The One About Blockchain Gaming That I've Been Meaning To Write For A Very Long Time. - Issue #7

This the seventh in a series of posts that had been originally published on Revue.co With Revue shutting down, the Bored Ape Games on Chain blog/newsletter is moving here and will be mirrored at thechaingamer.eth on Mirror.
This article was originally published on May 23, 2022

Welcome to my newsletter, Bored Ape Games on Chain.

This newsletter is focused on the intersection of blockchain and gaming. I believe we’re going to see tremendous growth in this area over the coming years and I hope to document some of that here and share it with you, the community.

In this issue, I wanted to talk about the opportunities I think blockchain technology presents for the games industry. This is the article that I’ve been taking notes on, mentally and on paper for a long time now. I’ve wanted to write it perfectly, which is a great excuse for not writing it at all. This is the one that should have probably been the first article I wrote for my revue newsletter, but all that doesn’t matter. I’m writing it now.

Overview

As the title indicates, this article is about blockchain gaming, and more specifically, my thoughts on the immense potential that this technology holds for game developers and players.

How well we, as a community, execute on that potential remains to be seen. It is still very early days and we’re seeing many blockchain gaming projects use very different approaches on how they use the technology and what their goals are. In my opinion, such early exploration is very good for the growth of the space. We will discover what models work and which ones don’t, their strengths and weaknesses, and we will, hopefully, use that to build a better gaming ecosystem for everyone.

And now, let me start by telling you, my story.

The Boy Who Loved Games

Note: Feel free to skip this section since I don’t talk about blockchain gaming here, just about my background in games.

Nintendo Famicom/NES. Thank you, Abbu! ❤️

I got sucked into the world of games when my dad got my sister & I the NES. Ever since then, I became obsessed with games. On the PC, on different consoles. From the Sega MegaDrive to various Gameboys to the PlayStation. From Dangerous Dave to Commander Keen and Gods etc.

Left to Right: Dangerous Dave, Commander Keen, Gods

Back in 2000, my brother gave me a PC gaming magazine that had a Demo CD through which I discovered Age of Empires II. The Demo wasn’t enough for either of us. One of my fondest memories of that trip to Austin is browsing the games section at CompUSA (RIP) to get Age of Empires 2. For the next several years AoE II + The Conquerors was my go-to game. I went from playing against the AI using “how do you turn this on” to 1 v 3’ing them on hardest and playing multiplayer on the MSN Gaming Zone. It was the perfect game.

About nine years later, I discovered BattleForge. AoE II had made me an RTS maxi, and I enjoyed the fast-paced PvP that BattleForge offered with unique deck building mechanics.

Soon after, I came across League of Legends and the next 8 years were spent obsessively playing the game, seeing the rise of e-sports. From the S1 Championships in “Phreak’s Basement” to attending Worlds at the Staples Center in LA.

For 3.5 out of those 8 years, I was working at Microsoft and there I discovered Day9’s After Hours Gaming League (AHGL). A league for gamers to represent their companies, live out their pro e-sport career fantasy :), and compete for a good cause. We won the League of Legends AHGL trophies back-to-back in 2014 and 2015, and that was when I left Microsoft to move back to Austin and work at an AI startup, SparkCognition.

Startup life was extremely busy, and I had less and less time for PC games. It was then that I turned to mobile games. Before then, I had always looked down on mobile games for a couple of reasons. First, the disliked the microtransaction mechanic that in my experience was built into every single mobile game, and secondly, I didn’t know of any “fair” competitive games.

I started to play a lot of Vainglory and the Clash Royale on the PvP side. As for single players, Contest of Champions was my go-to.

Left to Right: Vainglory, Clash Royale, and Contest of Champions

Shortly after moving back to Austin, I also started my indie game studio, Forgotten Machine. The goal was simple. Keep designing and building games!

Blockchain Games And Their Potential

Like anything new, blockchain technology has its fair share of detractors. You read about how Proof-of-Work is destroying the planet and how NFTs are scams and used purely for money laundering, and how every crypto project is an MLM. The fact is, there is some truth to all these things. Proof-of-Work does use a lot of energy. A bunch of NFT projects are scams. Some crypto projects are indeed MLMs. But, there are plenty of legitimate builders in the space as well.

A lot of people ask why there is a need for blockchain technology in games. Here’s my take on the subject.

1. Kickstarter On Steroids And A New Model Of Ownership Of Assets

This is a fairly straightforward one. It’s also something we’ve seen numerous examples of over the last year.

