The Future of GameFi - Autonomous Worlds
This post was written for the Chaotic Good DAO community.
Hey everyone!
We love to play: on the computer, phone, console, and just to gamify every step. Games are a familiar aspect in the life of modern man, they have a massive reach, which means there is reason to believe that the next wave of crypto users will be brought exactly by gaming titles.
A16z, Animoca, and other major VCs are betting heavily on games, relying heavily on this thesis.
That said, today's blockchain games, while having understandable merits, have many unresolved problems, both local (unsustainable economies, sybil attacks, mediocre gameplay, imbalance) and fundamental.
Today we will talk about the latter.
Let's take a look at the current blockchain games market and try to assess their long-term prospects.
But first let's reconstruct the events of recent years.
How did web3 gaming evolve?
Blockchain gaming, not counting the early bitcoin casino games, started with Crypto Kitties. It was one of the first high-profile gaming projects, launching dozens of forks and extensions of ideas. The innovations consisted of.
Transferrable and tradable in-game assets embedded in NFT
The ability of NFTs to interact with each other according to a certain algorithm
This was a significant step towards player sovereignty and we've been experimenting around these two values ever since, iterating game models.
Today's big names- Axie, Sorare, Splinterlands, Upland, or even any of the Magic/Gala games continue to build on this foundation.
DAO (development voting) mechanics are being added, ERC-20 tokens (to align the interests of investors, players, and developers). Studios are searching for gameplay mechanics, economic models, and distribution platforms, reinventing the web-2 experience of their predecessors.
In doing so, several fundamental problems are being missed that prevent web2 from becoming a full-fledged web3.
To create decentralized franchises, the mere possession of a game character and its items is not enough.
What are the fundamental problems in GameFi?
These problems are usually not outlined in white papers, and gamers themselves rarely talk about them.
The player can own their in-game asset, but if the game goes down, the value of the NFT tends to zero. Essentially no different than a skin in any web-2 game
No interoperability. Items from one game can't be transferred to another. To enable this you have to merge worlds (Magic and Gala are working on it).
In many games the artwork is protected by license
Code is closed to prevent copying.
Centralization. Economic and gameplay decisions are still made by the company or by whales and investors holding a majority of tokens. Players have no influence on such decisions and essentially tolerate the risks of centralized management. Also not all decitions are brought to public
Conflict of interests between the player and the company
Doesn't it remind you of anything? That's right - centralized exchanges where our assets only appear to be ours.
It's basically the same Web2 gaming, presented as Web3 through centralized NFTs.
The concentration of risk is still as high, and the user's control is reduced to the ability to buy and sell his asset on the secondary market without the right to control the very world that the asset belongs to.
Conflict of interests
A company's main incentive is to create popular games and its investors to return the money invested with a positive ROI.
And even if the developer is driven by long-term goals (to build the best blockchain game that will last decades), his investors' goals may be more short-term (to recoup their investment because they need liquidity).
These interests may influence the company's decisions and lead to:
Dilution of the players' assets value
Issuing a second token
Changing the in-game logic and balance (nerfs, boosts)
Dumping assets to prolong its runway or by investors
This conflict that in the long run, in my opinion, makes sustainable web3 economies impossible, became the fuel for the emergence of the concept of Autonomous Worlds, or onchain games.
What are Autonomous Worlds?
These are games whose logic, state of all assets in the world (items, characters), and rules (economy, interaction of assets with each other) are onchain.
I first became familiar with the concept in the post "Big Ideas for 2023" by a16z.
It's a fully open world that is managed by players not only at the level of NFT ownership, but also metadata (embedded in the blockchain), rules and world economy (embedded in the blockchain and cannot be suddenly changed by the managing party).
Its features:
All data is stored on the blockchain.
Open source code. Anyone can create a fork of the game with their own rules. Analogy of mods in Skyrim, GTA5
Everyone can create their own derivative game, using assets from the game for a superstructure - a minigame, a parallel world (spin-off) and set their own rules. An analogy is your server in Minecraft.
The logic of the game world is spelled out in smart contracts
NFTs are completely on-chain and do not depend on AWS, IPFS, etc.
cc0 public licenses. There are no restrictions on using game assets to create your art, fork, continuation and monetize it
There are limitations related to bandwidth and storage on the blockchain.
Basically AW promises real web-3 in the form of free and distributed ownership of assets, collective management, development and iteration.
In other words, the GameFi Lego that Defi has become for the financial industry.
OpCraft is a self-contained world made by the Lattice team made on Optimism Op Stack and the MUD engine:
In a world of autonomous games, communities will be free to connect to each other's economies, exchanging traffic and creating complex add-ons. This gives a higher rate of iteration, i.e. experimentation, as in Defi through forks and open-source, developers can connect the atoms of two projects into complex molecules.
