We are living in technologically exciting times. Several revolutionary technologies have emerged one after the other and taken the world by storm. Unlike previous technological innovations, these technologies are not just a tool to enhance the existing process but can alter the whole process altogether bringing in new possibilities and opportunities.
AI, VR, AR, Blockchain, NFTs, and Crypto, are among the top technologies making the impossible possible. After all, who would have ever thought that one-day human beings would crave digital assets? They will own and trade in it just like a real-world commodity. On top of it, some of these digital assets will have more value than their real-world counterparts. Crazy times for sure.
It is further interesting to know that gaming has been among the early adopters of these technologies and played a huge role in popularizing them. As a result, new forms of gaming are emerging such as AR games, VR games, and Metaverse games, and, the most prominent among them, Web3 Gaming.
In this blog, we will learn what Web3 gaming is, what makes it so special, how it works, and how gamers and businesses can capture the opportunity that they are handing out.
What is Web3 Gaming?
As the name suggests, Web3 gaming consists of games that utilize Web3 and its associated technologies such as blockchain, NFT, and cryptocurrencies. These technologies give them various unique features that were lacking in their traditional counterpart. This includes
- Democratization: Gamers have supreme decision-making authority over the game and its direction in the future.
- Ownership: Gamers have full ownership of their in-game digital assets. They can trade in these assets for real-world value.
- Economic Incentive: Games receive economic incentives for their involvement in the game.
- Trusslessness: Games directly deal with gamers using smart contracts eliminating intermediaries.
Such qualities result in a much more enriching gaming experience and create strong reasons for businesses to invest in them. That is why the Web3 gaming community is rapidly expanding and so are the opportunities for businesses. We will discuss these aspects more in the later sections.
For now, let’s start cracking the code web3 gaming and make it more simple and clear to understand. Starting with Web3, as it is what differentiates Web3 gaming from other gaming formats.
What is Web3?
To start with, Web3 is the latest evolutionary version of the World Wide Web that is changing the way the web is accessed, utilized, operated, and maintained. It has innovative features that successfully overcome the shortcomings of its predecessors, namely Web2 and Web1.
While the earlier versions had worrying defects such as the lack of users’ control on the internet, user privacy intrusions, absence of ownership of digital assets, lack of transparency, security, and many others. Users were demanding an alternative system especially when the cases of privacy intrusion by the tech giants came to the fore.
They are rapidly realizing how the control of the internet, which is almost equitable to a public resource, is in the hands of a few centralized organizations. They are commanding all aspects of web operations and churning out huge profits in the process.
First, they are controlling who can access what information or content over the internet gaining the capability to influence public perception of virtually anything.
Second, they take a significant share of the revenue from user-generated content. All of this is because they are the gatekeepers having full control over the entry points.
Third, they are also selling users’ private data to third parties leading to great privacy infringement and a huge uproar when it came to light.
Addressing all these user concerns, Web3 has arrived packed with game-changing features that are the need of the hour.
The first and foremost is decentralization. Web3 system operates on a distributed network of nodes instead of relying on a single organization with specified physical storage locations and operations.
Web3 utilizes blockchain technology, peer-to-peer networks, open-source protocols, and other methods to give consumers the power to govern sections of the internet democratically.
Another important quality of Web3 is that it is “permissionless”. This means that no permission from a controlling authority is required to access and use the web. Comparing it with earlier web versions that faced censorship from various different sections such as the government, internet service providers, search engines, etc.
Web3 also creates a “trustless” system that doesn’t need any kind of human or institutional intervention. Therefore, users don’t have to trust any intermediary to help them carry out any specific task.
Take the example of banks for that matter. Web3 users do not need banks to exchange money between them. They can directly send money to another user who can hold it themselves without needing a bank to store it.
In short, Web3.0 takes away centralized control of a few organizations over the internet and makes it democratic. Also, users do not need the permission as well as intermediation of the central authorities to use the Web and access its content. Lastly, they have full control over their data and can choose to use it in any way they want.
