Face it. Ethereum is NOT the future of gaming.

Blockchain! Crypto! DAPP! ICO! Decentralization! Ethereum! Token! I should be making money now, right? I used all the buzzwords. Isn’t that how this works? No? Crap.

I’m going to level with you. I’m a huge fan of blockchain technology. I also love game development. But what I see going on in the many game communities I’m a part of is insane. I’ve seen a dozen different “game tokens” that are going to “revolutionize the market” and “make your players money” and “give value to your in-game assets”. Those are all good ideas. But they don’t talk about how they’re going to do it. And the ones that do make me face-palm. Hard. Crypto Kitties was a flash hit, and now everyone thinks that’s going to work all the time. People are already getting over it. Flappy Bird ringing any bells right about now?

Ha. That’s not what I said. Blockchain is coming like a freight train, and it’s going to revolutionize the game industry. I’m 100% confident that in 5–10 years time, blockchain-based applications and games are going to be the norm. Using a centralized server is going to be like using Internet Explorer. Let that sink in.

What I said is that Ethereum isn’t the future of gaming. There are some glaring problems that make it a terrible fit, and it makes for a horrible game experience. But this isn’t an article to bash Ethereum. Just know that among other things, fluctuating gas prices (cost of doing transactions) and the 15–45 minute wait times are going to be a problem. If you purchase an item in-game from an auction house, do you want to wait 45 minutes to get it? If you win a ranked match in Fortnite, do you want to then sit at a loading screen for almost an hour? That sounds like fun, right?

“But I like Ethereum!” “Solidity’s the best!” I know some of you are getting upset with me right now. You’re not the first ones this week. You like the Ethereum platform. That’s fine. Some people liked The Emoji Movie, too. I’m just calling it like I see it. If you want more info on the problems with Ethereum, just know it’s slow (and all the “sharding” in the world isn’t going to help), the language is funky, your code is vulnerable and exposed (with no hope of bug fixes once you’ve deployed), and there are lots of alternatives without those problems. And remind me. How well does Ethereum play with mobile? Spoiler alert, it doesn’t. And with mobile games holding a $46.1B market share last year, that’s something to seriously consider.

I’m so glad you asked. So there are three things I’m covering here.

We could spend a while talking about blockchain basics, but there are plenty of articles that do that already. I can recommend a couple if you’re asking “what the heck is blockchain?” or “what does it mean to be a blockchain developer?”. Assuming you’ve got the basic idea, let’s explore how this should work from a gamer’s perspective. Let’s pick a couple of popular games to explore this with. First, Epic Games’ Fortnite. Right now it’s pretty much the hottest game around. Second, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. It’s the most popular MMORPG of all time, so it’s an easy example.

There are 5 major things I think are going to drive blockchain-based gaming in the near future.

I could go on for days about these four things, but let’s just provide a quick example of each. We’ll talk about an example from each game, and why blockchain is the smart choice for making it happen.

A quick personal note on scarcity. This goes back to the very roots of the MMO genre. People want to feel.. special. My first MMO made me fall in love because in the game, I was somebody. Not just the weird kid in class. I had friends. I had a purpose. I had unique items and a custom build that made me different. Let me be me. People like to be unique. They like to have things others don’t. They want to have something that separates them from the herd. They want to own that piece of armor, or weapon, or mount that people recognize and go “Whoa! They have that? That’s amazing!” Modern MMO’s are losing this trait, and it makes me really sad. Cookie cutter mentality is taking over, and this is an area where I think blockchain can really shine. One of my personal goals on a career level is to bring this back to games so that others can have the same positive experiences I’ve had in the digital world.

Fortnite
There’s this super awesome mount that people are going crazy for. Yes, I’m talking about the shopping cart. It’s had some bugs, but people love it. What if only 5,000 of them existed? What if it was a collector’s item that was earned by completing some kind of achievement it was tied to? First 5k to earn the achievement get the shopping cart. Second 5k get another version that doesn’t work as well and is missing a wheel. Anyone after that doesn’t get the cart. Suddenly, that cart has purpose. It has value. Most importantly, it’s scarce. People want it, but it’s not as easy as just grabbing it.

