In the field of DApp (Decentralized Application), it is generally believed that the largest application field of blockchain is DeFi (Decentralized Finance, Decentralized Finance) and blockchain games. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, also said in an interview in 2018 that he believes that finance and games will be the two major application areas where blockchain will first land.
Blockchain technology is widely known along with the birth of Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto's expectations for Bitcoin stem from his dissatisfaction with the existing financial system. Therefore, apart from technical parties such as cryptography geeks, the first people who paid attention to this technology came from the financial field that paid attention to the astonishing increase of Bitcoin. Therefore, the combination of the financial industry and blockchain technology is not difficult to understand, because this technology itself was born due to the shortcomings of the financial system. The popularity of many DeFi projects recently also proves the imagination of blockchain in the financial industry.
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Digital assets and blockchain games
At the end of December 2017, an encrypted cat with a trading price of 125,673 Ethereum attracted global attention. How could a "cat" be sold for more than 260 million yuan? And it's an intangible electronic cat? Such an unbelievable transaction volume has made the form of digital assets "value verified" in the game field.
In most of the games you have played, the virtual assets of the characters you created are issued by the game party. It is a string of data recorded in the server. Once the game party shuts down the server or clears the data, nothing left.
But blockchain technology allows users to have the real ownership and trading rights of game virtual assets. After the player owns the asset ownership, the biggest feeling is that even if the game operator shuts down the server, the player can still view his game assets on the blockchain, and if there is a certain technical support, the player can even build a community to build a private server , come back to this game again.
When players have the right to trade assets, the props in the game can be regarded as free circulation. For example, if I draw a card that I don't really need, but my friend needs it, I can definitely give it to him. Another example is that if the game is shut down and the game is no longer played, the assets in the game can still be circulated in the market. Even if it loses its use value, for some nostalgic collectors, it may become a The "antiques" in the game world have become valuable for collection.
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Digital assets endow games with new imagination space
"Game multiverse" and game props "traversal"
In addition to ownership and trading rights of digital assets, game props "time travel" are often mentioned. The concept of game props "crossing" was proposed by the well-known game engine Cocos-BCX. Cocos-BCX believes that in the current game system, many props are designed for general use, so Cocos-BCX proposes that game assets and props with the same worldview can be interoperable. Game props follow a unified world specification in the same world view, and game assets and props with the same world view can be migrated and intercommunicated in different game worlds under this world view by paying the migration fee, that is, the "traveling" of game props. We can understand that the props obtained in the A game can be transferred to the B game with the same world view by paying the migration fee.
In fact, Enjin also has a similar concept. Enjin mentioned that in theoretical physics, the multiverse is a series of infinite universes with various possibilities. In the game environment, players can use their multiverse items in multiple games, which also means that players use the same multiverse item to produce different functions in different game parallel universes. This is the "game multiverse" proposed by Enjin.
The game multiverse proposed by Enjin. Comparing different games to different universes, and players have different identities in different game universes, the items he owns have different functions in different universes. This is what people expect in many novels or movies, and Enjin believes that it can be realized in games through blockchain, and it can only be realized through blockchain. We can understand that this function mainly refers to the fact that in games using the same digital asset standard, the same item can be used multiple times in different games with different functions.
For example, in Tencent's blockchain game "Let's Catch Monsters Together", the "exclusive cats" bred by everyone can fight together as pets in the mobile game of Glory of Kings. Or the player made a gun in Minecraft that can be used as a special prop in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Players can even get six gems in game A, and then get an infinite gauntlet in game B, and finally synthesize them in game C to become Thanos, a skill that randomly destroys half of the enemies on the field.
For the game industry, this can greatly increase the fun of the game and enrich the linkage gameplay between games. Similarly, those who are interested can also use this function to realize the diversion of old games to new games, or to realize the "resurrection" of a game, and use new games to extend the life cycle of old games.
Transparency and "depreciation" of game assets
What the blockchain brings to the game is also the choice of on-chain game mechanics. Nowadays, many players are dissatisfied with the operators of the games they play, such as the non-transparent drop rate of card draws, the loss of powerful heroes who have spent a lot of effort to cultivate, and so on. Even though domestic mobile games now require transparent drop rates, some players still think that what is announced is only the total probability of different rarities such as SSR and SR, and question whether there is a game that adjusts the drop rate of individual cards?