It is no surprise that with each passing day, Web3 is finding more takers in terms of users and in the business space.
It brings safety, security, and transparency to the system. But more importantly, it hands out the control to users and they have a complete say on how they want to use the internet and their data over it.
The topic of Web3 is quite vast and needs a separate blog of its own. We have already covered it in detail here.
Coming back to Web3 gaming. Utilizing Web3 for its operation, Web3 gaming gains all these qualities by default. They are turning the gaming world upside down. It outshines in terms of how it treats players and alters the power balance in their favor. The arguments favoring Web3 games become more convincing when we contrast them with traditional gaming as we will see in the next section.
Web3 Gaming Vs Traditional Gaming
The most prominent difference is how the game data is stored and managed in these two setups. The traditional gaming setups have a concentrated approach wherein the game is thoroughly managed by a single organization having servers at specific locations for storage and management.
On the other hand, in Web3 gaming, the operations are distributed in nature, the game data is stored across different nodes on the network using blockchain wherein records are stored in a distributed manner.
Another important difference is the controlling command of traditional games are in the hand of game owners. They can alter the game or any of its features at any time without gamers having any say despite them being the ones getting the most affected.
Many times, gamers complain of losing thousands of hours of hard work in just a single game update. They end up losing their game assets and level advancements or, what is said in gaming jargon, their assets get “nerfed”.
One such incident actually led to the invention of Ethereum, when the assets of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin got nerfed due to a game update. It was the moment of truth when he decided to create a decentralized setup and the rest is history. He mentions this incident in his biography “about.me”.
On the other hand web3 game hands over control to players by giving them voting right. The weightage of their votes corresponds to the NFT and digital assets they hold. Using this right, gamers’ commands can decide the direction of the game and future updates.
The next point of comparison is the ownership of game assets. While players proceed through a game they progressively achieve milestones and get various digital games assets such as skin, weapons, armor, abilities, etc. In traditional gaming, players don’t have ownership of these assets which lies in the hands of game developers.
This is not the case in Web3 gaming. Once the player gets an asset, they have full ownership of it and can freely trade in these assets. The ownership data is stored immutably stored in the blockchain and can be used to trade in these assets in the digital asset marketplace. Thereby bringing real-world value to the players and genuinely rewarding their hard work
The fourth difference is that of the payment model, traditional gaming majorly follows either of the three models –
- One-time purchase
- Subscription Model
- In-game purchases
Players need to shell out fiat money to pay for these games.
On the other hand, Web3 gaming runs on cryptocurrency and digital assets. Noticeably, the exchange of these assets is automatically managed by smart contracts, and no intermediaries are involved. Also, one of the most common gaming models Web3 games use is X-to-earn model to reward players. Such as
- Play-to-earn
- Move-to-earn
- Sleep-to-earn etc.
We will discuss these in the later sections.
| Traditional Gaming | Web3 Gaming | |
| Setup | Concentrated | Distributed |
| Control | Centralized | Decentralized |
| Ownership of game assets | Game owners or developers | Players |
| Payment Model | Fiat money with banks as intermediaries. | Cryptocurrency and NFT for all transactions using smart contracts with no intermediaries. |
Now that we know what is Web3 gaming and why it is better than traditional gaming, let’s now understand what makes them so effective.
How does Web3 Gaming works?
The most exciting feature of Web3 games is that it rewards the players for their involvement. The player gets various game assets that they either earn, discover, or win while playing the game. Or, they would have bought it from the marketplace.
Here, smart contracts play a great role to ensure that the transfer of assets is smooth with no intermediation involved. As soon as the player meets the required condition, they receive digital assets. This asset can be anything, an NFT, in-game assets, or cryptocurrencies.
Also, the value of rewards keeps increasing as players keep moving through the game onto different levels.
Once they get a reward they have full ownership of it in the game as well as in the real world. Their ownership record is securely stored using blockchain technology, which is distributed ledger system i.e. it records the ownership of the digital asset and stores it in a distributed fashion.