NFT mints essentially serve as a new form of Kickstarting projects with the added benefit that early supporters benefit from the success of the project. The best example of this is probably Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club. The BAYC collection minted at 0.08 ETH (approx. $250 USD at the time) and is currently around 100 ETH. A crazy 1250x return on the mint price as BAYC blew up and has become a Web3 cultural phenomenon.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club changed the face of NFTs

Pixel Vault founded by GFunk did something similar, ala Kickstarting on steroids. The initial Punks Comic minted at 0.2 ETH each. There were 10,000 NFTs that were sold, and that kickstarted the Pixel Vault/Punks Comic/MetaHero world.

There have been many opportunities for early supporters to sell their comics for huge gains along the way. At one point in time the price of Punks Comic #1 was 15 ETH, a 75x return on mint price.

Pixel Vault has lofty ambitions in that they’re building a DAO owned MMO set in the MetaHero universe. In order to raise additional funds for game development they had another sale where different quantities of planet NFTs were sold. The idea with Pixel Vault’s model is that players would own the game itself and profit if the game profits!

One of the things the BAYC did that was quite unique was the ownership of IP angle. Whoever owns a particular Ape has the rights to commercialize it however they wish. This was, in my opinion, a major reason for the popularity of the BAYC. A lot of early community members worked hard to create IP around their apes. From a Bored Ape Burger Joint - Bored & Hungry, to the Jenkins the Valet project which is a collaborative storytelling project, and many things in between.

Axie Infinity has a similar license but much more restrictive. Last I checked, a player can use their Axies to generate up to $10,000 USD in revenue after which they have to get in touch with Sky Mavis and enter some sort of partnership agreement.

This is probably something SkyMavis should revisit, IMO

After the BAYC, own your Ape’s IP model, a lot of other projects started following suit. A lot of NFT gaming projects started to do the same thing.

The reason this new model of ownership matters so much is because it is creating a more collaborative way to build new ecosystems in Web3.

2. Enabling Interoperability In A Whole New Way

When YugaLabs announced OtherSide, the BAYC metaverse game, the trailer showcased CryptoPunks, Meebits, BAYC, all in the same spaceship. This was made possible because Yuga bought CryptoPunks and Meebits from LarvaLabs and handed over the IP ownership to holders.

A lot of other collections started following suite. We’ve also seen the rise of CC0 projects, which open up the possibilities of tying different projects/IP/collections together in a more cohesive way.

The anti-NFT argument when you talk about interoperability usually goes something like this.

“Interoperability is stupid. No real game developer is ever going to do that. Do you think X studio will ever let their IP be used in Y studio’s game?”

First off, yes. That already happens. Not at the scale that it could, but there are many examples of games that do IP crossovers. The Marvel vs. Capcom series of games is one example. Fornite has so many different IPs they’ve licensed - Marvel, DC, Star Wars etc.

Secondly, that is the part of the disruption that blockchain enabled games will bring. Game developers in Web3 are starting from scratch. They’re currently building IP. They’re the underdogs, and underdogs, in order to be successful, have to figure out how to get an advantage in order to replace the incumbents.

Left to Right: EtherOrcs, one of the earliest on-chain RPGs. TreasureDAO's Trove Marketplace, home to many interconnected projects on the Arbitrum L2

You see a lot of examples such as EtherOrcs collaborating with the Treasure Ecosystem. BattleFly, a project in the Treasure Ecosystem allowed holders of different NFT collections to mint a special edition BattleFly. The entire premise of the TreasureDAO is in fact the power behind projects that can use the same underlying layer and benefit from the shared infrastructure! These are just a few examples. Depending on how well YugaLabs executes their vision with OtherSide, we should be seeing A LOT of interoperability between collections, strengthening each other.

Another interesting project is BoredElon’s Bored Box. Partnering with different NFT game studios, Bored Box curates games and includes NFT assets from those games to distribute amongst community members.

The Genesis Bored Box contained assets from five different NFT games. The team partnered with NFT game studios and worked with them to create unique NFTs for the Bored Box minters.

This is yet another example of creators in the new Web3 gaming ecosystem working together to provide more appealing offerings.

3. Community Owned Economies

There are several examples of NFT games in development that are building on the premise of players being able to own their in-game assets. Why does that matter?

It matters because gamers invest a lot of time and money into the games they play. Whether you take League of Legends, or Diablo, or Fortnite. Players spend their time and money leveling up their accounts/characters, buying items and skins etc.

All this time and effort, all the skins and gear collected can vanish at a moments’ notice if the company behind any of these online games decide to shut their servers down. The players do not own any of these items, instead they only own a license to use these items as long as their accounts are in good standing and the games are live. All of this goes away in an instant.