World of Warcraft
Wow’s already got some great examples of this built in. Blizzcon happens every year, and it’s not uncommon for Blizzard to release a special mount, pet, weapon, or some other exclusive item at them. The kind of item you only get if you show up to Blizzcon and beg the frosty overlords kindly. Instant scarcity. You don’t go to this one-time event, you don’t get the item. They never release it again.

How Blockchain Helps
When you create a token or object on a blockchain, you can make the quantity immutable. That means there’s only so much. Once that quantity is distributed, no more are generated. I create X amount of shopping cart objects, Y amount of lesser shopping carts, and bam. I’m done. No more will ever exist in my domain. This could be resources, currency, access to a certain class, anything. For example, with WoW, they have a new expansion coming out where you have access to certain races based on your reputation with those races. What if only a certain amount of players with the highest reputation (remove the max rep cap to make that happen) had access? Did someone just cause more scarcity?
TANGENT WARNING: There used to be a big MMO called Star Wars Galaxies. They didn’t start with Jedi, and the way they implemented the class eventually led to their downfall. This kind of solution could have easily solved the problems and made Jedi rare, mystical, hack-free, and easier to balance. Jedi are super versions of their respective race. Too many would ruin the game for other classes, but the population of Jedi is pretty small, isn’t it? Hmm. Sounds like a job for immutable token quantities.

Fortnite
Let’s keep running with this shopping cart thing. There are two major security examples here. Example one, someone hacks the game and causes it to generate the achievement. As it stands, the server only gets notified if there’s an event, so there’d have to be some pretty heavy validation saying “Yup, that’s legit.” Example two, somebody hacks the database and gives themselves a cart. Yeah, I know, a little extreme, but it’s plausible. You’d have to know where and when your users unlocked the cart and track that somewhere. Then you can’t even tell if it was legit or not without some heavy tracking.

World of Warcraft
So the same kind of concerns exist here as in Fortnite. Did the player really level up? Think back a few years to the Warlords of Draenor launch. Some guy got attention for being one of the first to hit level 100. That’s awesome! Or it would be if he didn’t cheat. Blockchain’s verification would have nipped that in the bud. Did they win that PvP match? Did that mount really drop? All those questions can be handled via blockchain. Ever had your account stolen? Blockchain is an easy way to fix that, too. A totally different use case, though, is login. WoW has a pretty obvious black market, just like any other MMO. People buy and sell items and accounts. The game industry as a whole isn’t keen on supporting account sales and such for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is security. You buy an account from some random person on the internet, pay real money for it, they immediately file a false report with Blizzard, Blizzard restores the account to them, you lose your money. And it can go the other way, too.

How Blockchain Helps
For traditional “Don’t hack me, bro” security, blockchain is an obvious choice. The whole idea is to create a trustless system where verification through some kind of third party action takes place. Because of the decentralized and anonymous nature of blockchain tech, the effort and skill it takes to hack a system utilizing blockchain is on a whole different level. No need for those annoying “anti-cheat” programs that cause problems for the end user.

Now, regarding game accounts. Moving to blockchain encapsulates the account. It makes it transferable. You can have an address that the account is tied to, and people can transfer ownership of that address pretty easily. And that transfer would take place on public record with requirements and escrow and everything so it’s out in the open and everybody gets what they were promised. Boom. Whole new legit market. We’ll talk more about that in a minute, though.

Total side note. Not doing an MMO? Building a game distribution platform? Using tokens representing a game would be a great way to make games easy to rent, trade, sell, all while making sure that ownership of the game never “mysteriously” disappears from the server. Want to make sure achievements are valid? Looking at you, Steam. Blockchain validation solves that.

Quick note on “universe building”. Examples of what I’m referring to here include easter eggs, cohesiveness, continuity, culture building, fictional universe type stuff.

Fortnite
Fortnite is building up an awesome community. So much hype. Fortnite is a big deal. So let’s say in a year Epic says, “Hey, you know what would be cool? A spin-off of Fortnite! Let’s make a mobile game focused on just building things.” But they also want this mobile game to reflect achievements and possessions in Fortnite, and vice versa. Currently they can do this, but it is tricky to set up, there’s a lot of data management involved, and it doesn’t typically work out very well.

