2023 game market: Ponzi chain games are dying, and traditional 3A games are difficult to benefit from the blockchain

Throwing a Ponzi scheme on a crappy off-chain game like 99% of crypto games today.

Original title: "Games and blockchain: 2023update"

Written by: polynya

Compiled by: Yvonne

A year ago, I wrote an article about gaming and blockchain. Admittedly, this is a "reactionary" article, because I'm tired of VC hype - "Huge wave of AAA games will change the blockchain landscape in 6-12 months and attract A billion users". In 2020, I wrote about blockchain scaling for the first time on reddit, but no one really cared and paid attention, until mid-2021, I deliberately exaggerated - which is very out of my nature - and it worked . So, lessons learned, I use some of the same strategies in this article. My main goal is to point out that the vast majority of traditional AAA games cannot and will not benefit from blockchain technology - especially single player games. A year later, many of the narratives associated with the hype have disappeared, so I can instead focus on just the upbeat, positive parts of that article.

Where the blockchain still doesn't make sense

For most games, forced chaining and financialization will destroy them. It is true that certain games are financially oriented - especially MMOs and mobile games - and these games do not suffer from the above restrictions, but most of them still do not benefit from the blockchain, with traditional financial means up.

Throw a Ponzi scheme on a bad off-chain game, which is like 99% of crypto games today.

Sharing assets between games is impossible and pointless without the infrastructure or sufficient requirements.

I don't need to be conservative right now, so let's cut this section short and get straight to what I'm talking about in my 2022 post.

Decentralized game infrastructure

First of all, I don't think "decentralized" is the right word, maybe "distributed" is more accurate. Anyway, decentralized gaming infrastructure, distributed gaming infrastructure or online gaming infrastructure - whatever you want to call it - has made huge strides in the last year. We have two very promising frameworks - MUD and Dojo. I want these frameworks to be able to mix and match, to be compatible with each other, to be plugged into traditional game engines like Unity or Unreal, and middleware like Simplygon or Wwise. This type of infrastructure goes beyond blockchain and is being built. However, like I mentioned last year, this is a daunting challenge that will take several years to mature.

In a previous article on Fractal Scaling, I considered online gaming as a validation of 1000 specific applications based on L2 rollup. But the infrastructure design space for on-chain games and autonomous worlds is open, and there are many innovations off-chain.

DAO-based game development studio

There hasn't been much progress on this front, but it's still a meaningful direction for blockchain. Especially MMOs and platformers.

Game release

Some people are trying, but no real progress. Maybe we'll have to wait until the online game goes live for something new to happen, maybe this will be a Trojan horse coming to non-online games? Maybe, for the reasons mentioned last year, I'm still skeptical.

New mechanism for using smart contracts

We saw some really cool ideas at the hackathon. I would add that these mechanisms don't necessarily need to be "novel" - they can be a riff on existing ideas, as long as they work on smart contracts

How is AAA gaming going?

Almost all AAA publishers have given up on blockchain, and many games that VCs claim to be AAA were never AAA in the first place. However, I must mention Project Awakening, a game in the EVE Universe. According to their statements and statements, I think it meets all the conditions I mentioned!

EVE Online is already a successful economy-oriented game, so financialization makes sense; in fact, blockchain has the potential to remove friction from some aspects of financialization.

Game Development as a DAO - While they don't mention a DAO, "really open third-party development" pretty much hints at it.

Key game systems are on-chain, driven by smart contracts; I assume a lot of infrastructure is off-chain.

I'd love to see more of this, both in the established gaming industry and the nascent world of online gaming. I will say though, that I'm personally more interested in non-financialized games and co-op narratives.

In summary, the blockchain gaming space has progressed in the last year, everything I want is an emerging trend, and some Ponzi games are dying. To be clear, these games will be resurrected in a bull market, but I believe that truly systematic online games will stand the test of time. However, unlike some topics I've written about in the past, the technical development of blockchain games is not easy, and I expect it will take at least 5 years for this field to start to mature. There may be short-term frenzy, but this is a long-term game.