Exciting new innovations after a fumbling start

Blockchain gaming has come a long way since its fumbling beginnings. Here are the exciting things to come, according to Don Norbury, Head of Studio at Shrapnel.

Ralph Baer’s ‘Brown Box’, Atari’s ‘Pong’, Sega Genesis, Playstation, Xbox Live, the rise of online gaming – the list goes on and on of important milestones in the development of the video game industry over the years. All of these projects and products contributed something different to the development of games, but they all had one thing in common: they pushed the boundaries of innovation.

Since its humble beginnings, the gaming industry has consistently evolved and changed shape through technological innovation. At its best, this enhanced what players already love about games – community, exciting world-building, and immersive gameplay. At worst, overcomplicated and poorly integrated technology ruins the gaming experience and drives players away.

The rise of blockchain gaming is a controversial and ever-evolving example of innovation in the gaming space. Evangelists have always pushed the potential of blockchain to deliver new, fun and improved experiences to gamers. But early blockchain or crypto games have failed to live up to this billing and have been scoffed at by most traditional players.

This is largely due to the first blockchain games’ fixation on the functions of revenue generation and neglect of production values ​​and gameplay. Simply put, many early crypto game projects forgot the basic fact that it is exciting world-building and immersive gameplay that attracts players to games.

Blockchain game bug

Missteps made by early projects in the Web3 space do not mean blockchain is without value for gaming. These missteps have yielded amazing insights, and indeed, blockchain still has great potential to transform the gaming industry and improve the player experience. Don’t just take my word for it, this potential is clearly reflected in the recent trend of gaming industry veterans transitioning to working with blockchain.

Recently, the Japanese game giant Square Enix sold intellectual property for 300 million dollars related to major franchises “Tomb Raider” and “Deus Ex”. This is together with a number of foreign studios – in favor of financing the blockchain initiatives.

Attracted by the technology’s ability to facilitate features such as community participation, true ownership, and interoperability, many high-caliber developers with proven track records in traditional gaming are now working on Web3 projects. Their goal is not just to shoehorn crypto payment infrastructure into existing gaming models. But rather to maintain the essence of what players already love about games and create a whole new genre of top quality games enhanced by the features enabled by blockchain.

Blockchain game goal

In these top quality games on the horizon, the goal is for the underlying foundation of the blockchain to be invisible. Instead, the player will enjoy a AAA gaming experience. The Web3 technology will work in the background to enable important functions and improve the gaming experience. The first projects to successfully achieve this seamless integration of top-quality games and blockchain-enabled features will be a major milestone in the history of the video game industry. They will offer a truly new experience to players.

This new experience is evident from the beginning of a Web3 project, as the decentralized nature of the technology allows far more community participation in the development of games. By enabling voting on the development of in-game items, map creation tools, game features, and innovations, community members have the capacity to be involved in various aspects of the game prior to launch. With its egalitarian and communal ethos, blockchain allows game developers to open up the gaming journey to their communities, transforming the traditional player-studio relationship.

Strengthen players

Blockchain can also enable top quality gaming to further empower players by facilitating true ownership of in-game assets. Unlike traditional games, where players’ assets exist solely within the game’s ecosystem itself, blockchain enables players to link their assets, such as weapons and skins, to an on-chain identity that is immutable, transferable and valuable. This allows the player to get real rewards for their items in a way that they have never experienced in traditional AAA games.

Furthermore, recording game objects on the blockchain also has the added benefit of helping to create a backstory for each element in the game. For example, a player will be able to pick up a weapon and tell who had used it before them, who had made it and how it was won. This gives more meaning to every element of the game and builds an extra layer of storytelling to the gaming experience, highlighting what players already love about games.

Web3 and virtual worlds

But perhaps most revolutionary, Web3 allows the next generation of games and virtual worlds to be built with interoperability as a core principle. Instead of keeping players inside walled gardens, the virtual worlds that make up the open Metaverse will empower players to own their identities and take digital assets with them wherever they go. These open economies will be larger and more sustainable than any closed economy game we’ve seen yet, with players deeply invested in their assets and driving innovation as co-creators/co-owners of the world around them.

The prospects and potential of these blockchain-enabled features make this a truly exciting moment for the industry. However, it is clear that Web3 game developers still have a long way to go to prove to traditional players that they can integrate blockchain and maintain AAA quality gameplay.

Now backed by industry veterans with the knowledge and skills to create exciting and entertaining games, blockchain holds great promise as one of the next big gaming developments. In the years to come, we will inevitably look back on the early top-quality blockchain games as an important milestone in the development of the gaming industry.

About the author

Don Norbury is head of studio at Shrapnel. A gaming industry veteran from genre-defining franchises such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bioshock, Sunset Overdrive and Crackdown, Don has been redefining cross-platform creative boundaries and player experience for over a decade. Don sees backend blockchain infrastructure in games as a natural industry progression to facilitate the kind of creativity and applications that Minecraft players want to grow into. Shrapnel is the world’s first blockchain-enabled moddable AAA first-person shooter.

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