Blockchain games are not the future

Editor's Note: This article comes fromNakamoto Shallot (ID: xcongapp), Author: Yin Yaoping, published by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Nakamoto Shallot (ID: xcongapp)

, Author: Yin Yaoping, published by Odaily with authorization.

The encounter of blockchain and game applications is obvious to all.

The traditional game industry urgently needs to introduce new gameplay and new logic to seek new breakthroughs and increments. The underlying technology and token model of the blockchain can provide new ideas for the transformation of traditional games, and the game carries the raw technology of the blockchain. A wish to fly into the homes of ordinary people.

However, after the birth of the first blockchain game, chain games quickly developed into synonymous with DAPPs such as quiz, lottery, and fund disk, and the number of users of chain games has not seen explosive growth for a long time. There are voices of doubts about the best landing scene of the chain.

Looking at the current application ecology of major public chains, games and simple lottery applications always occupy the largest share. In Ethereum, the largest public chain ecology, the number of game applications is far ahead of other application categories. It can be said that the progress and failure of blockchain games are related to the future of the entire blockchain industry.

So what kind of difficulties and struggles are the increasing number of blockchain game projects experiencing? What is missing from the era of blockchain games? We feel that it is necessary to spend some time to understand the group of people who are insisting on making games, to see if their original intentions have changed, what difficulties they are currently facing, and what deployments they plan to make, and what kind of "big era" will push the blockchain game forward.

In the past month, after visiting many practitioners in the chain game industry, we have formed a clearer understanding of the growth, bottlenecks, current difficulties and future goals of the entire industry. Some of our views are as follows:

1. The subversive changes that the blockchain may bring about in the ownership and circulation of game assets are most attractive to industry practitioners.

2. Blockchain games are likely to achieve a win-win situation where players make money and developers make money, and it is expected to change the existing game development, distribution, dissemination and profit models based on the technical characteristics of the blockchain and the token economic model.

4. The "chain reform" model of traditional large-scale games is gradually emerging. The perfect combination of blockchain game teams and traditional well-known game IPs is constantly enriching the chain game content market, and trying to aspire to the industry's "explosive models".

5. The ecology of the blockchain game industry is becoming more and more perfect, from the underlying public chain facilities, to the game industry solutions in the middle layer, to game development tools, game distribution service platforms, game production teams, game data ecology and evaluation institutions ...The entire industrial chain is constantly improving, which provides the cornerstone for the breakthrough and expansion of blockchain games.

6. Blockchain games are not the future, but games with built-in blockchain technology features are. At present, the blockchain may be more suitable as a technology hidden behind the game. For players, accepting blockchain games should not be a deliberate rational judgment, but a natural emotional recognition.

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Lianyou is still the best choice to undertake the first implementation of blockchain applications

In the process of being interviewed by the Xiaocong team, practitioners in the blockchain game industry are still very firm about the vitality that blockchain can give games.

They believe that the game itself, as a single closed application scenario, is very suitable for the landing attempt of the blockchain. If the game cannot take the first shot of the blockchain application, then there is no better scenario to replace it. In addition, the most important thing is that the virtual asset circulation, community autonomy and virtual economy genes that come with the game itself are naturally close to the blockchain ecology and its token model.

The most ideal is to "plant" the value-delivery characteristics of the blockchain into the game field, cultivate and grow, create a new gameplay and profit logic, and bring ""creation"" to the content production, distribution and dissemination modes of the entire game industry. "Great changes"; if we put aside the gameplay changes and simply regard the blockchain as a technical tool and put many centralized things in a decentralized system, we can also optimize the user experience of traditional games at many levels, such as realizing more Fairness, impartiality, transparency, and asset confirmation and ownership, etc.

Chain games are an emerging track, and milestone breakthroughs have not come so fast, but it has not stagnated, but is gaining momentum.

As Vincent, the founder of Dappreview, said, over the past year, blockchain games have shown many changes visible to the naked eye. Small and medium-sized game manufacturers have entered the market and developed more diverse game categories, with better graphics and better user experience. more fluid. Chain game projects such as Mixmarvel and Cocos-BCX are trying their best to launch more interesting and interesting game products, build the underlying infrastructure of chain games, and help more development teams create more and better chain game content.

