What is the Nature of Blockchain Games?

PS：本文是《区块链游戏的本质是什么？》的英文版，会发到NeoWorld英文社区，同时也顺便宣传一下币乎。

I am aware that many of you may be dismissive of the title: "There is nothing to discuss about this. The nature of the blockchain games is definitely the game itself. It couldn't be the blockchain." This answer is correct, but it is meaningless. Whether it is blockchain games, mobile games, web games or PC games, in essence, it is definitely a game. Everyone can understand this, but there is no point in just understanding the fact. If we would like to be smarter than others, it is necessary to contemplate two questions:

- What is the nature of a game?

- What is the essential difference between blockchain games and traditional games?

To figure out the second question, we must first understand the nature of the blockchain and the nature of the game, because only by mastering them can we know what chemical reaction is produced when the two are combined and what the difference between blockchain games and traditional games is.

The nature of blockchain has been discussed in the previous article. It will not be repeated here. It needs to be reiterated that the nature of the blockchain is the token, the new economy based on the token and the financial system (including the tokenized economy). If you feel that this conclusion is incomprehensible, you can refer to What is the Nature of Blockchain? In the next section, I will discuss the nature of the game without touching on the blockchain at first.

The Nature of the Game

I entered the web game industry since I graduated in 2007 and became one of the pioneers of web games in China. I have witnessed the whole business circle from zero to one and hitting the bottlenecks. I have been participated in many types of games: virtual community, children's games, real-time strategy games, FPS and card games. During the years, I have been contemplating one question: What is the nature of the game?

We are have instinctive answers to this question, just like the nature of the blockchain game. The nature of the game is of course fun.

However, this answer is meaningless.

In all types of games, the priority is definitely fun, but the question is: how can we achieve this and what is the nature of fun?

At this point, we finally begin to consider the truly valuable questions, and this is a question that every elite in the global game industry is thinking and studying every day. It is worth hundreds of millions dollars, because if you can really make a game with much popularity, it is no difficulties in earning several million dollars.

As for me, I have a cognitive progression of “the nature of fun” for more than 5 years. It elevates from personal feelings, to game types, to content and values, to planning and products, to producers, to industry and business. In every stage, my perspective is quite different. After reviewing the playability from various angles, my final conclusion may be difficult for many ordinary players to accept, but if you are ready to invest in blockchain games, I believe it is necessary to know the truth. The nature of fun is the understanding and satisfaction of humanity.

Understanding humanity is the internalization of game planning that requires deep and in-depth thinking.

Satisfying humanity is the extension of game planning that requires expansion and re-expansion of experiences.

To understand humanity, you need to have a deep understanding of yourself, people like you, and people who are different from you.

To satisfying humanity, you need to master the mainstream game types, planning tools, common skills, the availability, the cost, the developing period, the level in the industry, the market stage, and the consumption ability and so on.

After decades of development in the game industry, almost all humanity has been exhausted. Pornographies, gambling and battles are the strongest humanities, but pornographies and gambling are prohibited in most countries, so they are not the mainstream now. It is due to external influences.

However, the battle is not completely banned at present, so the PK games prevails and become the mainstream, and various PK modes are complicated: guns, strokes, and skills; solos, group fights; strategy-oriented, collaboration-oriented, money-oriented, and so on.

As it is one of the strongest humanities and can be exploited legally, it definitely becomes the most competitive area. It can be described as the whale in the Red Sea. No matter age, consumption, skills or time, there are corresponding PK games for you to play.

- Curiosity: Puzzle games

- Excitement: racing, horror games

- Social relations and growth: RPG games

- Caring: Education games

- Honor: music games

- Beauty: dressing games

- Creation: sandbox games

- Relaxation: casual games

- Gambling: chess (legal version, such as Tencent Gaming Hall) ...

I have greatly simplified the classification. In fact, all of the games no longer just satisfy a certain aspect of humanity, such as almost all masterpieces. They will certainly invest tens of millions of dollars on art to meet the basic needs. Loving beauty is everyone's nature.

However, a successful game must have a focus. Normally it should not exceed two core humanity designs, and the two should be related. For example, in the pursuit of stimulating racing games, you can also join PK, because adding a combative design will make it more exciting, but if you add social relations and growth, players will not pay, and players who like excitement will feel the tempo too slow and cumbersome. And if you add caring design, it’s even more hilarious. When you are racing, would you mind giving way to a grandma? Instead, you should join the violence and directly hit the grandmother so that the players who like the excitement can satisfy and enjoy the fun part.

In addition, the humanities I summarized earlier is the more common ones, and there are some relatively small ones. For example, parents have the need to educate their children. Correspondingly, there are educational games, which generally combine certain exploration and growth design, which are related human needs.

