit on a moment such that you got all the attention. Then someone else would come along and get all the attention. The hope of bringing these users over to your main game never came to fruition. People on Telegram are looking to get those click rewards from a game and then move on to the next one. We see, even now, that it’s starting to be less popular.
If there’s a through line, a trend among games, what we’re seeing is more AI, more AI agents at this point. It’s gotten to a point where you don’t need to have a machine learning expert on your team in order to have AI agents in your game.
GamesBeat: It’s still a fast-moving space. You have surprises every day.
Liao: It’s true. The TON phenomenon, when it first started, everyone said, “It’s a mini-game. How hard could it be? We’re all going to build mini-games now and take advantage of this wave.” Turns out even mini-games are not easy, especially when you’re trying to keep the brand integrity of your game. You want the same characters there. You want a similar look and feel. The experience of a lot of studios–by the time they were ready to come out with their mini-game, the TON phenomenon was starting to cool off.
It’s a very fast-moving space. That’s why I tell developers–if you’re an original title, you’re going to take at least two or three years to build. Try to get in front of your community as soon as you can. Share updates with them. Solidify your people. When it’s time for you to launch a token, if you want to do that, you’ll have a solid community behind you. They will not feel like–who is this game? Who is the team behind it? They’ll already know. It’s the only way to do it if you’re a game that’s looking to do it right. Otherwise you get swept up in the speculative fever of crypto. You start making short-term decisions that probably mean you’ll never release the game.
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