Such worlds can potentially be endless, as long as the blockchain on which they are built and the community that supports them exist.
The studios and projects I follow
Autonomous blockchain worlds are still in their early stages of development. Blockchain introduces bandwidth and storage limitations, so many developers compare the current era to when the first DOOM, or Build Engine, appeared.
Starknet
Starknet is positioning itself as the gaming platform of the future, thanks to native abstraction of accounts (finally no seed phrases), the ability to perform multiple transactions with a single signature and session keys (no need to sign a transaction every time. Instead, give signature permission per game session, e.g. for 2 hours).
Twitter: Starknet Ecosystem
My actions.
Created a list of active projects, interact with new projects, subscribe to the ecosystem account and monitor new subscriptions.
Influence
Cosmic global strategy. All logic is onchain. Built on Starknet.
Currently running an incentivized testnet with quests with tokens allocated for completion.
Website https://www.influenceth.io/
Twitter https://twitter.com/influenceth
Followed by: A16z (2 reserchers), Paragim (4).
Bibliotheca DAO.
Video from the last DAO call, where you can watch snippets of gameplay.
Eternum. An economic strategy in the spirit of Age of Empires and Clivilization, also on Starknet.
They are building two products.
The game Eternum itself.
An engine on which other onchain games can be built, either by the team itself or by other developers
The game is being built as a derivative of the original Loot drop. Eventually (like Treasure/Magic, by the way) grew into an independent project and moved to Starknet, re-writing all contracts from Solidity to Cairo.
Extremely strong and involved community. Held a community round the day before yesterday, which was 6x over-subscribed ($4M in funding with a $600k goal).
Website https://bibliothecadao.xyz/
Whitepaper https://scroll.bibliothecadao.xyz/
Interactive world map https://atlas.bibliothecadao.xyz/
Twitter https://twitter.com/BibliothecaDAO https://twitter.com/LootRealms
Followed by: A16z (6), Paradigm (4) Delphi Digital (6), Animoca (1), Sequoia (1)
My actions - bought 1 land and some $Lords tokens. NFA. Really like the project.
Tetration Lab
Built on Lattice's MUD engine.
The beta test of the detective onchain game Museum Heist started 4 days ago.
The use of zk technology opens up new and interesting scenarios. The task of the players is to finish the game with the greatest number of artifacts, stealing other people's and finding those who stole yours.
The mechanics are reminiscent of Among Us and the tabletop Mafia. Game theory, deduction, that sort of thing.
Twitter Tetration Lab
Followed by: a16z (1)
Briq
They are literally building Lego NFTs on Starknet.
You can buy a set and
Build a model from the blueprint (comes with the kit).
Use bricks to create your own nft model.
Sell that nft as an art piece or use it in your game.
Build any kind of superstructure with bricks, even your own Sandbox
Bought a few kits a long time ago as a small bet on the sector and just like the project.
Buy NFT https://mintsquare.io/starknet/briq/created
Twitter https://twitter.com/briqNFT
Followed by a16z (1), Paradigm (1), Delphi Digital (3)
Lattice and MUD
Presentation of the MUD autonomous worlds engine from the DEVCON conference:
Lattice is building the infrastructure for future onchain games - the MUD engine. It was used for the game OPCraft, a showcase from Optimism and Lattice of what an autonomous world could technically look like, where the destruction of each voxel in-game is instantly incorporated into the chain.
Twitter https://twitter.com/latticexyz
Followed by: a16z (7), Paragim (10), Delphi Digital (9), Animoca (1), Sequoia (2)
Matchbox DAO
A team of onchain game developers and contributors.
Recently held a tournament among top web3 developers, where each car in a racing game was a smart contract. Uniswap won :)
Article https://www.theblock.co/post/206516/uniswap-wins-web3-gaming-battle-of-titans-competition
Website https://www.matchboxdao.com/
Twitter https://twitter.com/matchbox_dao
Followed by: a16z (3), Paragim (2), Delphi Digital (6)
Final Thoughts
Autonomous worlds can be a breakthrough for blockchain game development because it aligns with the values and promises of decentralized, democratic ownership and governance.
It is also capable, like the DeFi ecosystem, of rapid progression through replicability and interoperability.
Developers and major venture capitalists are concentrating around projects in this niche, with no high-profile rounds yet. Projects are prioritizing their communities by first selling and dropping their game assets to them.
Right now we're in the concept and early release stages. It's a great time for anyone interested in the field to get active, contribute, get to know projects and look for opportunities.
Rodion Longa.
This post was written for Chaotic Good DAO, a friendly and English speaking community RU/UA/BL contributors, researchers and investors.
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