Expectations, roles and responsibilities in a decentralized network for video games
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A decentralized network - in my opinion - is much like a well-functioning community. It's governed and ran by its participants. There are fundamental rules that no single actor can ignore or avoid. Everyone involved in this community has an innate responsibility to keep its overall outlook healthy and positive. In exchange it provides an ecosystem that rewards all of its actors throughout its lifecycle.
The notion of a decentralized network is nothing new. It's been a noble idea since the dawn of the internet, but only recently, in the last one or two decades or so, has it gained a newfound traction through the invention of blockchain technologies.
One of the newest trends in game development has become the so-called Play to Earn (P2E) scheme. Basically video game studios are building products that supposedly run on the blockchain. The premise of such games is that if you invest time into playing, you should be able to reap the rewards and make money off of them. Alongside this, you will usually hear about true ownership, which means if you buy an item, it will live on the blockchain and you can do whatever you want with it; keep it, sell it or bring it to another game - it really is up to you. Even if the game shuts down for some reason, you get to keep your items.
While I appreciate the fundamental concepts behind this, I can't help but question its validity and practicality given the currently available blockchains one can develop on. Here's why -
And if that wasn't enough, “dApps” or “decentralized apps”, - in other words, things that supposedly run on the blockchain - are in fact, mostly not decentralized and they don't actually run on the blockchain. Most dApps are very much centralized with only a portion of their code actually getting executed on the blockchain. They are hosted on-prem or in the cloud and follow very typical system architectures. The only differences is that parts of the domain logic is implemented in smart contracts; and these are the bits that are served by the chain. There are multiple reasons for this:
As you can see, in my opinion, there are quite a few issues surrounding blockchain game development. So what can we do better? In all honesty, I don't yet know. Hence why I decided to start building a network myself and see first-hand the forks in the road that lead to different answers. I have some ideas in my head, but I don't yet know if all of them can be reached on walkable paths.
The way I see it, building utility on a financial system has very limited use-cases. Yet, we see different blockchains being developed based on the same old paradigm with perhaps a few changes and caveats along the way. At the moment I don't believe such systems should represent the cornerstones of Web3. To draw a parallel, the way I think about it, building on top of any existing chain whose foundation starts with Tokenomics is much like building on top of a banking API on steroids; sure it's a great place to start if your goal is to move money around, but does that really serve a generic purpose? My hunch is that over the coming years we will be seeing more and more specific purpose decentralized networks popping up, providing tools and incentives for developers to build on them. Then, much like a centralized app would use something like Stripe as its payment backend, these networks could use one of the existing blockchains as payment provider.
My rudimentary vision, specifically one for a decentralized network that specializes in video games, is a multi-role space, where each participant has a key function in the well-being of the ecosystem. Naturally, one can assume multiple roles at the same time.
There is a native virtual currency called Terinium that is detached from network fees. E.g. transactions on the chain won't cost Terinium. Instead, there's a credit system in place that protects the network from abuse. More on this later. Ideally the value of Terinium is pegged to a decentralized stablecoin - best candidate for this at the time of writing is UST.
Developers must purchase some amount of Terinium to be able to participate in the shared econ. They can forge Terinium into items - e.g. skins for F2P games or stronger items for P2W games. Any transaction that happens with the forged item is going to net some profits to the developer. Let's see a few examples:
A system like this creates incentives for developers to opt into a shared economy, might that be by making actual profit or by acquiring new users.
Developers who don't want to participate in the shared economy can create their own virtual economies much like they would in a traditional development process. They lose out on some of the features, but they still get to run their game servers in a “serverless” manner by sharing it with the network - that is if a game server host chooses to host it for them.
Evidently at the start of the project everything is going to be centralized; I'm the only person working on this platform and until there's enough participation, there is no getting around making executive decisions. Once we hit a threshold where the community is comfortable with basing decisions on a consensus, we can switch over to a fully decentralized system.
I believe in full transparency - hence this blog series as well - and while I disagree with big corporations owning user data, full privacy has its drawbacks as well. We already see how anonymous teams can easily get away with scams in the crypto space. This is why I believe that joining the network - especially for developers - should be decided through a consensus. To get credits - which are required for participating in the network - one has to submit their game (idea) to a catalog that's a native feature of this platform. The idea then has to be accepted by a majority of eligible participants. Voting eligibility is something that's going to be based on one's role; e.g. developers will be eligible to vote, players who have been part of the network for X amount of time will be eligible to vote, etc. The exact rules are still something I'm working through and I will elaborate on them once I have more of the platform flashed out.
In the next part of this series we're going to explore the rewards system for more in-depth examples on how one can make money by joining the network. We will also talk more about detaching the value of the native token from directly impacting the usability of the network and the implications of this choice.
There's a good chance that some or much of my thinking is going to change as I dive deeper into building this network. If you want to be a part of this adventure, feel free to follow and share your thoughts on the matter. I'm always open for a discussion - just keep it civil, please!