If the game party wants to prove its innocence, it is a good choice for the game card draw mechanism to be chained. When the data is transparent through the chain, players can clearly see whether the game assets they draw are really high-rarity assets as the game party said, and it becomes difficult for the game party to secretly modify the drop rate Things, even on-chain digital assets can have a fixed amount of output at the beginning, instead of unlimited output like most games, which can motivate players to enter the game earlier to obtain early game bonuses, because such digital assets In comparison, it is less likely to depreciate.
Regarding the depreciation of game assets that players are more worried about, the Enjin platform proposes that game props should have a minimum support value. Enjin believes that game props should have intrinsic value and ENJ support value. The ENJ support value is the minimum value of an item, while the intrinsic value of the item can depend on its utility, rarity and other variables. The price difference between the game developer's intrinsic value and the ENJ support value is the income that the developer should obtain through the game .
Therefore, the Enjin platform proposes that game developers should use a small amount of ENJ to create props, so that game developers will not spam props. Items acquired in games or servers that no longer exist can still have real value by melting them down for ENJ. This method makes game assets more valuable as real items, and always has a cost price backing, instead of just infinite spam that eventually leads to data with zero value in game assets.
Players who work with game developers
Since the birth of blockchain technology, it has been advertised as "decentralization", so it is considered by most people as an important technology to change the production relationship between enterprises and consumers, and it may even eliminate the form of enterprises. It was replaced by the organizational form of "community" with a higher degree of freedom.
Although looking at it now, this expectation is still far away. On the contrary, institutions such as centralized exchanges have become the biggest winners of current profits. Therefore, "decentralization" and "community" have also become self-deprecating words among blockchain practitioners. But we are still thinking about such a problem. In blockchain games, digital assets may become a way to promote the cooperative relationship between players and game operators.
In the past, the relationship between game players and operators was just that of consumers and merchants. However, with the emergence of digital assets, game props are no longer just virtual commodities that are likely to be withdrawn at any time. After giving players ownership and trading rights, they also have the attribute of value "hype", just like the high-priced encryption cat.
As a result, the revenue model of the game side is no longer a single advertising model, or charging players for item purchases. The game party can produce some ultra-rare props and allow players to participate in the auction to increase the income of a single prop; it can also cooperate with the prop exchange platform to charge a certain prop transaction fee; for example, it can even have some more Special financial functions make the types of game props more diverse and have more "value" attributes.
In this case, the relationship between the game player and the game party becomes delicate. In order to protect their own interests, the game player will hope that the value of the digital assets in their hands will be higher and higher, and the game party will obtain more benefits. I also hope that the value of my digital assets will be higher and higher.
In this case, players will have a stronger sense of belonging to the game, which will enhance players' participation in game operations. At the same time, once a large number of players are dissatisfied with the game, it will be directly reflected in the price of in-game assets. This makes the game party no longer able to ignore the opinions of players, and the spontaneously formed game community can also become an important role in the future development of the game.
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Blockchain Games: Evolution of Standards for Digital Assets
non-homogeneous standard
When referring to the Ethereum Token in the past, what everyone heard was the ERC20 standard, but in fact, the ERC20 form is not completely suitable for blockchain games. The props in the game are more inclined to commodities in daily life. Larger, so someone proposed the concept of NFT (Non-Fungible Token, non-homogeneous Token), and the most famous is the ERC721 standard used by CryptoKitties.
The difference between ERC20 and ERC721 that you often hear is very obvious, and they are representatives of homogeneous Token and non-homogeneous Token respectively. The former is our common Token, homogeneous Token, each Token is the same, and can be fragmented, such as divided into 0.1, 0.01, etc.; and the rise of the latter is exactly the Token standard used by CryptoKitties. A Token is unique, and the smallest unit is 1.
ERC1155
Both ERC20 and ERC721 methods have defects, that is, whether it is ERC20 or ERC721, each Token needs an independent contract to define. If you want to face the mainstream game market, there will be more than one million props. Obviously, this will bring huge problems to the blockchain main network, and a large amount of gas fees will also affect the game experience. That’s why Enjin sees CryptoKitties as just a proof-of-concept, showing the possibilities blockchain brings to gaming, but also causing congestion on the Ethereum network.
