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Blockchain Games Should Focus More on ‘Game’ than ‘Blockchain’
The common belief amongst prominent thought leaders and investors in blockchain is that games will lead to mass adoption of blockchain technology. Much has been promised, with the CEO & Partner of Hashed, Simon Kim, asserting that “The Blockchain Game World Is Our Oyster.” Mass adoption has become a holy grail for blockchain projects, as eliminating the profit taking middlemen leaves no other alternative business model that they can thrive upon.
While I do believe that internet of reality will come with blockchain technology, I also see a problem with the way current blockchain games are approaching the problem. Instead of focusing on the core problem that traditional gaming has solved for the masses, the solutions suggested by blockchain games seem more focused on forcing users to experience the benefits of the blockchain technology. There’s an emphasis that if you build the outstanding blockchain product, all else will follow.
While blockchain gaming developers have made a lot of headway, they need to consider how other cutting edge technologies achieved mass adoption, restore product thinking and apply creative practices used by other technologies. By doing so, blockchain games will be able to meet its promise and lead the mass adoption of blockchain technology.
We need to restore product thinking
Currently, playing a blockchain games is like going to a seafood restaurant and getting a lobster when the consumer asks for a shrimp. Sure, they are both crustaceans, but if you were given a lobster for the first time, you will have no idea why it’s so hard to break and eat. If I told you that it’s western food delicacy, you wouldn’t believe me because you will likely stop midway and wonder why one needs to go through so much effort just to eat. If I told you that it’s a prison food, then you may believe me, as it could be perceived as a punishing experience (which, as history tells, is not necessarily false).
Unlike other technology products, we expect gamers to be forgiving due to the behaviors of past gamers. However, the gamers today have higher expectations with advancements in internet speed and better hardware leading to a plethora of very high quality games. Unless the game solves the user’s core problem, it is unlikely that they will even give a new game a shot, as getting the attention of gamers is harder than ever.
On Steam, games that receive less than 70% of recommended views from the gamers lose the ‘positive rating,’ which instantly impacts its sale numbers. There is a reason why millions of dollars, along with years of work by experienced game developers, are invested into each game. There have been plenty of products that either released too early or didn’t solve a problem that the user wanted, commonly known as product market fit.
One example of this in the gaming world is the catastrophe Nexon had with Sudden Attack 2 in 2016. Despite being a sequel to one of the most popular FPS game, Sudden Attack, and costing over $25M for development, the game was in service for only 85 days. The gaming world is proving to be not as forgiving as people make it to be, with recent announcements in Gaming Developer Conference showing that the standards will only be higher. Like the internet, accessing your next video game has only become a click away.
Hence, we must consider what pain point the games fix for the gamers. Blockchain game developers believe that the one of the biggest pain point for the gamers is the sunk cost of their in-game assets. If such was the case, then they would stop investing crazy amount after heavily investing in a few games. However, what we see in the real world is that such is not the case, with 46% of gamers (1.1 billion) making up a $137.9 billion market in 2018. As long as the game offers them a quality experience, they don’t mind at all investing a huge sum of money for nothing in return.
Gaming market is growing, and it’s growing fast!
What this shows us is that in-game assets matter only if the game itself is a quality experience. Value comes from us enjoying what we invest in and being able to thoroughly experience the depth of the game through our investment. This applies not only to gaming, as study by Harris group found that 78% of millennials prefer to spend more money on experiences than on things. However, if blockchain games are unable to offer that, then the initial investment from gamers will likely not even come through.
To show how we can restore product thinking to new technologies, I will go through a few examples of how different technology products managed to gain mass adoption despite technological constraints. Hopefully these could help the next generations of games in the blockchain space and eventually lead to mass adoption of blockchain technology!
Adapt to the restraints via new features
A popular game that succeeded on both Desktop and mobile is Crazy Arcade. The game play is very much like bomber-man, which makes latency and smoothness of movements that much more important. However, Nexon knew that they can’t simulate this type of play on mobile. They are restricted by different internet speeds and hardwares that are of lower standard on average compared to desktop computers.
Hence, Nexon clearly thought through what problems the Desktop game solved and why the game was loved by many. It turned out that unlike other games where playing more didn’t guarantee mastery, Crazy Arcade made one clearly better than others with experience because it had very predictable elements along with a bit of luck. One’s ability to adeptly move around and place the bombs at the right places allowed one to beat out those who had more luck with better items. However, this also meant that latency is more important than ever, as any lag would create unpredictable moments that would annoy the players who have loved the game for so long.
