XBIT Tao Maowen: Is there a future for blockchain games?

As of press time, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has exceeded 5.7 million, with a cumulative death toll of more than 350,000. The epidemic is like a sword hanging over the heads of humanity, not only threatening human life and safety, but also causing great damage to economic activities.

As my country has achieved phased results in its fight against the epidemic, most countries have had to lower their proud heads and "copy" China's homework, announcing quarantine measures, and people are strictly restricted to their homes and cannot go out.

Misfortunes often lie behind good fortunes, and good fortunes often lie behind misfortunes.

People cannot go out, and many industries that rely on offline customers have come to a standstill, such as cinemas, dine-in restaurants, O2O, offline retail, hotels, etc.; but some people will also benefit, such as those engaged in Internet services, such as DingTalk, online game companies, etc.

According to Reuters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company will still accept permanent remote work even after the blockade caused by the new coronavirus is eased. Zuckerberg said that Facebook will "actively open remote recruitment" from July this year, and it is expected that about half of its employees will eventually work remotely in the next five to ten years. In the future, remote work at Facebook will become the norm.

In addition to online office work, the epidemic has caused a surge in traffic for online entertainment applications. People's offline entertainment has decreased, and online consumption has increased rapidly, which is of great benefit to the gaming industry. Like other online entertainment such as online videos, live broadcasts, online literature, and online music, the gaming industry has achieved explosive growth in user scale and product revenue.

As the performance of computers and mobile devices continues to improve, the size of the game market is also increasing year by year. The "2019 Global Game Market Report" released by Newzoo, a well-known game market data research company, shows that the game market generated US$152.1 billion in revenue in 2019. This figure will continue to increase at an annual compound growth rate of 9% in the next three years. It is estimated that in 2020, the global game market will grow to US$196 billion.

The impact of the epidemic has also led to explosive growth in the gaming industry. According to data released by Gamma Data, China's mobile gaming market revenue reached nearly 55 billion yuan from January to March 2020, a record high, with a year-on-year growth rate of more than 49%. And this is just the Chinese mobile gaming market. Judging from the current global epidemic situation, the revenue growth of the global gaming market will continue and set new records with even more astonishing figures.

So what happened to the blockchain games that were so popular two years ago? The answer can only be described in four words: terrible.

Three years ago, ICO was in full swing, and choosing a track and telling a story became things that all project parties needed to consider. The game market with 2.4 billion gamers and an annual revenue of more than 100 billion US dollars naturally became the "Tang Monk's meat" in the eyes of project parties. In addition, there are various assets in the game itself. At that time, blockchain practitioners believed that the currency in the game could naturally be combined with blockchain and finance.

At that time, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also said that blockchain games and distributed finance will be two important application directions of blockchain in the future.

In 2017, the first blockchain game "CryptoKitties" became popular overnight, with a total market value of more than 110 million RMB in 2017, and the highest price of a cat was 770,000 RMB, which opened the era of blockchain games making money. Blockchain games began to spread in the currency circle, and domestic giants such as Xiaomi, Baidu, NetEase, and Xunlei successively launched Crypto Rabbit, Lets Dog, NetEase Planet, and Wanke Monkey. Countless unknown crypto game projects have sprung up like mushrooms after rain.

Even Tencent was not willing to lag behind and launched the blockchain game "Let’s Catch Monsters". Some people even called 2018 the first year of the game. However, this wish was not fulfilled. The game did not become as popular as expected. Instead, it was popular for a while after its initial launch, but its popularity gradually declined, and many players also expressed their intention to "abandon the game".

In just over two years, the current situation of most blockchain games can be described as “dismal”. Due to the particularity of the game, either the project progress is extremely slow, or some game assets have been reduced to zero.

Why haven’t blockchain games taken off?

The current blockchain games have problems such as rough graphics, high difficulty in getting started, and low playability. Most on-chain games are affected by the weak performance of the public chain, the lack of scenarios that require blockchain, and the insufficient reserve of blockchain developers. Blockchain games are mainly spinach and cultivation games, and the transaction volume of gambling games even accounts for as much as 80%.

At present, blockchain games are still in a deformed state. It is not that the developers’ ideas are not good enough, but that the development of blockchain infrastructure is still imperfect at this stage. The inefficient blockchain network cannot meet people’s current needs for game quality.

The core model of cultivation games is to issue coins. For example, CryptoKitties uses ERC-721. The issued tokens can have different attributes, and giving the tokens rare attributes will attract people to take over.

This type of development game is very similar to the card collection game in traditional games. In fact, that kind of game itself is very expensive, but in order to encourage players to "spend gold", it needs the help of some auxiliary systems, such as leaderboards, battles, card combinations and card explosions, etc., which can stimulate players to compete and show off, so as to make the whole game more playable. In fact, these gameplays are not related to blockchain technology, which is also what is lacking in current blockchain games. People spend a lot of money to collect those "assets", not for entertainment, but for hype, so that others will take over.

The second is gambling games. Actually, there is no need to explain this. Everyone knows that it is just a game of passing the parcel to see who runs faster. It is very direct to make money. No matter where the technology develops, it is human nature. This is not very related to technology. It is just that digital currency can help gambling games avoid many complicated processes. For example, the popular FOMO 3D in 2018, because everything is on the chain, it is open and transparent and there is no fraud, so many people rushed to participate and it became a phenomenal game.

These two types of games are closely related to the characteristics of digital assets, and it is no surprise that they develop with the help of the characteristics of tokens.

There are so many ways to play in traditional games, but why are there mainly only these two types of blockchain games? Why are there no MOBA and MMORPG games in blockchain games?

I think the problem is that the purpose of participating in the game is not for entertainment. The gameplay of blockchain games is monotonous and boring. Players participate in the game not for enjoyment, but more to make money from the game, and even participate with the mentality of getting rich quickly, which is very different from other types of games. At present, blockchain game designers are working hard on how to make players gain monetary benefits in the game, but this is contrary to the original intention of the game itself to entertain and relax.

What is the future of blockchain games? As a founder of a blockchain dApp game said to me: "There is no light behind me, and there is a vast fog in front of me."