Analyzing the Market Potential of Fully On-Chain Games

Top of Mind

On-chain Games.

There are varying degrees to which blockchain-based games actually use on-chain features. At one end of the spectrum, only nominal game assets are stored on-chain while gameplay is entirely off-chain so that traditional, feature-rich game engines such as Unreal and Unity can be utilized. At the other end of the spectrum, the entirety of game assets and game state is stored on-chain. These games are deemed Fully On-Chain (FOC) games and are defined by the following properties:

• On-Chain Game Logic – FOC games represent all game logic as smart contracts on-chain. If users are playing an FOC rock paper scissors, the idea that “rock beats scissors” must be reflected in on-chain code. As the games get more complex, the code reflecting the game logic increases in complexity, too — all while staying on-chain.
• Fully Shared State – Traditionally, a game developer would maintain the state of affairs within a game. For example, EA Sports maintains the score of my FIFA game, the positions of all the players, their stamina, etc. all on their own servers. In an FOC game, all of that data is posted on-chain and indexed by all players.

Since FOC games are open-sourced, anyone can permissionlessly customize them. Curio, an on-chain gaming studio, has deemed this customization as user generated logic (UGL). UGL is a new game design paradigm that takes the user generated content (UGC) trend that has propelled games such as Roblox to multi-billion dollar annual revenues to a new level.