So when they transferred to mobile, they did the following: guarantee mastery by slowing down the movement of the characters, so that phones with worse hardware/internet connection could still play, and add over 20 skills, so that the skill component is still there. The game also added various modes, which made it more welcoming to the masses since mastering one mode didn’t necessarily mean that you dominate in other modes.
Various skills on the bottom right, unique to Crazy Arcade BnB M.
The result of this release was the server crashing for many gamers, but still recording over 5,000,000 downloads in 4 days, topping Google Play store and Apple app store as the most popular app with 200,000 daily active users. The negative reviews it received due to server crashes will take time to ameliorate, but individual reviews from YouTube influencers and bloggers show that Nexon were indeed spot on in addressing gamers’ needs.
Blockchain game developers should also consider what features they can add/amend to navigate through the limits of blockchain infrastructure. This is where the creativity from the game developers matter. If we are going to give up on certain elements of the game to make it work on the blockchain architecture, then we must add features that can be enhanced by blockchain technology while also solving the gamers’ core problems. Finding this breakthrough will be pivotal in how blockchain games enters the masses.
Blockchain technology as an enhancement
Considering how people already feel a negative sentiment the moment they hear the word ‘blockchain,’ what if we offered an alternative, where addition of blockchain technology was an opt-in choice for the users?
The negative sentiment about blockchain is quite real
Making the utilization of new technology opt-in is common in several successful products. Pokémon Go had their Augmented Reality technology be optional, as having the AR technology on drained the battery at a rapid rate. After all, the reason why people were coming to play the game was to catch Pokémon, not necessarily to see what it’s like to see Pokémon in the wild.
If all Pokémon Go users had to use AR technology by default, then the mass adoption may not have been as smooth. Catching with AR on is a lot harder, as one must hold the camera in the right spot for it to even be aimed right. The battery drain would have also been hugely frustrating, as live phones are a must in today’s world and you can’t sit at your house to play the game, as you must move out to see a new Pokémon.
I still remember going for a run on my iPhone with the AR on and seeing my battery level drop as fast as that of Google Glass. If I had to charge my phone several times a day just to play Pokémon Go, I doubt that it would have stayed for too long.
As such, with blockchain technology at its nascency, we can’t expect people to suddenly embrace it. Rather, we must give them a game that is fun without blockchain, but even better with blockchain. What if you were playing Fortnite and for setting up your own wallet, the game gave you access to a store with unique skins that only you can own? Or what if the game opened up new mainnets with a limited number of seats per each mainnet, so that it won’t overwhelm the blockchain with too many transactions at once, while offering special benefits to those who play in these settings?
A blockchain company taking this approach is Proxy, a digital identity platform that is creating a frictionless world with a universal identity. Currently, it is using the user’s smartphone to authenticate and interact with devices in the physical world, although its end goal is to use blockchain technology to give users ownership of their digital identity.
Proxy can be used to open doors via your smartphone, saying goodbye to those old IDs!
If Proxy began as a blockchain company, I doubt that WeWork and Dropbox would have become their clients when they were a stealth company with only seed round funding. Rather, they focused on solving a problem that the clients wanted solutions to first, so that they can raise their Series-A funding and continue to grow.
I don’t know if building a blockchain was always their end goal, as they only mentioned it on their website’s company vision page. However, I am sure that Proxy’s clients won’t mind blockchain technology being used to enhance the services they provided without blockchain. As such, blockchain games should also look to think about how to solve the problem without blockchain first and then look to enhance that experience through blockchain.
Making blockchain technology optional works
From the points I have made above, a common argument I can see is that these cases may not necessarily apply to a blockchain product. Hence, I’d love to introduce Brave, a privacy-respecting web browser that solved the issue people had with trackers that followed users to target ads and fed news that rewarded publishers regardless of their quality.
In fact, most users do not even use the blockchain technology when using Brave browser because to even see Basic Attention Token (BAT) coins, the user must sign up for the rewards program. The numbers reflect this, with just over 100k unique BAT addresses signed up despite the monthly active user being over 5.5 million. Yes, it’s barely 2% of users using the product, but imagine what the adoption rate would look like if the blockchain technology was in a more bullish market.
The best part about Brave is that they are beating others browsers that are not using the blockchain technology through its speed and the number of ads and trackers Brave has blocked. It actually keeps a tally for you on how much time you have saved and publishes studies on how much data you saved by using Brave. Hence, they give you a great product that could only be enhanced by the BAT coin, as you can now even get rewards while rewarding other publishers that you like through the BAT coin.