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The "dilemma" of the industry: "not fun" and "not profitable"

At this stage, chain games are in an embarrassing situation: users generally feel that it is "not fun", and developers generally feel that it is "not profitable". The content "not fun" leads to few incremental users entering the market, and the project "doesn't make money" leads to few developers entering the game.

Blockchain does have the potential to bring many different values ​​to the game industry, but even if a game realizes all these values, if it is not fun enough, no players will pay, let alone community consensus and game assets the value of.

As Vincent, the founder of Dappreview, said, "The criterion for judging whether the game content is good or not is that first of all, you need to put aside the complicated operations in the middle and let an ordinary game user try it to see if it is fun."

"Whether it's fun or not directly determines how many people will come to play. The so-called 'popular style' that the market craves is nothing more than a large number of users and enough attention. Developers' long-cherished business wish of "making money" from players cannot be realized, and the "money-making effect" is precisely the best effect to create an industry, which directly determines how many professional teams are willing to step into this industry..." - Cocos-BCX Chief technical expert Hong Zhixiong also expressed the same concerns about the playability of blockchain games.

Although blockchain games are inherently linked to financial attributes, if a game without playability wants to attract users only by luring players into the illusion of making money, it will eventually stay in "Ponzi" and "spinach" forever.

Looking back at the development model of traditional games, we will find that most traditional games first use game mechanics and gameplay design to attract users. Guide users step by step to realize cash consumption in the game.

It wasn't until later that everyone discovered that chain games were gradually reduced to Ponzi and spinach games with a different skin, and their life cycle was short, it suddenly dawned on them that chain games should return to the essence of games and pay more attention to entertainment rather than financial attributes.

In the long run, chain games may actually realize the beautiful vision of "players make money and developers make money", provided that the game must be fun.

Strong entertainment and the design of token economy can make the UGC content in the game reach a value consensus among a wide range of players. Game developers formulate game rules. Some game players consume and some produce. Producers spend time Produce content, and ordinary players can gain experience through token consumption content, which constitutes a complete economic closed loop.

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The struggle of practitioners: "Let the content have barriers, so that players have no threshold"

At present, it seems that the blockchain game developers who entered the game earlier have gained a lot of lessons and experience in the past year or so. Make a few changes and try to find a way around this new, thorny track. Since the beginning of this year, we can see two obvious development trends:

First of all, the chain reform of high-quality traditional games has set off a new trend of chain games.

In terms of game playability, the regular army of traditional games is still doing the best. Before creating a native blockchain game that crushes traditional games, it would be a great idea to try to inject blockchain features into existing traditional games. Good choice.

First, it can enrich the content of the blockchain game market and guide more gamers to enter the market; second, it can also help more developers in traditional fields understand and accept the blockchain during the docking process.

The previous Mixmarvel's "Battle Chain-Jedi Hunting", and the blockchain version of "Legend of Sword and Fairy V" jointly released by Lianyou World and IOST are the perfect combination of blockchain project team and traditional game IP.

"With more content and more developers in chain games, there will be more opportunities for exposure, and a greater chance to achieve the so-called 'popular style'," said Yiyi, CMO of the Mixmarvel team.

In addition, we can clearly feel that the industrial chain of chain games is constantly improving.

The formation of the industry chain is not a one-day effort, just like the creation of the Internet product ecology, from the underlying technical infrastructure, to the game industry solutions in the middle layer, to the application of game content, game development tools, game players, etc. One must.

However, we have seen that after more than a year of development, the industry chain of chain games has almost taken shape.

There are public chain infrastructures like Cocos-BCX customized for game needs, game distribution service platforms like BitGuild and Mixmarvel, game production tools like DGameMaker, and data ecology and game evaluation platforms like Dappreview;

Of course, in the final analysis, the improvement of the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain is to pave the way for the final product to be polished, and the end users will judge whether it is good or bad. The game's set of products and business models are equally competitive.