Hence, each node on the network maintains a copy of the record, and any anomaly in a single record will be rendered invalid by the system until 51% of the nodes agree on the change. This creates an immutable database as perpetrators have to control 51% of the node to bring any preferred change.
Once stored on the blockchain, the owner of the digital asset can trade in them in the digital asset marketplace achieving real-world financial gains. Again, smart contracts are used to facilitate trade between the two parties.
On the other hand, the game developers get a fee from each transaction of the digital assets as a form of monetization. This makes Web3 gaming a highly lucrative investment avenue as it creates a win-win scenario for both parties.
In the next segment, we will discuss different earning models that blockchain games can utilize to mix entertainment with earning and attract an increasing number of users.
Web3 Gaming Models
At the end of the day, Web3 games are nothing but games and they should be planned in a way that brings immense joy and entertainment to the gamers. Only then can be termed as successful and create a loyal gaming community that any game developers dream of.
To achieve this goal, Web3 games have gone one step ahead and added a component of earning for the player. These games utilize the X-to-earn model wherein players can do different acts to earn assets of real-world value. Let’s see the prominent earning methods under this model.
Play-to-Earn
This is the most popular Web3 gaming category. Under this method, players are rewarded for playing the game per se i.e. as soon as a gamer achieves a predefined milestone, they are rewarded with a gaming asset with an inbuilt gaming smart contract watching over the process.
These milestones can be anything like the time spent playing the game, a particular level reached, an in-game task completed, a new skill gained, etc. Further, the rewards can also be tied to players’ in-game performance. The better they play, the bigger their reward is.
These rewards are in the form of digital assets, game NFTs, cryptocurrencies, etc. Players can sell these assets in the marketplace or crypto exchanges to earn real-world money.
Move-to-Earn
These games are rapidly catching popularity as they promote a healthier lifestyle in their participants while offering financial opportunities. Different move-to-earn game rewards different activities that come under fitness such as walking, running, swimming, etc. Their activities fetch them rewards in terms of native utility tokens.
These gaming apps use smartphones or fit bands to track users’ performance. It then assesses the data and sees if it qualifies for the reward. The rewarded tokens can either be used to buy things within the app or be traded on the internal marketplace or external exchange for cryptocurrencies.
Sleep-to-Earn
These Web3 games track users sleeping patterns and reward them with NFTs. The reward gets higher if you can take more rest. All that users need to do is download the app and it will use the user’s smartphone to track their sleeping pattern, body movement, and quality of sleep.
Users do not need to wear pesky track bands all night to track their resting patterns. The smartphone will track it as it is close to them.
Wear-to-Earn
A Wear 2 Earn model incentivizes players when they advertise and represent the brand online and in the metaverse. The participants get rewarded in digital currency or physically redeemable items.
The concept is fairly new and more to be seen in the coming times.
So, now what we can do for you?
Queppelin is an award-winning technology organization that specializes in the latest technologies including Web3 gaming. We offer different development services that help you enter the lucrative gaming market and make the most out of this decade-rare opportunity.
Smart contracts
We develop smart contracts to regulate the terms and conditions of your Web3 gaming and DAOs. The immutability of smart contracts keeps your Web3 game secure and well functioning while adapting to the changes brought by DAOs.
Decentralized gaming platform and Gaming dApp
We offer full-cycle open-source blockchain gaming platform development including the front-end and the backend service.
We also create gaming dapps and assist you in designing, innovating, developing, and launching gaming NFT marketplaces.
Gaming NFT marketplaces
We also offer NFT marketplace development to help you earn through facilitating trade in NFTs. experts assist you in designing, innovating, and launching gaming NFT marketplaces.
Conclusion
By offering exactly what users were looking for, Web3 games have gained a stronghold in the market. It has solved many major problems that users were suffering such as privacy intrusion and lack of control over game development.
With Web3 gaming, they can safely store their data on the robust blockchain platform and have a say in the evolution of the game they passionately play. So that no single update could render the game asset nerfed and devoid them of all their hard-earned rewards in the future.