Off The Grid’s success shows that ‘invisible’ blockchain has won – Cointelegraph Magazine

Off The Grid, a battle royale shooter with a hint of blockchain, had an electric debut, with players spinning 9.12 million wallets and processing more than 100 million transactions in its first month.

However, Off The Grid’s use of blockchain technology is more of an option rather than a core element. Graphics and gameplay do not run on-chain and NFT in-game items are optional. The game plans to launch a marketplace where you can trade items from Gunz, the Avalanche subnet. The soon-to-be-released GUN Tokens will be an in-game currency that can be used to purchase items and skins.

This success shows that highlighting good gameplay using blockchain elements as an add-on to enhance the experience for those who want it can be a win. That helped Off The Grid’s studio, Gunzilla Games, secure VanEck’s backing to build on the $517 million in third-quarter funding the gaming startup raised.

Some of the industry’s biggest games follow this formula, like World of Dyspians and the new Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles from Assassin’s Creed developer Ubisoft.

Many gamers hate blockchain anyway

Many gamers are deeply suspicious of extractive game developers using NFTs. That said, it’s best for gaming companies to distance themselves from the blockchain label but slowly allow players to dip their toes into it.

“Gamers are still angry about their gaming (graphics) cards being used to mine Bitcoin and Ethereum, and they have never forgiven the blockchain people,” said Viktoriya Hying, co-founder of Base layer-3 game chain B3. .” he said. It tells the magazine.

“Every time a big publisher said they were going to try something on blockchain, all their fans would rally against them and they would post shit on Discord to stop the whole plan.”

Several blockchain and gaming companies tell Magazine that the key to getting gamers on board with Web3 at scale is making the blockchain itself “invisible.”

“If you have to jump through a lot of hoops, install strange wallets and set up seed phrases, people will bounce (…) Interest is incredibly scarce and people have infinite choices about how to spend their time and what games to play. I have it. Amitt Mahajan, founder of blockchain gaming studio Proof of Play, told the Magazine:

Anthony Palma, head of gaming partnerships at Sui blockchain developer Mysten Labs, shares the same vision. He says the best thing about the sector is when the content is simply referred to as “games” rather than Web2 or Web3 games.

In any case, blockchains are often added.

Aleksander Larsen, co-founder and chief operating officer of Ronin blockchain developer Sky Mavis, classifies most current blockchain-based games as “Web2.5.” Larsen’s company created Axie Infinity, the most successful blockchain game to date. However, its popularity has declined compared to its heyday.

“Even when you look at games like Axie Infinity(…), a lot of the transactions actually happen off-chain,” Larsen told the Magazine.

For a game to be fully on-chain, it typically requires tremendous technical throughput: scalability, speed, and low cost. Additionally, many competitive online games require real-time computation, or at least something close to it.

“We don’t really have the technological advancements to put all the data we want on chain. So there are a lot of trade-offs that game developers building using blockchain technology have to make,” Sicco Naets, head of ecosystem development at the Moonbeam Foundation, told the Magazine.

Which blockchain is best for gaming?

With scalability as its north star, Solana was once considered the leader in hosting the blockchain world’s best games, but recently Breakpoint has launched Aurory and the long-awaited Star Atlas.

Meanwhile, competitors like Sui emerged. Based on the Move language developed by Facebook (now Meta) to scale stablecoin projects globally, the theoretical throughput is close to 300,000 per second. This is near real-time in modern applications, and if it could be achieved in the real world, it would be ideal for competitive online multiplayer games like the shooter Bushi or the multiplayer online battle arena Final Salvation.

Other blockchain platforms are making progress in the gaming sector.

Immutable Avalanche also differentiates itself with its subnet architecture, which allows the creation of custom blockchains that can optimize performance for specific gaming requirements, such as Gunz for Off The Grid.

Today’s On-Chain Game

While technologically advanced gaming experiences require high-throughput chains like Sui, another option is to design games around the limitations of current chains.