Although there are billions of players around the world, the game industry has evolved over the past few decades. Now, whether it is mainstream humanity or all kinds of wonderful human needs, there are a large number of corresponding games, and there are leaders in its categories. If you are not the targeted players, u may not imagine how powerful they are.

For example, the "Nikki series" dress-up game, with hundreds of millions of users, is once be rated as the best games in Tencent mobile game platform.

For example, "Collapse Gakuen Series" that Bilibili is highly marketing made nearly 200 million of net profit in 2015.

For example, the main sandbox game "My World" has survived for almost a decade with tens of millions of people active per month.

I believe that many readers are not in the game industry, even if they have played many games, they may not know the above three games, but these games are indeed the most popular masterpieces in their respective fields. But the question is, why is the most fun in the eyes of others that we have never played? This is what I said before. The game is the satisfaction of humanities. These games obviously can't satisfy us because we don't have such strong demand for beauty in the second or for creation. All we pursue is PK, so any game that does not involve the PK is no funny at all in our eyes. We can't imagine a middle-aged greasy uncle who is interested in the Nikki series and is willing to pay for clothes. He just thinks the game is extremely boring.

Before you understand the nature of fun, maybe you are talking about the system, gameplay, game type, even PK, etc. After you understand the nature, you should talk about humanity, wand what kind of humanity a game satisfies. After positioning humanity, you can pursue the players. Then you can study the characteristics of them: gender, age, preferences, time, consumption ability, etc. With these attributes, you can continue to study what type of game, what gameplay, and what system to satisfy them. .

Finally, we can use the values and content to combine these macro design and attract players step by step.

Some readers may be confused: since the nature of fun is humanity, traditional games have satisfied all kinds of humanities, and there are so many leading games in various fields, is there any chance for blockchain games? Can the blockchain games satisfy new human needs? Let's move on to the next section.

The Core Difference Between Traditional Games and Blockchain Games

Before elaborating in this section, I assume that you have a preliminary understanding of the blockchain. If you are unfamiliar, you can see the blockchain series at the bottom of my article.

The nature of the blockchain is the token, and the core building block of playability is humanity. From this perspective, we can revisit the corresponding relationship of the blockchain in the table between humanity and game type.

- Curiosity: Puzzle games: Blockchain does not make puzzles more interesting

- Excitement: racing, horror games: Blockchain does not make racing and horror games more exciting

- Social relations and growth: RPG games: Autonomous community in blockchain can nourish better social relationships, but basically ineffective for growth.

- Caring: Education games: Blockchain can not make people become more caring, but often induces resentment

- Honor: music games: Blockchain is not intended for music games, but it can satisfy the sense of achievement by showing off because users in this space especially love to show off, and the rich. And they are particularly stared at and envied by others.

- Beauty: dressing games: Blockchain doesn't make the game more beautiful.

- Creation: sandbox games: Blockchain does not make creation richer and more fun.

- Relaxation: casual games: Blockchain is not casual at all.

- Gambling: chess: Blockchain is very suitable.

After filtering, we can see that the blockchain can bring about the essential improvement of game playability in only two of them: one is showing off, but we can't depend on a game where showing off is the core gameplay, and this game will become a scene of buying and selling fanatics. There is also a chess board. At the surface, it is to take advantage of the credibility of the blockchain, but in fact, not many people care about this, even in the absolutely centralized Tencent platform and some credit-friendly local chess platforms. Many people don’t play because they don’t believe in the platform. The real question is not about trust, but the payment. Because the chess games in the legal framework are all banned from the export of legal coins, and in a chess game with gambling, the irritating feeling is greatly reduced, that is, the playability is greatly reduced. The blockchain token can partially solve the problem of capital in and out, and to some extent restore the stimulation of the gambling games, which still uses the tokens.

There is also a gameplay, which is the "collection" that blockchain games are particularly popular with. The chain game especially likes to fiddle with this concept, because the chain can confirm the assets, and it is decentralized. The player's own assets seem reasonable, but in fact they do not understand humanities and game production.

Is collection one of humanities? of course! But the value of the collection comes from scarcity and value.

Scarcity is easy to understand. If one thing is available to everyone, there must be no collection value.

The process of giving value is really difficult. When things that have no value, and there will no collection value as well. For example: If you shit, this is the only one in the world, it is scarce enough, and it can be confirmed by DNA testing, but is it worth collecting?

It’s obviously worthless to see that you can quickly rush to the toilet every time you shit, but if we prove that this can make people live forever, this will become a golden egg, and a group of people will rush to eat, this time it is valuable, and your DNA confirmation also makes sense! But later I found out that all shit can make people live forever, and the one that you have will have no value right away.