As such, blockchain games should look towards building a product that is definitively better, with blockchain technology only enhancing that experience. There are ways to make the on-boarding process easier, such as preinstalling add-ons like the way Brave does, so that the users won’t churn the moment they experience slight complexity. We can’t forget that a lot of people still hold a very negative sentiment towards cryptocurrency due to the crash that burned millions of people’s money last year, with Google even delisting MetaMask on its Chrome Extension store at one point.
What can blockchain games do?
So what if blockchain games were similar, where they won the crowd based on the merit of the experience it offered? Blockchain technology would sound a lot more welcoming if the user played a game and learned that if they did this game a little favor by making a wallet, it could suddenly keep its items. Or if users were given high reward despite the risk of losing it all.
As gamers playing blockchain games will see, trying to reward all in a RPG game will lead to struggles where nobody will be happy. Those who invested a lot of real money may not feel that their return on investment is too low, while the new comers will feel the same because most of the rewards have gone to the high spenders and the moment you introduce more premium items, the early investors will further experience the value of their investments dwindle.
Hard to please everyone in games
Hence, instead of trying to balance the game each time the game grows with endless patches, experiment with making all items have a finite usage durability, or every ship be vulnerable to blowing up like it is with Eve Online, where no ship can ever last forever as people will always try to loot even the biggest ships. And on top of this, set up a system where items can be bought and sold when the value of items that you hold amount to a certain value.
By setting a high risk (as you can either loot big ships a few times, or small ships many times), high reward (a meaningful minimum for you to cash out) system, users can feel the thrill of fighting for a meaningful reward at the end. After all, behavioral research shows that getting intermittent prizes that mean something is a lot more rewarding than getting predictable reward that mean very little for the user.
Using the food analogy again, if you were given a fresh premium wagyu beef at unpredictable times, you would look a lot more to this than regularly getting a patty that has been frozen for years and doesn’t taste very good. Second Life had a similar system, where you can cash out if you profited from the game game’s economy? The result was a thriving economy, where ~$60 million was cashed out with an estimated GDP of $500 million, higher than that of some smaller countries like Tonga, in 2015.
Or you could even look to utilize the public ledger in a helpful way, since many people don’t even know what a blockchain is. Want to know the reputation of a seller who is selling a NFT, so you have no real comparison to base the price upon? Check out the ledger that has a history of all his previous transactions! Want to know who currently owns the top weapons in a specific game that you can possibly loot from? Check out the ledger that keeps track of which weapon went to whom! These are just few of many ideas where the blockchain could serve as really helpful features in the game.
Fear not, mass adoption of technology takes time
One message that I hope to leave with is that there is no need to rush blockchain technologies to the masses. Artificial intelligence also had its ‘AI winter,’ when Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky, two leading AI researchers, warned the business community that AI technology is still too new for serious products to be made in the 1980's. And more recently, dot-com bubble saw even the world’s richest companies today, Amazon.com, drop 94%.
Remember how people freaked out in early 2000s? I bet they regret selling their stocks.
What this shows is that those who try to sell the technology, not the service that the users need, are going to be corrected by the market. Hence, the bearish market is actually better for those who know that they are delivering quality service because they will become more visible in their field. Instead of looking back at the bearish market, let’s be thankful of the fact that we learned so much thanks to all the crazy ICOs that tested all sorts of ideas in the blockchain space.
Now that experimentation stage has happened, we must put the product thinking cap on and make deliberate decisions on how we want blockchain to enhance gaming services. Blockchain doesn’t have to be the way we start and it’s completely fine to make a game that initially incorporates no blockchain technology. As the past examples have shown, games that actually make blockchain technology optional are the ones that get massively adopted because it enables developers to abstract out the complexities that serve as barriers to entry.
As long as we are patient, the mass adoption will come. Hence, let’s focus on what the users want with a memorable game first. If we succeed with that, we can then focus on placing the blockchain layer on top of it. With the amount of talent in the blockchain industry, I am optimistic it will happen. The matter lies in how we approach the problem and how long developers can stay despite the bearish market that we are currently in.
If everyone persists and gives blockchain games the necessary investment they deserve, I am confident that blockchain games will lead the mass adoption of the blockchain technology.
Blockchain game should focus more on ‘game’ than ‘blockchain’ was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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