Off The Grid, a battle royale shooting game drizzled with a hint of blockchain, had an electric debut, with players spinning up 9.12 million wallets and more than 100 million transactions in its first month.
But Off The Grid’s use of blockchain technology is more of an optional extra than a core element. The graphics and gameplay do not run onchain and its NFT in-game items are opt-in. The game intends to launch a marketplace where items can be traded on Gunz, an Avalanche subnet. A to-be-launched GUN token will be the in-game currency that can be used to purchase items and skins.
Its success shows that emphasizing good gameplay, with blockchain elements as an added feature that enhances the experience for those who want it, can be a winning move. It helped Gunzilla Games, the studio behind Off The Grid, secure backing from VanEck, building on the $517 million in Q3 funding raised by gaming startups.
Some of the industry’s high-profile games, like World of Dyspians or the new Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles by Assassin’s Creed developer Ubisoft, also follow this formula.
Many gamers hate blockchain anyway
Many gamers are deeply suspicious of extractive game developers employing NFTs, meaning gaming firms may be best off distancing themselves from the blockchain label but slowly letting their players dip their toes in.
“Gamers are still pissed about their game [graphic] cards being used to mine Bitcoin and Ethereum back in the day, and they’ve never forgiven the blockchain people,” Viktoriya Hying, co-founder of Base layer-3 gaming chain B3, tells Magazine.
“Every time any big publisher said they’re going to try something in blockchain, all their fans revolted against them, and they were shitposting on Discord to shut down the entire initiative.”
Several blockchain and gaming firms tell Magazine that the key to onboarding a mass wave of gamers onto Web3 is to make blockchain itself “invisible.”
“If you have to jump through a bunch of hoops and install a weird wallet and set up a seed phrase, people are going to bounce […] Attention is incredibly scarce, and people have unlimited options for how to spend their time and what games to play,” Amitt Mahajan, founder of blockchain game studio Proof of Play, tells Magazine.
Anthony Palma, gaming partnerships lead at Sui blockchain developer Mysten Labs, shares the same vision. He says the sweet spot for their sector is when their content is neither referred to as Web2 nor Web3 games, but simply “games.”
Blockchain is often an added extra anyway
Aleksander Larsen, co-founder and chief operating officer of Sky Mavis — the developer of the Ronin blockchain — categorizes most blockchain-based games at present as “Web2.5.” Larsen’s company created Axie Infinity, the most successful blockchain game to date, though its popularity has declined from its glory days.
“Even when you look at games like Axie Infinity […] a lot of the transactions are actually offchain,” Larsen tells Magazine.
For a game to be fully onchain, it would typically require immense technical throughput, like scalability, speed and low cost. Plus, many competitive online games demand real-time computation or something close to it at the very least.
“We don’t really have the technological advancements to put all of the data that we want onchain. So, there’s a lot of trade-offs that need to be done by the game developers that are building with blockchain tech,” Sicco Naets, head of ecosystem development at the Moonbeam Foundation, tells Magazine.
What blockchains are best for games?
With scaling as its north star, Solana was once seen as the frontrunner to host the blockchain world’s best games, but the chain has mostly been used for memecoins and decentralized finance even if the recent Breakpoint did showcase some impressive looking titles, like Aurory and the long-awaited Star Atlas.
Meanwhile, competitors like Sui have emerged. Based on the Move language developed by Facebook (now Meta) to scale its stablecoin project to the world, its theoretical throughput is placed near 300,000 per second. That’s near real-time for modern applications, and if it can hit that in the real world, it’d be ideal for some competitive online multiplayer games, like shooter Bushi or multiplayer online battle arena Final Salvation.
Other blockchain platforms are making strides in the gaming sector.
Immutable X, utilizing ZK-rollups, stands out for its scalability and zero gas fees for trading or minting NFTs, making it a popular choice for game developers looking to incorporate blockchain without sacrificing user experience. Additionally, Avalanche distinguishes itself with its subnet architecture, allowing the creation of custom blockchains that can optimize performance for specific gaming requirements, like Gunz for Off The Grid.
Onchain games today
While high-throughput chains like Sui are required for technically advanced gaming experiences, the other option is to design games around the limitations of current chains.
Mahajan’s Proof of Play studio doesn’t make high computation-demanding games like Off The Grid; instead, it focuses on casual games with fewer “moves.”
Back in 2009, Mahajan helped create FarmVille, a viral Web2 social farming simulator game, and discovered that such a model can be as popular as any other. FarmVille was acquired by Zynga in 2009 and joined a portfolio of games with a monthly player base of 300 million in 2012.
