What’s missing for mass adoption

What is missing?

While there’s a lot of agreement among game industry experts and observers that blockchain will revolutionize gaming, there are still open questions regarding how this anticipated future will become reality. Existing incumbents in and around the gaming space, including large publishers as well as “infrastructure providers” like the mobile giants of Apple and Google, have little to no interest in allowing for open ecosystems that put their existing, successful economies at risk. This innovator’s dilemma is garnished with uncertainty regarding the scalability and sustainability of currently existing technologies, making it difficult for current gaming companies who do not come from the blockchain world to actually adopt NFTs and blockchain technology.

While early companies in the blockchain gaming space have aimed to put as many parts of their games onto the blockchain, including larger parts of the game logic, the overall sentiment within the industry has shifted towards more lightweight approaches in which merely some or all of the in-game assets are operating with or on the blockchain in a more seamless way, while the entire game logic remains on the servers of the game studio. These in-game assets, specifically items and characters which can be represented as Non-Fungible Tokens will play a pivotal role in the mass-market adoption of blockchain as an instrument to unify the interests of gamers and game companies alike.

NFTs have proven to allow for a much stronger social signal than fungible tokens (just like certain rare items or skins in a particular game are a stronger social signal than any number of in-game currency, or an expensive car is a stronger social signal than a print of someone’s bank account balance).

In order to break up the existing silos, it is necessary to get the flywheel accelerated when it comes to “more users -> more demand for games -> more games -> more users”, and this can best be addressed by offering ways of adopting the technology without a lot of risk.

Gamers

Gamers want a simple user experience. After all, they’re playing for entertainment purposes and usually don’t want to jump through a bunch of annoying hoops in order to play a game.

Any interface that lets gamers interact with the blockchain, therefore, needs to be self-explanatory and offer just the right amount of functionality, packaged within a simple user experience (UX) in order to keep entry barriers really low.

More specifically, gamers need a simple place in which they can store, manage and trade their digital in-game assets, with jargon they’re used to and user interfaces (UIs) that are easily understandable.

It also means the most important features need to be accessible very quickly and prominently through at most three clicks.

After all, it’s also important to give gamers the possibility to socialize over their in-game assets, be it to compare themselves against their peers or by gifting items to a friend for their birthday.

The place gamers are looking for is Wombat - The Web 3 Gaming Platform

Game Makers

For game makers to adopt blockchain elements to their existing and future games, they need to be assured their community won't experience a sub-optimal experience due to blockchain integrations, so it should always be optional. In addition, game makers can't be expected and shouldn't be required to provide the entire infrastructure for their users' blockchain experience themselves. Key components for integrating blockchains into games include:

• A wallet to securely and conveniently store and manage private keys

• Marketplace and trading infrastructure and UIs for NFTs

• Easy ways to discover associated game assets

• Low barriers to transition between technologies and 3rd party suppliers

In the following chapter, we present how the Wombat Web 3 Gaming Platform addresses these issues. We'll also show how we've been successfully addressing these issues so far, with examples from working with numerous gaming publishers.