I don't know if anyone realizes a problem: Since the nature of playability is humanity and the collection is one of them, why is it that traditional games don't have a special type of game that is specially on fire? Because the process of giving value is difficult, there exists no magic that can make a thing that has the function of immortality. To give value often requires investing huge funds to create a whole set of gameplays to give value to the items of the collectible level, such as the legend. But the collections must be scarce. If everyone has one, it has no value at all. In the end, there are only a few items that can be built with huge sums of money. Commercially, it is a very uneconomical way to play, so this model is definitely not the first choice for commercial games.

It seems that the situation is very pessimistic. The blockchain does not seem to help the game much. I have found that many people who are not optimistic about blockchain games are also unable to find a way out in the logic above. Because if you want to go further, you must understand both the nature of the blockchain and the game industry. This is all hard work, and it takes a deep participation in the industry to be truly professional.

Only when we understand that the nature of the blockchain is the token, the new economic and financial system based on the token, and the nature of fun is the design of humanity, can we combine the two to find the core gameplay. Otherwise, it will be disturbed by a bunch of secondary elements like decentralization, certainty, uniqueness, and various gameplays and systems.

Now let us return to the nature of fun: "humanity". The former three strongest humanities are pornography, gambling and battles. The game of porn and battles has little to do with the blockchain. The gambling has some relationship, mainly because the circulation of the legal currency is restricted, so the cryptocurrency is particularly convenient to break through various restrictions.

In fact, there is still one of the strongest humanities has been restricted, not only by the law, but also by the game company, that is: moneymaking plays. There are some of the most powerful humanities behind the scene, such as profit-seeking, greed, and wealth-raising.

Since making money is one of the strongest humanities, why doesn't traditional games produce the main game?

First, our nation does not allow it. All the game gold coins can only be entered in legal currency, and the legal currency is absolutely not allowed. Once circulated, the gold coin will immediately have financial attributes, and the external financial system will collapse through the legal currency. The game will be closed from the economic system and instantly become an open economic system. This is a great uncertainty for the country and must be prohibited. Of course, players can still trade gold coins through third-parties such as 5173 to realize the exchange of game assets to fiat currency. However never underestimate the step. The difficulty is not inferior to setting up VPN and installing cryptocurrency wallets. More than 90% of the players are blocked.

One of the strongest humanities is suppressed by the limitations of the state and traditional game companies, and the blockchain seems to solve such problems. The core spirit of the blockchain is the pursuit of freedom, the realization of the redistribution of wealth and the revolution of production relations. How do you pursue these? Through decentralized cryptocurrency! And what is the means of making money in the strongest humanity? It must be a transaction and what is the medium of trading? It must also be money. Does the currency work? No, it is limited. Well, you can only use cryptocurrency. Is there a combination point? Yes, it is the token, and the general economic system constructed with tokens.

There is another problem. Although the game company can use the cryptocurrency to break through the legal currency restrictions and satisfy the needs. Does not the company's own profit dilute? Yes, so it is obviously not reasonable to expect that the monopolized game companies that rely on traditional vested interests will produce this type of game. Can Tencent produce a blockchain game? Yes, it will make one in a minute, but can Tencent allocate 90% of the game's revenue to players and partners? No way. You are grateful to have 30%, let alone 90%. If it dares to split the 90%, the entire company's existing structure will soon be unable to support, shareholders will also rebel.

Which companies have this motivation? Of course, those small and medium-sized companies that "aspire to be the great companies in the future". These companies have R&D and innovation strengths, but because of the benefits of solidifying the opportunities, there is a strong willingness to re-enact the rules, and share the benefits to attract more people to join this new rule, and finally the establish a new profit model, and challenge vested interests on the new track. The profit margin of this business model may not be as high as the traditional monopoly model, but it will be healthier, lasting and fair. Isn't this the direction of social progress that everyone hopes?

Therefore, it can be seen that the essential difference between blockchain games and traditional games is that it makes some inconvenient design humanity more convenient through the characteristics of blockchain, especially the "making money". So, the final question is, what should be done specifically?

How to Make Blockchain Games?

First, make sure that our main humanity is: money-making.

Second, the most important gameplay related to money-making , that is, the "core gameplay" often mentioned in the game industry, should be the transaction, economic system and benefit distribution system.

Third, combined with the blockchain to strengthen "global 24-hour trading, global open economic system, credible interest distribution", highlight the advantages compared to traditional games.

Fourth, according to the core gameplay, find the core group. I believe that the most people who are interested in making money are: investors, including long-term and short-term investors; partners who aspire to gain wealth; players who love to make small money.

Fifth, select the type of game and game mode according to the core group. At this point, I have always been the most optimistic about the sandbox game, especially the type of UGC game platform like Roblox, because this type of game can not only maximize the unity of the profit-seeking developers, but also can accommodate unlimited economic capacity. These are all advantages of the blockchain.

Last year, Roblox earned more than three billion dollars, 30% of which is allocated to UGC developers, but I still think the platform has taken too much, and developers have to pay more than a few dollars in development costs each month.

