A CEO, a Caveman and an ERC walk into a bar
Ready for the dream player one ?
I have spent a great many hours in online worlds like Ever Quest and Ultima Online. It has been a long time since I could log into either. And it always frustrated me that the hours spent amassing items and stats in one world had zero value in the other.
There are a lot of people betting big that this is the sort of place where games do indeed need blockchain. They paint a very ambitious vision of the blockchain enabled gaming future. A very “Ready Player One” vision.
There are plenty of un-answered questions: Is it in the interests of current platforms to enable this utopia ? Is the advantage of solving it big enough to cause a fundamental shift ? Can blockchain rewrite player expectations for content ownership ? Will established platforms simply fold this in as a feature addition — with no material change to ownership ? Is the space too big for there to be only one answer ?
The CEO said
“Apple has outlawed the metaverse” — Tim Sweeney, Twitter (2020)
The success of Fortnight led Epic Games to battle Apple, Sony and pretty much all format owners in games. The battle was over who had the right to build walls and how much they should get away with charging for them.
A secure and trusted mechanism for downloading and installing gaming sofware is crucial. Without it online games publishing can’t work. Delivering this at scale, and without building lots of shops, delivers enormous value. As does the marketplace listing and all the analytics that go with it. Charging for this is completely reasonable.
But how much and on what terms is the argument that Tim Sweeney is having. He is arguing that his competitors are employing exploitative and monopolistic practices. And in doing so positions Epic Games as a champion of open platforms and the creator economy.
From the 2018 launch of the Epic store, this is what Sweeney said:
“In our analysis, stores are marking up their costs 300 percent to 400 percent. We simply aim to give developers a better deal.” — gameinformer 2018
And, also from the Apple outlawed the metaverse tweet
“The principle they state, taken literally, would rule out all cross-platform ecosystems and games with user created modes: not just xCloud, Stadia, and GeForce NOW, but also Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox”
Fast forward to 2023 and Tim Sweeney recently announced Epic’s self publishing tools. And called out Valve’s Steamworks API as a “classic lock-in strategy.”
Epic highlight multiplayer interoperability and the consistency of social experience in their distribution requirements:
“users who purchase a multiplayer product on the Epic Games Store can easily connect with friends and other players, regardless of where purchases were made.” — Epic Games, distribution requirements
All of this is by way of saying normal competition is doing its job. Player pain points like game interoperability are being addressed. Developer pain points like exploitative or manipulative terms of service are being addressed. Normal competition between contemporary players is already solving these problems. Is the brave new world of blockchain gaming really going to deliver a step change in player and developer experience ? An increment will not be close to enough given the scale of the technology change.
The Caveman said
Well, Cavan “Caveman” Roe of Polemos, in a fair example of the maxi pitch for blockchain gaming, said of self sovereign game assets:
“They can also provide a wide range of benefits and functionality — for example, operating as access passes or providing for royalties — and you can only access any of this functionality if you are holding the asset in your wallet.” — polemos, give blockchain gaiming a chance
As in, if you unlocked the Corrupted 8Ball skin at level 350 in Fortnite all you can do is tell people you have it and maybe link your socials back to an on-platform portal. Any other benefits are dependent entirely on the developer/publisher building it, enabling it and probably charging you again for it.
If on the other hand you could demonstrate that achievement independently of the game world, it becomes a pass, a verifiable credential asserting an accomplishment.
Let’s have a slightly contrived example. There is a completely independent online store. It sells high-end gamer mice.
Our imaginary Corrupted 8Ball skin winner buys a new mouse at the store. Is an automatic endorsement and reward mechanism at the point of sale a valuable thing to do ? “This mouse was last purchased by one of the 8 holders of the Corrupted 8Ball skin” — and by the way, here is your 30% discount.
The self sovereign content riff is then as much about enabling practical extraction of value from the enormous creative energy of gamers as it is about lofty ideals of self sovereign content ownership. When it’s all in one silo there is only so much that can be done with it.
This seems like something that just doesn’t work at all with the current approach no matter how large the silos are.
In a cautionary note Sam Peurifoy points out the “overjustification” effect. In short, paying a player money directly for a game item diminishes the value they place on the experience. But in this example it’s not direct payment. It is a time disconnected bonus that confers a reward that is part social status and part monetary.
Back in Cavan Roe’s piece he also points out
“Almost every blockchain has multiple marketplaces with thousands of transactions occurring every day. This prevents a single centralised marketplace from forcing unfavourable trade conditions and allowing competition to drive pricing. The counterexample here is again Steam, with its high fees. Steam is the only place for gamers to trade, they have no choice but to pay those fees or risk getting scammed by trying to circumvent the rules.”
And this is the point that most speaks to my personal entry point to this — where is all my stuff and can I have it back please ? In this model, it is always my stuff and I am always in control.
But also, before any of this can work, blockchain gaming may have more basic problems to solve.
The ERC (4337) said
“account abstraction” — Um, come again ?
Because of these problems this isn’t the place in this story where we say here is this great thing that blockchain does now for games. What we can sell now is more of the dream.
The first problem is that those promised novel gaming experiences lie at the other side of onboarding. The web3 wallet onboarding experience chasm. It is now accepted that it’s not possible to put wallet creation in front of the initial “aha I like this game” moment. It at least has to be deferred.