So Enjin proposed the ERC1155 solution. The breakthrough points of this solution are as follows: one is to bundle Token to solve the low efficiency of transactions; the other is to package multiple transactions to solve the main network congestion and high gas fees; The third is to support homogeneous Token and non-homogeneous Token at the same time, to solve the problem that the same game needs both, such as a gun and a large bag of bullets.
In fact, ERC1155 can be seen as combining the features of ERC20 and ERC721, and reducing the load on the main chain by means of packaging, so as to meet the high requirements of game performance.
ER721x and ERC1178
Ethereum's well-known side chain Loom proposed the ERC1178 standard, which allows multiple types of digital assets to be defined in the same ERC1178 contract. This means that it allows the simultaneous transfer of any amount of a particular type of digital asset, which is useful for large quantities of valuable digital assets.
Based on ERC1178, they are packaged with the ERC721 compatibility layer. This is the more effective ERC721x standard proposed by Loom. The compatibility layer preserves the minting functionality, allowing individual ERC721 tokens to be minted on demand. It can be seen as a combination of ERC1178 and ERC721.
dGoods
dGoods is a digital asset standard initiated by the blockchain game company MythicalGames and jointly established by many well-known EOS nodes such as EOS Lynx and Scatter. dGoods Standard has metadata templates for 3d and 2d assets such as games, coupons, music files, artwork, tickets and more. Part of the standard involves specifying metadata templates based on the type of digital goods being used. The standard is built on the idea that digital assets require the same certificate of authenticity as physical real-world objects.
dGoods are able to have immutable fields (as the designers intended) to represent properties describing the certificate of authenticity. The dGoods standard supports "multiple ledger tokens" in one contract. This differs from other token standards that support one token versus one contract, and dGoods' standard has the added benefit of reducing complexity and cost. The new standard supports fungible and non-fungible tokens in one contract. This differs from other standards that only support one token type.
Among the NFT standards on EOS, the Korean blockchain game company ITAM proposed the ITAM NFT standard. ITAM NFT is the Token standard for games in the ITAM Store. It is used to mark special digital assets obtained by users in games, such as equipment, characters, achievements, rankings, etc., to provide users with non-tamperable and real ownership. The digital assets of ITAM NFT can be lent or borrowed among game users, and the borrower can use them in the game within a specified period of time, and the leasing process is implemented entirely through smart contracts. ITAM Games has also joined the dGoods NFT standard, so ITAM Store has confirmed that it supports both dGoods NFT and ITAM NFT Token standards.
BCX-NHAS-1808
BCX-NHAS-1808 is Cocos-BCX's non-homogeneous digital asset standard. Compared with the aforementioned Ethereum non-homogeneous standard, it has the characteristics of separating assets from contracts and expandable and customizable data areas. It is compatible with other non-homogeneous asset standards, and can control asset access rights with extended domain data. Asset data is separated from contracts and exists independently in the chain network.
Now there are many types of public chains, and there are also many NFT standards. The above lists are some standards with a relatively high degree of consensus. In addition, there are some other standards: For example, AlphaWallet independently developed the ERC875 protocol and optimized the ERC721 standard to make it simpler and more direct. Another example is ERC998, a new and complex digital asset based on more complex non-homogeneous Tokens. Each Token can be regarded as a digital asset portfolio; and ERC1190, which separates "creation rights" or "ownership", its After trading digital assets, the creator of Token can obtain the income brought by "ownership" at one time, and because of the existence of "creation right", the creator will obtain a certain percentage of "ownership" income in each subsequent transaction .
Decentralized NFT exchange
Due to different standards, there are a large number of decentralized NFT exchanges that provide transactions for digital assets. The well-known ones include OpenSea, SpiderDex, and encrypted asset trading platforms such as rarebits and emoon. These encrypted asset trading platforms are verifying the advantages of assets on the chain.
When we list the game assets on the decentralized NFT exchange, before the transaction, we can still use them to upgrade monsters in the game, instead of being unusable like the custody system of traditional trading platforms. As long as the transaction has not occurred, the ownership of the asset is always in your hands. This is also one of the important reasons why everyone advocates asset on-chain.
Decentralized NFT exchanges such as OpenSea complement the most important part of digital assets in blockchain games - a free trading market with good user experience. This makes game assets truly become visual "assets" and become commodities with high liquidity. The chaining of game assets is actually a value-giving behavior, which makes virtual items more visible and closer to physical items, making game virtual assets truly realized in the form of "digital assets".