By owning these assets, and in some instances being able to migrate them to the Ethereum Mainnet, players are able to truly own the items they spend so much effort collecting.

When players own their assets instead of simply owning a license to use their items/skins they are more invested in the ecosystem and actually have monetary incentives to create content.

Treeverse is a great example of a game currently under development that aims to focus on player ownership of assets. It’s one of the NFT games I am looking forward to the most! An MMO, with MOBA style combat and an amazing art style, it certainly seems like Treeverse has the potential to create a thriving player owned economy.

Forgotten Runes is another example of an early stage blockchain game that is building out their universe collaboratively and trying to evangelize the concept of “create to earn”. The universe is very interesting and they’re doing more than just creating a game. The team is building a whole universe around the Forgotten Runes IP.

4. New Ways To Keep Games Alive In The Digital Age

We’ve talked about owning in-game assets instead of having a license to use them as long as the developers keep the servers up or a player’s account remains in good standing.

The other opportunity that the integration of blockchain technology in games presents is the ability to keep games alive in a new way.

This is not hyperbole as any gamer can tell you. Here are just a few examples of well-loved games that were shutdown.

BattleForge

Release in March 2009, BattleForge was a real-time strategy game with deck building. Players could play through the PvE campaigns as well as PvP.

I remember playing it a lot in college, spending time trying to build optimal PvP decks, and playing 1v1s and 2v2s to climb the ranked ladder.

As with most EA titles, even though it was made by Phenomic (acquired by EA), the monetization piece was a big part of the PvP. You had to buy expansion packs to get more cards to be able to create competitive decks. Card balance wasn’t ideal either. There were clearly very underpowered and overpowered cards that would tilt the balance against you or in your favor.

The servers were taken offline in October 2013.

SkyLords Reborn. Bringing back BattleForge!

A passionate community remained and in December 2020, SkyLords Reborn, a revival project was announced. It is actively maintained by the community.

Duelyst

Another well-loved turn-based tactics card game. Duelyst went live in 2016 and was shutdown by Bandai Namco, who had taken over publishing from Counterplay in 2017, in 2020 due to declining player count.

Once again, a super passionate community still collects in discord and on reddit. There are a couple of Duelyst revival projects in-progress right now. The more popular one is Duelyst II. Here’s the latest reddit post by Igotlazy from a few days ago:

CPG has provided us with the majority of the original Duelyst source code
In addition to this, we also have a license permitting us to build Duelyst II from it. Over the past couple of months we’ve been working to prepare the original code base for deployment. This includes getting it working with our servers, removing all Bandai Namco integration, modernising the code to 2022 standards, fixing legacy bugs, implementing the Duelyst II Core Set, and adding visual/auditory polish. This is this version of the game we’ll be using for the network tests.

Playtesting begins 29th July! You can find out more on the Duelyst subreddit.

Age of Empires Online

After the MSN Zone died, the most popular way to play Age of Empires 2 & The Conquerors was by using Hamachi to create your own online games which others could join.

Age of Empires 3 never really did it for me. I didn’t like the graphics style, and in my opinion, they tried to change way too much from the near perfect formula of Age 2. We see this even today after the launch of AoE4, AoE2 and its expansions keep going!

I remember having fun when I tried out Age of Empires Online. Again, this was many years ago. Like the two previous examples, Age of Empires Online was also shut down by Microsoft. The reason? It was too expensive to maintain. It was live from 2011 to 2014.

Project Celeste brought back, and continued development on Age of Empires Online

In 2017, the game was revived under Project Celeste and is still being maintained!

There are countless more. Most of them are not as lucky as the ones I mentioned above. It is amazing how even though we live in the digital age, the preservation of games is a bigger issue now than it was before. Steam, AppStore, etc. give us convenience when it comes to storing our collections for us, linking them to our accounts, but on the flipside, we don’t actually own our games anymore. We can’t dig up a disk, put it in a disk drive and play our games. We’re at the mercy of centralized online services.

5. Community built and maintained games

This is a concept that I am trying to experiment with. I believe that blockchain technology creates a new way for us to enable the community to build and maintain games.

I started work on this experiment last year with Ruffion Reborn, a turn-based tactics, deck-building game where players will compete with each other to earn tokens which can be used to craft NFT gear and cards.

I want to create and release the core version of the game after which I hope the community will take it over, creating new cards, items, doing balance updates. All these things will be voted on by other community members who are holders of Ruffion Reborn Puppers.

Currently working on a demo that’ll allow folks to play the game with some items and cards already crafted.

Ruffion Reborn Card Library - In Progress

All the content will be released as CC0, the game assets etc. will be hosted on IPFS, and a history of all games played will be stored on-chain. I’m still figuring out all the details.