World of Warcraft
Blizzard already does an amazing job of this. They have events and achievements that unlock things in other games. For example, they had a promotion for Heroes of the Storm a couple of years ago. By playing Heroes of the Storm for so long, you could earn a World of Warcraft mount, a banner for Diablo 3, and some rewards in Starcraft II. Your actions and achievements matter in other games. However, in-game items like weapons and armors have no meaning in other games. What if it did, though? What if I could ride my super awesome Lich King horse in Heroes of the Storm? Or use my Paladin’s artifact sword in Diablo 3?

How Blockchain Helps
You’ve probably heard the word crypto once or twice in the last few months. Or weeks. Probably today. Everybody has a cryptocurrency they’re talking about. People like to think about these as dollars because that’s easy to relate to. But that’s not their only use. You can create an actual object on a blockchain network represented by something like a cryptocurrency. That’s one of the reasons for my personal favorite in the blockchain race, but let’s put a pin in that for a minute. Basically you’d create a token players could keep in their wallets. Then it’s tied to the wallet, usable in any game that wants to utilize it. Whether that’s to accept as money or represent equipment or any other kind of item. In theory, you could even have a game whose sole purpose is to farm goods from another franchise. I want to farm as many shopping carts as I can? Make a game where there are massive perks in exchange for a shopping cart. Want subscription game time or currency in World of Warcraft? Wildstar? Elder Scrolls Online? Farm it with another product like an app. Make something to help players and in exchange they pay in a token worth something in that game. Let that magic blow your mind for a minute.

So this is a little less focused on what blockchain can do, and more focused on what we need to watch for. Blockchain is slower than your typical centralized server. You’re not going to get an immediate response. That’s why a pure blockchain solution won’t work. There are things like player positions that we don’t necessarily need to validate and that would be ridiculous to expect high performance on. Transactions and major achievements, though, are prime candidates for some blockchain love. The problem is wait time. That’s why I’m saying Proof of Work solutions (like Ethereum) are bad juju. You could be waiting for a long time for transactions to go through. Purchased a crafting material at the auction house? Could take an hour to receive it. Waiting to validate results from a match? Sit tight, it’s going to be at least 15 minutes of your favorite loading animation. Blockchain needs to be carefully implemented. User experience must not be sacrificed in this transition, or it’ll never work. Another reason for my personal pick.

Now for everyone’s favorite part of all this. Let’s talk money. This is where all of this comes together into something really cool. World of Warcraft has a lot of features. There’s a lot of work that goes into it. People need to be paid for that work. So what if we could increase profits to pay for that work by making it free to play?

Am I talking about a bigger cash shop? No. Pay to win? No. Your game could make you money by letting your players make money. I’m not going to go into too much detail here because you’re probably already tired of me. Just think about this. Make your crypto (made for your game/company) that converts to real cash through selling it to people. There’s a limited supply so it’s like real money. No broken economics. Then let people take over. Let your player base make you money. You could allow freedoms like:

Every time one of these things happens, take a small fee of your crypto to resell. Easy natural economy. Players can literally make a living playing your game. And you in turn get funds from them playing your game. 100% win-win.

This is going to make a lot of things possible for game monetization. I’m going to write a completely different article with more specifics. Until then, though, here’s a pretty good article on the basic idea. Just know that things are going to be changing in how players pay for games. No more random packs that you pay hundreds of dollars for and never get what you want (which everyone hates). No more subscription fees. A new age is upon us.

We’re working closely with NEM to provide the best experience possible and help bring more awareness to their amazing technology outside of the countries where they’re already popular. My sole focus is game development. I love games. The future of game development is blockchain. It’s not Ethereum, though. Seen Ready Player One? Everyone’s excited about it, and the NEM blockchain is how an experience like that is going to happen. I’m working to make that technology even more accessible to you ASAP. I want to make blockchain a reality for indie devs, small studios, and companies like Blizzard and Epic Games. Here’s an update for what we did this week on this project from my good buddy Caleb.

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