Mahajan’s Proof of Play studio doesn’t make games as computationally intensive as Off The Grid. Instead, it focuses on casual games with less “action.”

In 2009, Mahajan helped create FarmVille, a popular Web2 social farming simulator game, and discovered that such a model could be as popular as any other. FarmVille was acquired by Zynga in 2009, and in 2012 it joined its portfolio of games with a monthly player base of 300 million.

“We are 100% on-chain,” Mahajan says of Pirate Nation.

According to Mahajan, most gamers don’t care whether their game is on the blockchain or not, but there are properties they will eventually become interested in once they discover it.

First of all, Web3 native games cannot be terminated and can run forever. That wasn’t the case with FarmVille, which closed in 2020.

For FarmVille players, they would have been able to preserve the time and investment they put into the game if blockchain games had existed at the time.

“If FarmVille had been open source and on-chain, it’s possible that someone would have continued to run the game. I mean, I’m sure that 300 million people would actually care enough for someone to run the game,” Marhajan says.

Proof of Play runs games on Arbitrum layer 3 Apex and Boss. Both chains are among the largest gas consumers in the Ethereum rollup ecosystem.

Blockchain is the main character

A criticism that often plagues Web3 games is that they are not as fun as non-blockchain games. Blockchain adds an economic layer to games, often with players working towards tokens or NFTs.

But Sky Mavis’ Larsen argues that games don’t necessarily have to be “fun.” Rather, he sees games as entertainment platforms that can evoke a myriad of emotions in players.

“When I play Dota or Diablo, I play it for competition. “I’m not laughing, but I’m having fun,” he said.

Larsen adds that the opportunities offered by blockchain technology address needs beyond gaming.

A deep gaming economy can provide income to players around the world, just as Axie Infinity has become a lifeline for COVID-hit Filipino communities during the pandemic.

“I truly believe this is a new market leveraging new types of behavior and will only grow stronger in the future as people around the world spend more time in digital spaces.”

As Axie did, blockchain offers an alternative to existing systems.

For example, in August 2021, China imposed a strict gaming limit of three hours per week for minors. Under the new rules, Chinese authorities froze new gaming licenses for nine months when new games cannot be released.

In response to China’s strict gaming regulations, including a three-hour weekly limit for minors imposed in August 2021 and a subsequent nine-month freeze on new gaming licenses, gaming companies have looked for innovative solutions to enter the market, according to Hying.

“The solution is to have some of these teams start offices in Vietnam and Singapore to bring games to market via blockchain because blockchain has no barriers to entry,” says Hying.

Early access to the future of blockchain gaming

Studios across Asia are becoming more open to embracing blockchain elements. Even though no studio has found real success with this technology yet.

“If you look at the dichotomy between East and West now, Oriental studios are… enthusiastic about new technologies and putting more effort into being first movers,” he added. Western studios tend to be more cautious and wait, he added. For a blueprint for success before taking risks on your own.

In Japan, major gaming companies have already boarded the blockchain express through Oasys, a gaming blockchain. Developers release their games on tiered networks called “Verses,” which are essentially customizable ecosystems within the larger Oasys network.

The Oasys roster includes major studios such as Ubisoft and Sega, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog and once the world leader in home consoles. The Battle of the Three Kingdoms trading card game currently runs on Oasys.

But Ryo Manzoku, technical director at Oasys, told Magazine that it’s still difficult to get players engaged.

“We have never seen a successful blockchain game in Japan,” Manzoku told the Magazine through a translator. “It’s very difficult to get users for blockchain games right now, but if just one of our games is successful, it will be easier to get additional partners on Oasys,” he says.

Sui’s Palma believes a big breakthrough is just around the corner.

“The major studios will pay attention because someone will figure it out in the next year or two,” he says.

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Yoon Yohan

Yohan Yoon is a multimedia journalist covering blockchain since 2017. He contributed as an editor to Forkast, a media outlet specializing in cryptocurrency, and covered Asian technology stories as an assistant reporter for Bloomberg BNA and Forbes. He spends his free time cooking and experimenting with new recipes.