Creating a new gaming experience
Interoperability of game assets will open up new exciting opportunities
I recently watched Forte co-founder and CEO Josh Williams's class about ‘Opportunities for Crypto in Gaming’ (hosted at the a16z Crypto Startup School) which I recommend to anyone willing to understand how gaming can benefit and evolve thanks to crypto and blockchain.
Everything in the thirty-mins-long talk was very insightful, but what I found most exciting was the debate about the interoperability of game assets and the challenges that this could pose to the defensibility of games. After all, if players can own and exchange assets across games freely, the incentive to stick to one single game drops dramatically. I believe this poses some challenges, but also offers a unique opportunity to create something bigger.
Overall, this is how I see an ideal scenario of blockchain-enabled gaming business playing out:
Games are developed on a traditional engine and released on a decentralized app store. This would have the twofold benefit of distributing the value among the developer and players rather than leaking to the platform and at the same time, it would help reduce piracy and unauthorized distribution, as the provenance of each build would be known and transparent.
The game can either be free-to-play, with a combination of rewarded videos, in-app purchases, and NFTs as monetization tools, or it could be purchased via the developer’s social tokens. This would allow buyers to access the full game without ads, and would also entitle them to unique perks, like special NFT items, artworks from the game, a masterclass on game design from the creators, and so on.
Regarding the interoperability and lack of defensibility, which excites me the most as it opens up unprecedented experimental opportunities. Let’s start with the obvious objection: if players can own assets and transfer them across games freely (this is the unique opportunity offered by blockchain-powered assets), it means they will have the ability to easily abandon game A to move to game B, whereas today players tend to stick to the games where they have invested time and money in. How can this turn into an opportunity for developers?
Firstly, players will ascribe more value to those games and assets that can be owned and transferred to another game: the use case scenarios of those items dramatically increase, and thus their intrinsic value.
Secondly, if it’s true that players might more easily leave game A to game B, it’s also true that players from game C or D will likely try game A, so eventually, the number of players in the ecosystem might be stable or even increase (especially benefiting new developers/games that might currently struggle in attracting players from other established games). Overall, the size of these economies will grow, and a stronger ecosystem will emerge.
Finally, even if items can technically be exchanged across games, the design of these games must be at least compatible in order for players to use them in a meaningful way. This, together with the idea of wider ecosystems mentioned before, opens up the opportunity for exciting collaborations and crossovers. Think about it: two studios might decide to cooperate and create two games whose universes (worlds and characters) are to some extent connected, so then exchanging items across these games would produce a coherent and meaningful experience for players. This will make both these games more appealing, as they offer ‘two experiences in one’, so to say. Eventually, these two games could then connect to games C, D, and so on, which will create a significantly different experience, from a universe of games to a unified game universe (or Metaverse).