The mint will go live after the playable demo is completed and uploaded online so folks can try the game out before they decide to mint!

The goal. To ensure the game stays alive as long as there are a few people who want to play, build it.

I am not 100% sure how well this concept will work with Ruffion Reborn, but I do firmly believe that we will be seeing more and more of this model in the future.

In Conclusion

I can’t help but get excited when I think about all the tremendous opportunities that lie ahead in this space. Criticism like “you can do all these things without blockchain” is easy. The same way Dave Letterman mocked Bill Gates when they were talking about the internet and said, “does radio ring a bell?”.

Bill G sitting on the other side of the desk now, poking fun at "cartoon monkeys"

I do not believe what we saw with Axie Infinity, early on, is going to be the mainstream model for blockchain gaming. That level of P2E is unsustainable and that kind of success is all based on hype and speculation, not on fundamentals. It is also cyclical, and these cycles are short lived. That being said, I think it will remain a part of blockchain gaming for quite some time to come, because the “get rich quick” mindset is a very human thing, and it will be something we can’t help but introduce into everything.

Straight up buying or not buying MSFT or TESLA depending on your outlook of those companies isn’t enough for all of us. You can margin trade to increase your exposure. You can short those shares, betting they will drop to a certain price X. You can buy 2x 3x 4x S&P leverage ETFs or inverse ETFs and gain from the S&P going up or falling!

To me, the technology is first and foremost, an enabler. The three examples of games that died and came back to life show the possibility exists. The community goes to the company controlling that IP and works with them over long periods of time to try and bring back something they loved.

A new system of ownership where my in-game skins and items aren’t dead the day the servers are, a public ledger that records minimal information about competitive games that anyone can pull and literally get the full history of the game, are just better ways to do this!

I’ll end with an example from my favorite game. League of Legends. I stayed at Microsoft in large part to be able to compete against other companies with my team in the AHGL. The game, as many may know, was based on a Warcraft 3 mod, called Defense of the Ancients (Dota). Numerous community members who worked on that mod moved onto different projects. Heroes of Newerth (recently shutdown), Dota 2, and League of Legends. Blizzard entered the fray with Heroes of the Storm, which didn’t do very well.

Tons of competition. Riot Games became a massive studio on the back on League of Legends. Dota II found tremendous success, etc. So much gained from a single Warcraft 3 mod!

Left to Right: Auto Chess, Dota Underlords, TeamFight Tactics

The same thing happened with Auto Chess, which was a Dota 2 custom game. It found huge success and led the Chinese game studio behind it to release their own game, Auto Chess. Valve released Underlords and Riot released Teamfight Tactics.

Obviously bitter after all the opportunities that Dota created for others, and I say obviously because wait till you read what I pasted below, Blizzard released an update to their “Custom Game Acceptable Use Policy” on Jan 21, 2020. Here’s the first section.

Ownership Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games. If for any reason you are prevented or restricted from assigning any rights in the Custom Games to Blizzard, you grant to Blizzard an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, unconditional, royalty free, irrevocable license enabling Blizzard to fully exploit the Custom Games (or any component thereof) for any purpose and in any manner whatsoever. You further agree that should Blizzard decide that it is necessary, you will execute any future assignments and/or related documents promptly upon receiving such a request from Blizzard in order to effectuate the intent of this paragraph. To the extent you are prohibited from transferring or assigning your moral rights to Blizzard by applicable laws, to the utmost extent legally permitted, you waive any moral rights or similar rights you may have in all such Custom Games, without any remuneration. Without limiting Blizzard’s rights or ownership in the Custom Games, Blizzard reserves the right, in its sole and absolute discretion, to remove Custom Games from its systems and/or require that a Custom Game developer cease any and/or all development and distribution of a Custom Game. Please note that your Blizzard account can be subject to disciplinary action in event that you do not comply with Blizzard’s request or this Policy.

I’m not a lawyer, but ^ seems pretty nuts. I hope we see less of this in the blockchain gaming ecosystem 🤞.

This is such a very nascent space. From what little I have seen thus far, I believe we are probably looking at the biggest opportunity in technology since the advent of the internet.

I hope to see a future where gamers owning their assets, having interoperability across games, and being able to buy and sell their assets becomes the norm. Not the exception!

DISCLAIMER

I own a few Treeverse NFTs, a Bored Box, a bunch of $MAGIC and Treasure NFTs, 3 Forgotten Runes NFTs, an EtherOrc, a bunch of MAYC, Otherside deeds and a BAYC/BAKC, Pixel Vault planets and other NFTs, and a Jenkins ticket.