The Future of Blockchain Gaming
I’ve been in the blockchain space for some time now, creating and building NFT projects, watching the developing gaming landscape with interest. Not least because I wanted to create a blockchain game myself.
So, these are the three key areas for me, that will not only distinguish blockchain gaming from the mainstream, but that will ultimately make it a huge success.
Digital assets:
Well duh, of course digital assets. Being able to actually own your game items is pretty revolutionary. NFTs — what we’re calling these assets just now — have changed the game for me in a big way. I believe they’ll come to be ubiquitous, a part of most peoples lives. And they wont even be called NFTs any more. Digital collectibles, cyber assets, digibles, I don’t know. But we’ll all have them. And they’ll have no bigger influence than in the gaming
space. Now, I understand the cynicism. You can buy and sell stuff, big whoop. But no sir, it is a big whoop. A very big whoop. Because you’ll be able to take them out of the game. Out. Of. The. Game. Imagine the places we might be able take them…
Which nicely segues into my next point:
Interoperability:
Okay, being able to sell my game assets is cool and all, but I’m a collector, a hoarder. I don’t ever really sell anything.
What excites me about owning my game items is what I might be able to do with these assets in the future. Who can imagine the platforms and games people will build around those out-game items (that’s what we’ll call them) we’ve collected as we continue to develop.
I know this to be a thing to be excited about for certain, because the game our team is developing — Meta Battler — is built around this exact concept. Instead of thinking — like many of these teams we’ve seen — how do we extract as much from this community as we can — we asked, “how do we give as much to this community as we can?” With that in mind, we built a game that uses every single NFT ever created (on the WAX blockchain). We gave use-case to the quite frankly useless.
What excites me is the fact we’re just one team. There’ll undoubtedly be other teams thinking similarly. I can’t begin to imagine all the possibilities for these out-game items. But when they start working across platforms and games and whatever else, it’s going to be glorious!
Let me paint you a scene. You’re a young boy or girl, playing Pokemon on your Gameboy back in the day. Now, imagine if all those Pokemon you’d collected were able to be taken out of that game and kept in your own wallet. Imagine all the cool stuff the community would’ve built around those Pokemon. And although it’s not my primary driver, imagine what those Pokemon — now the keys to so many other cool things — imagine how valuable they might be today. I don’t know about you, but that excites me a lot.
Tokenomics:
Play to Earn has become a dirty word and rightfully so. So many poorly conceived products with a simple endgame: make the creators rich. Okay, some early players may have benefited from playing Axie or Farmers World. But for everyone that did, there’s a hundred that didn’t. Whatever way you try to spin it, earning income from a game doesn’t really work. It might work for a month. Even six. But long term, I’m not convinced.
As a gamer, a return on investment from the games I play has never interested me. I play games because they’re fun, they’re an escape from work. Add money into things and it becomes a job. And we all know jobs suck. I experienced this in a sharp way as a professional writer. I wrote because I had to and I was determined to make my living out of it. And as soon as I started getting paid for it, it took some of that joy away.
I do think attaching a real life currency to a game could work — if that game was fun and the token had utility and a robust system around it — but we’re not there yet. If and when someone’s able to make it work, earning from a game that doesn’t feel like work might not be the worst thing in the world.
And there we have it just some of the reasons blockchain gaming will have a bright and rosy future. It better had, it’s where I’m building my game!
To find out more about our game, Meta Battler, visit us here.
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John is a writer, creative director and designer. In 2020, he co-founded Ultra Rare, a digital collectibles, comics and games company based in the UK. Since then, he has created and overseen multiple IP, including the highly successful Horrors series, as well as bringing iconic horror franchise, Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the world of digital collectibles. Ultra Rare have recently been busy building their first blockchain game, Meta Battler.
