Case Study: GraphCMS and DMarket

GraphCMS allowed us to work with a tech stack filled with best-of-breed products including GraphQL, Angular, Cloudflare, and Steam. The intuitiveness of the system enabled our engineers to be productive from Day 1 of the project.

Roman PinskiyHead of SEO at DMarket

DMarket is an in-game item trading platform. It enables secure in-game item buying, selling, and exchange, to help developers attract and retain more players, increase their revenues and the lifetime value of the player. DMarket unlocks the multi-billion-dollar gaming skins economy for game developers and players around the world.

The Project

Passionate gamers believe a borderless gaming world is a better gaming world. The global gaming skins economy emerged from this notion. The team aimed to build a platform that used the most cutting-edge technology to give its users the ability to easily trade gaming skins. This marketplace serves not only the community of gamers but also game developers by boosting player engagement and their lifetime value.

Since the team was building this new platform from scratch, they took the opportunity to work with a promising menagerie of technologies which provide flexibility, stability, and resilience to the product. DMarket opted for using GraphCMS at the core of the marketplace for all of the content including inventory, item descriptions, and buying instructions. Choosing Angular as the frontend language, Cloudflare as a global CDN, and CrowdIn which is a localization tool, DMarket created a static platform website that is easy to use for their global customer base. The site is also connected to Steam’s open API, the leading digital distribution service for video games, which gives the product access to a wider audience and a seamless user experience during the bidding and purchasing process.

To handle transactions and pricing, DMarket is built on distributed ledger technology for transparent and secure transactions. The platform is using machine learning algorithms for predicting pricing and demand.

Emerging Trends in the Gaming Industry

DMarket uses only the most innovative technologies to its advantage to meet the needs of its customers around the globe.

Distributed Ledger Technology: Players can safely exchange items across titles and platforms using the blockchain technology. With the help of distributed ledger technology, the DMarket team guarantees that their transactions are secure. Distributed ledger technology creates many possibilities for the future of secure transactions, particularly in the global gaming sector.

Machine Learning and AI: Machine Learning and Blockchain go hand-in-hand in the case of DMarket. In order to create a marketplace where users can bid, exchange and buy, machine learning is used to predict prices and understand the demand.

Why GraphCMS?

DMarket needed a cloud-hosted system which was reliable, flexible, and built using a future-proof technology. The team ultimately chose GraphCMS because it is native in GraphQL and has the flexibility required to manage the DMarket platform. The DMarket team knew that whichever system they chose would hold the core functionality of their entire platform, so the system needed to be able to handle large data sets, have an easy to use API, and not break the budget. GraphCMS ticked all of the boxes.

As an added benefit, DMarket manages their SEO through GraphCMS using metatags and reference fields to ensure their website is outperforming competitors. While SEO management was not a requirement for the DMarket team, GraphCMS made it incredibly easy to set up a SEO content optimization metatag system for the marketplace.

What Mattered most to DMarket when choosing GraphCMS?

• GraphQL was one of the initial reasons the Dmarket tested GraphCMS. GCMS helped mitigate any learning curves of being new to GraphQL.
• GraphCMS has proven to be a great tool for SEO Content Optimization.
• GraphCMS was the cost-effective option which allowed the Dmarket team to experiment with their new project without sacrificing a robust feature set.