The establishment of content barriers requires chain game project parties to find a perfect fit and a new profit model between the strong entertainment of traditional games and the new economic model of blockchain.

On the player threshold, the technical threshold and the cognitive threshold need to be smoothed out simultaneously, allowing more users to touch the emerging thing of blockchain games unconsciously, and naturally discover the fun and new features in it.

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What does the expected "big era" of chain games look like?

Chain games have carried the hope of blockchain applications from the day of their birth, so what will chain games really look like when they become prosperous? Clarifying the future direction may be the best way to get out of the current state of confusion.

In the "2018 Blockchain Game Industry White Paper" jointly released by ChinaJoy, DappReview and Cocos-BCX, the advanced process of blockchain games was divided into four theoretical stages:

In the first stage, the digital currency of some projects began to be produced based on the ERC20 standard of Ethereum, and the token can be directly used as a game settlement method;

In the second stage, props, equipment and any other characters in the game are expressed with non-homogeneous tokens (such as Ethercat), allowing props between players to be traded on the chain without the game, or even in different games. Realize the de-intermediation and de-agent transaction of props;

In the third stage, the key rules of the game (such as the rules of gold coin output, the drop probability of advanced props, etc.) are implemented on the chain, that is, they are directly implemented in the form of smart contracts on the chain to ensure that the rules are open and transparent to players;

In the above three stages, blockchain game developers have tried and explored on Ethereum, but due to problems such as content quality and performance limitations, they have not attracted widespread attention from players.

The last stage is an ideal state: the game runs on the chain as a whole, and all the logic codes of the game are put into the chain environment for execution, and the data is carried and stored by the decentralized blockchain network. This scenario needs to be safe and efficient. , Lag-free running containers and lightweight nodes to support the running of the game, but there is no good technical solution yet.

Let us once again briefly review the "original intention" that ignited the concept of blockchain games.

• Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, was deeply dissatisfied with the centralized control of players’ virtual game assets because Blizzard, the development company of World of Warcraft, canceled the “life siphon” skill of the game character Warlock. There are thousands of players like him , The confirmation of game assets has become a pain point for players.

• In addition, the circulation and transaction process of traditional game assets (such as props) is cumbersome and inefficient, and there are concerns about middlemen earning price differences and insufficient trust, and game assets are often limited to the internal circulation of this game, with no reusable value , the player's sunk cost is high.

Improving efficiency and reducing costs are the main theme of every new technology application. The arrival of the blockchain has excited everyone. The "big era" of blockchain games we are looking forward to is actually an era in which the technical characteristics of the blockchain can be used to solve the above-mentioned pain points of the game industry.

All kinds of assets in the game are uploaded to the chain, and the points, props, weapons, and characters are no longer fully controlled and disposed by the developer, but can be attributed to the player's blockchain address, and the player has ownership of the game assets under his address;

All of this revolves around the ownership and circulation of game assets. The player's virtual game assets will truly become an asset, owned by the player, and the investment and value of entertainment can be actually deposited, taken away, and traded.

Of course, based on this new decentralized system and token incentive model, the interaction mode between participants in the entire game ecosystem will also change. There will be a closer connection between game developers and players, between developers and publishers, and between different games. There may be a change in game development methods, distribution methods, dissemination methods, and even profit models.

This is a revolution in new technology, and it is also a revolution in the recognition of the value of game assets. The so-called "big era" of chain games is actually the era when the value of game virtual assets is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.

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Blockchain games are not the future

When the big waves wash away the sand, the sinker is gold.

At the moment when the currency prices in the entire encryption market are depressed, and the public's enthusiasm for the implementation of blockchain applications is overshadowed and confused, the blockchain game circle is really left behind by time, and there are fewer and fewer teams that can really go on. But those who survive are all experienced "pioneers".

It is not the main network of the underlying chain that really creates the commercial value of the blockchain, but the fancy DAPP applications built on the main network. Up to now, there is nothing more suitable than games to take the first step in the implementation of blockchain applications. The emergence of applications, but the process of taking over is very difficult.