But even deferred, the traditional seed phrase, etch it on a diamond, wallet creation process is a tall ask of consumers looking only for some idle entertainment.
As far as normal users are concerned they have a wallet, they unlock it, then they click on stuff. They are not going to meticulously create separate accounts. Segregated, as they should be, to ensure that clicking on a ‘trade blueblade sword grade 3 for 20 gold’ button in a web3 game doesn’t accidentally transfer all of their digital wealth to some lucky random gamers wallet. Oops.
There is a second problem. It is specific to gaming. It lies with the typical web3 wallet experience. Game immersion is antithetical to the best practice “common user experience” for signing transactions. The idea is that we can train consumers to always do the safe thing. All we need to do is make ledger transactions present in a consistent way across all wallets. Yet not a single game I have ever played would tolerate that. Never going to work. Any usable game that involves transactions will be hiding the wallet experience completely.
And the third problem: It took us 40 years to train billions of internet users to deal with passwords and 2FA. I personally don’t want to bank my future gaming experiences on teaching them all to use private key management software safely. That is just madness. Calling it a wallet doesn’t help much. Acronyms like ECDH and secp256k1 are in my daily experience and I don’t fully trust myself to do it.
But good things are coming. There is just a war to win first. Hal Crawford introduces an opening salvo from Immutable X nicely here — Polemos the wallet wars begin
ERC 4337 is the crucial enabler. It first makes it possible for the game developer (or publisher) to pay GAS on behalf of the consumer. Secondly, its “User Operations” allow a batching of operations. Translate todays wallet experience to our weekly shopping trip. We would be making an individual payment for each item in our weekly shop. With “User Operations” one transaction can pay for the ‘whole basket’.
The familiar web2 onboarding and payment paradigms can ‘‘just work”. And it does all this without making ownership dependent on a central party.
You still have to trust a smart contract. It was possibly written by Chat GPT or cloned and hacked and deployed without much thought. But possibly it was published, verified, and audited by multiple credible parties. The detail of that will not matter at all to most consumers, there will just be a tick somewhere with a logo they trust.
But this is just an opener. Account abstraction means roughly speaking “programmable wallets” become a thing. That poorly understood wallet, created in a confusion of clicks, in response to mysterious dire warnings about address re-use and protecting your seed phrase above the lives of your children, is no longer a one stop trip to disaster.
A programmable account abstraction can set limits. How much is spendable, what it can be spent on, where it can be spent. Any game specific, application specific, or even parental guardian co-authorized, rule you could imagine becomes merely a matter of software. You may have created your primary wallet in a poor way but it becomes possible for applications to do a lot to limit your exposure.
Derek Chiang of ZeroDev puts it the best I have seen in this piece, and notes key enablers for games. Here regarding interactive apps and session keys And here on delegated assets.
But despite the very compelling work by the likes of ZeroDev and Stackup, this is a lot of stuff to build out. And there remain plenty of legitimate concerns
So much so that it is hard to see why most wouldn’t say “oh bother, just pick a central authority and be done already”. But what if it comes off ? Do we get to a place where the Epic vs Steam choice is irrelevant ? Game content ownership becomes an assumption rather than an ideal and that old world is just obsolete ?
So sure, not many of these things exist yet. It is a very green field. But if you have recently decided it might be time to hack around on an experimental game project: good news, you skipped the dead end. Good things are coming.
A tag line that reads like a joke needs a punchline
I am hoping there is not a joke here. In the face of frothy optimism about exotic things, wrapping up with a perspective from people who make real games is probably the right tone to finish on.
Mark Long is the CEO of the studio behind Shrapnel, a stunning looking blockchain FPS extraction game built on Unreal Engine 5. Mark disagrees with the self sovereign content ideals of the sort articulated by Cavan “Caveman”:
“it’s a lie that you can buy an NFT and take it to other games. They’re not interoperable and there’s no real business model that provides for that. So stop saying that, and stop telling people you can quit your job driving a taxi and earn money playing a video game.” — Polemos, Mark Long inverview
I really appreciate the blunt way Mark puts that — snap out of the dream state people! But I don’t think that earning from NFTs is the point, or at least not the whole point.
- You have a mint for achievement xyz in the League of Bananas ? Well we want you as a customer in Oracle of Oranges.
- Hey, you have the BlueBlade axe for Mysterious Mellons, want to do a time limited swap for my MP9 ?
This seems like utility to me. And without necessarily requiring a token or other financial incentive. How those services and features are paid for does not need to be coupled to the consumption. I find it hard to believe this list can’t be extended.
There is a place where I do agree with Mark. And something I think Epic have a very solid answer for. He asserts what he thinks is the regular game developer perspective in all of this:
”Most game developers, us included, just wanna make cool shit. I don’t wanna fuck around with trying to figure out if this is the right layer one or token economy, I would prefer somebody else to figure all that out.” — Polemos, Mark Long interview
Were Tim, Mark and Canva to walk into a bar one day I would be doing my best to listen in.
For my part, I would most want to ask what they think the first steps are going to be ? What are the things that are happening right now that will decide how this future plays out ?
If you have some answers, while the bar is just a handy literary prop, polysensus have a discord server and a twitter. Come and say hello and let us know what you think!
- https://discord.gg/rjTr6U7Z3u
- https://twitter.com/polysensus
- See our cheeky L2 “head 2 head” demo here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACJ1o5oYE3E
