Building on-chain fully is hard; what about web2.5?
GameFi games are built in a hybrid model.
Hello Web3 builders, enablers, and leaders,
After Axie Infinity pioneered the concept of “play-to-earn,” we saw a massive rise in the development of new evolution of gaming.
Blockchain technology brings a new evolution to gaming, where the transfer of information and assets gets recorded in an open ledger technology.
The open ledger technology has opened a new frontier in gaming where financial incentivization and digital game assets ownership are possible for the first time.
GameFi evolution has promised many things, such as better interoperability, more control, and ownership for players.
As the new technology is still nascent, it meets with excitement and challenges.
Kuzote Lohe
Researching on Web3, GameFi at Librty
Podcast:
What VCs Look For in Web3 Games - The Metacast by Naavik
There is a fee you need to pay
In this week's issue, we will take you through how Web3 games can develop better using existing web2 technology while at the same time benefitting from the blockchain incentivization model.
You see, in blockchain, before every information and transaction is recorded, it needs to get verified and validated, and there is a fee associated with it; the gas fee as the computation cost.
Building infrastructure as complex as those in the highly interactive and realistic game completely on-chain means recoding every action and interaction into the blockchain.
This comes at a massive cost, especially for games that are building on the Layer 1 PoW blockchain.
High computation fees with high latency in the existing blockchain technology force game developers and builders to look for alternatives.
What about building on Web2.5?
With the existing technology, running games on-chain seems economically unfeasible and technically difficult, if not impossible. This is the reason most GameFi games are built in a hybrid model.
A hybrid model is where the game logic is built off-chain, such as AWS, Azure, etc, and the game assets are built on-chain.
Building games are complex and require solving huge engineering problems, and on top of that, it needs to meet the on-chain requirement of paying high gas fees for every action recorded on-chain.
Building game logic off-chain also means smooth gameplay with low latency. For instance, this is the same reason Axie Infinity’s battles are built off-chain.
We’ve decided to make Axie Infinity battles off-chain to ensure our players have a smooth and enjoyable playing experience. All ownership of Axies remains on the Ethereum blockchain of course!
When we see at the current development of web3 games, we broadly classify them into two categories:
Weakly on-chain: For games that have only a few components of their stack on-chain while running the core part of their game logics on off-chain proprietary servers.
Strongly on-chain: For games whose logic and well as digital assets are deployed on-chain.
Problems with blockchain gaming:
Blockchain gaming, though provides unimaginable benefits but still suffers in other aspects.
Sylve's great article explains the Four challenges in blockchain gaming.
I would like to point out a few more-
UI/ UX- In the case of strongly on-chain gaming, every state change in the game needs to register and recorded in the blockchain. If a user wants to execute any action, they need to sign a transaction for every action, and this means most computation cost. This is unfeasible for high-velocity games.
Backrunning- Imaging two players are in the battle of a game, player A sent a transaction to the mempool on-chain, and his action is exposed to backrunning if it is a readable format or if it can be decrypted. If Player B (the opponent) is monitoring the transactions, he can foresee the opponent's next move and be able to backrun it by submitting the perfect counter-move.
Information hiding- Competitive games rely on some degree of imperfect or incomplete information. But blockchain is open and accessible to anyone in the world; this world allows the observer to exploit players if they can read the information on the smart contract. A sophisticated user who can read the smart contract storage can adjust their strategy accordingly to what their opponent is doing.
Latency- Considering a game is strongly on-chain if hundreds of users send transactions to the smart contract to read and register them on the game. It might swiftly worsen into network overload instances, reducing the latency in-game.
I suggest you read this article's Thoughts on on-chain gaming; it covers more technical details and provides a few solutions to it.
The way out (at least for now)
The problems discussed above are specific to strongly on-chain games and can be mitigated by using off-chain tools.
But again, running game logic off-chain means the same as web2 games, where developers and publishers have all the control, ownership, and the will to change anything.
Then the idea of ownership, decentralization, and open source, which Web3 advocates for, will lose its meaning.
For sure, web2 games has evolved and have brought the industry this far; we can solve most of the problem discussed above with off-chain tools.
For instance, using SSO-Single sign-on for KYC implementation can solve the multi-accounting problem, or just moving the game logic off-chain can do away with problems like information hiding, backrunning, latency, and UI/UX.
While at the same time, we are seeing innovative development like Optimistic Rollups (ORUs), NFT-based access, and Zk-Rollups (ZRUs) that has the potential to make a paradigm shift.
Food for thought on building game logic off-chain.
Where is the money?
Mobile gaming platform MetaverseGo announced a $4.2 million seed funding round led by Galaxy Interactive.
What’s happening?
India’s first web3 conference is having this weekend in Goa-
With dozens of speakers lineup to share their journey and mission on the future of Web3, this is a big thing happing for the first time in India.
Interestingly, the Web3 community in India is looking to build Goa as the Miami of India. If you are going there, let’s catch up. Adeeb and Kuzote from the librty team will be there too.
You can check out the details of the event at the office Twitter account here.
MLSPA Announces Partnership with Chief Blockchain Gaming Developer Splinterlands-
The Major League Soccer Players Association (MLSPA) and Splinterlands, the top blockchain game developer globally, have started working together.
The two organizations will work together as part of this special agreement, beginning with Genesis League Soccer (GLS), to include MLSPA players in a new Web 3.0 opportunity. Together with Splinterlands, the MLSPA will construct and develop a blockchain-based play-to-earn (P2E) soccer game that will provide MLSPA players with additional ways to interact with their fans on desktop and mobile platforms.
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I will write to you again next week; until then, happy building, gaming, and investing.
Kuzote Lohe
Researching on Web3, Blockchain at Librty