As a blockchain sandbox game, you should use the blockchain as a convenient tool to build a set of credible profit distribution mechanisms based on cryptocurrency, then unite investors to provide financial support, unite UGC developers and Partners provide content and service support, and unite gamers who want to make small money to provide in-game interaction, popularity and testing services. Finally, unite everyone to make the game bigger and stronger, to achieve the playability level of traditional sandbox games, and then to make money together. In the end, when sharing profits, it is certainly realized through the blockchain tool. With blockchain and tokens, the initiative brought by a paper contract is much larger, and the means are more abundant and flexible. It is definitely one of the values of the blockchain.

In fact, you can see that this model not only includes customers but also includes developers and partners. The blockchain is sometimes more important to the enterprises reform. Due to the length, this article will not expand.

As for the above ones, especially gameplayers who want to make small money, it is very important that the game succeeds on the one hand. On the other hand, they need a flexible and powerful trading system, both in-game and outside the game. The more things you can trade, the better. This will maximize the profit-making effect. Emphasizing that trading will be one of the biggest differences between blockchain games and traditional games. Players will experience unprecedented game trading pleasure, especially making money through trading.

Sixth, with the core gameplay and the choice of game type, then add the appropriate system and diversity gameplay, and finally fill and glue the game with values and content. Here is the familiar part of everyone, whatever PK, social relations, collection, growth, as long as it is conducive to trading, you can join properly, but I feel that the most important secondary gameplay is "gambling" and "game" because they are naturally compatible with "making money."

Seventh, with the core gameplay of making money, use the blockchain to achieve a good job of profit distribution, unite all forces that can be united, achieve final success, share the fruits of victory, realize the redistribution of interests in the game industry, and reshape the production relations of the game industry. .

Conclusion

The nature of the blockchain is the token, a new economic and financial system based on the token, and a revolution in production relations that is possible because it is based on the new economy and financial system.

The nature of the game is fun, and the nature of fun is the understanding and satisfaction of humanity.

Blockchain games should use cryptocurrency to break through the traditional centralization of interests, liberate the humanity of “money making”, build a new game economy and financial system with the core of making money inside and outside the game, and realize the redistribution of interests and the reform of production relations from B to C. As long as you can make money, all the people involved will have fun. They will realize that making money itself is fun. It may take a long time. All new markets need to educate users. Educating users requires cost and time, but it is all done, the first-mover advantage is gone.

From the consumer side, the blockchain does not have much to do with the game, but after consumption, how is the money divided? It is time for the blockchain to function. Players and enterprises can participate in the sharing process and provide the appropriate interactions, content, and services. "Make money for fun" and "have fun in consumption" can be mutually causal and transform each other! For example: a popular blockchain game in the early stage built a set of money-related economic system and gameplay, including both the B and C, because these designs have been recognized by everyone, so even the game is now without reliable consumption design, there are still many people who are willing to continue to strive in and out of the game. This is actually the humanity that has been captured by “making money”, but the players themselves are not quite aware of it. With this premise, the possibility of making consumer-side playability is greatly enhanced. This is the so-called "money-making fun" that can lead to "have fun in consumption." And if you really achieve the consumer-side playability in the future, you can even compete with Roblox and earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year, then these profits can be shared with all players who want to make money and enterprises, then they will feel more fun, this is the so-called "have fun in consumption" can feedback "making money to play". The two kinds of playability are aimed at different groups of people, but the two groups will continue to transform and influence each other because making money is one of the strongest humanities. Who does not want to make money? After creating value, as long as the design just hits them, they also have a high probability of consumption. The consumption point of the sandbox game can be very diverse, and there is always demands that can hit someone.

Can I achieve the above model without using a blockchain? It's hard because without the blockchain and blockchain methodology, the playability of making money is too difficult to design! The first step is nowhere to go. Why do you use the playability of making money to make the consumer side playable? Without the help of the blockchain, the game I just mentioned that has almost no consumer-side design will not be involved at all. It first uses the game to make the ultimate game of earning money, and uses the tokenized economy to distribute the benefits, so that everyone will go with them and work together for the common future!

Blockchain is a production relationship tool, not a productivity tool.

Blockchain games are a transformation of production relationships similar to those from paid games to free games, not hardware and productivity evolution from web games to mobile games.

The humanity that blockchain games can really catch is: Making money.

The core gameplay of blockchain games should be: Trading.

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Author: Hanson, Founder of TopPlayer

TopPlayer (TOP)：The World's First Professional Blockchain Gaming Organization, http://topplayer.org

Translator: Rex Liu, Blockchain and NeoWorld Enthusiast

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编译者/作者：推比特火山哥

玩币族申明：玩币族作为开放的资讯翻译/分享平台，所提供的所有资讯仅代表作者个人观点，与玩币族平台立场无关，且不构成任何投资理财建议。文章版权归原作者所有。