What is a fully on-chain game?
Introduction
A fully on-chain game is a blockchain game where every piece of the game logic is handled via smart contract on decentralized servers.
Blockchain games are taking over the gaming world. But not all blockchain games are made equal. Some simply integrate a crypto-wallet but keep all the action on a private server. Others have on-chain elements like NFTs, but they still keep the main game logic on a private server. A truly on-chain game keeps all of the game logic and game resolution on the blockchain within a smart contract. The latter is what we are building with Pinupwarlords, a fully on-chain NFT-based trading card game.
Let’s understand what makes a real on-chain game as well as why that’s such a big deal.
A game is considered to be fully on-chain if it possesses the following characteristics:
- All in-game logic is handled on the blockchain through a smart contract.
- An on-chain game is permissionless, meaning anyone can join the game with external wallets.
- Game results are based on the blockchain RNG (random number generation if applicable) in order to make the game provably fair (think about how important it is if we are using a play-to-earn model).
- Game assets/NFTs are on IPFS servers.
The Advantages of a Fully On-Chain Game
On-Chain Games Are Cheat-Proof
Most competitive games, even those without monetary rewards for competitive success like Fortnite or PUBG, experience widespread cheating. Fully on-chain games are immune to cheating. With every in-game interaction/transaction verified by participants in the blockchain, fraudulent activity can be detected immediately. For a cheater to successfully get away with it, they would need to hack the whole blockchain, which is (practically) impossible.
Better Competitive Experience
On-chain games improve immersion by putting actual value at stake when you compete. Furthermore, their decentralized nature helps them facilitate eSports much more fairly than their off-chain counterparts. There’s no room in the game for cheating or manipulating the pairings.The transparency provided by blockchain is excellent for preventing corruption within organizers. As eSports have a lot of stakeholders these days, on-chain gaming helps bring them all under one roof.
Improved Game Economies
On-chain games offer a much closer economic model to real life than traditional games. This makes the in-game economies harder to disrupt. While this may not seem like a huge advantage at first, asset inflation and mispricing can be enough to single-handedly lead a game to its ruin.
This is much more difficult to do in on-chain games, as the community can instantly price the value of an NFT used in the game thanks to secondary marketplaces.
Why The Concept of On-Chain Gaming Is Powerful
Decentralization Leads To Transparency
Fully on-chain games have all their transactions on-chain and fully observable to anyone, and this transparency puts players and developers on the same page. Traditional gaming is plagued with issues such as:
- Rigged drop rates for certain items
- Higher chances of pulling a character if you spend money in “gacha” games
- Flawed shufflers in TCG-s
These issues are all solved by NFT-based games, simply by giving the community a transparent view into the game assets stock and a clear understanding from the beginning of how resources are distributed. Therefore, we know how scarce an object/card will be in the game and we can price it accordingly. In Pinupwarlords, every single faction is a limited edition and every NFT that composes the factions has a finite number. Common cards have a higher card count, and rarer cards have fewer cards in circulation.
Furthermore, on-chain games let users fork the NFTs and use them in any other game theoretically. Another interesting feature that we observe on Wax blockchain is cross-game collaborations with NFT-staking between games. We will most likely see teams in the near future using NFTs from one game and rebuilding new game variants around them. The possibilities are endless, and that’s what makes this new NFT gaming world particularly compelling.
Overall, this transparency incentivizes developers to pursue player-first approaches and to build a strong community of supporters.
Reusable Assets
Once you stop playing a traditional game, all of your in-game items essentially lose all their value. Legacy Gaming usually doesn’t let you sell them legally, and they’re very rarely useful in other games, even ones made by the same developers.
However, when playing on-chain NFT-based games, your items have value long after you stop playing. Worst-case scenario, you can simply sell your items for tokens or coins before jumping into a new game. This makes the time you spend playing potentially more valuable as grinding can be rewarded with tokens or NFTs that have real economic value.
Limitless Potential
Even though on-chain gaming is a new concept, it has already given rise to so many innovations and advancements. The most powerful thing about on-chain gaming is not its present but its future.On-chain games encourage fostering a positive relationship between the developer and the community, reward creativity, and bring players a higher sense of satisfaction when playing. We’ve barely scratched the surface of everything they can do.
Downsides of a Fully On-Chain Game
They’re Less Reactive
Since fully on-chain games are built on the blockchain and require every action to be verified by other participants within it, the gameplay has a bit of lag. Hyper-reactive games like FPS or MMORPGs cannot accomplish that at this technological stage and have a long way to go before being fully on-chain one day. They are more likely to be crypto-based or use NFTs but store all game logic on a private server. Turn-based and auto battler games can achieve being fully on-chain. Pinupwarlords will include an Autobattler at launch and a turn-based territorial conquest mode later on.
Microforks can miss transactions
In high speed blockchains like WAX (EOS, Solana, etc) with less than a second between blocks, validators get out of sync from time to time. Usually, this resolves itself quickly . In some rare cases, you sign a transaction that looks like it got into the chain because a game is connected to a certain validator API, but there is a microfork and some nodes don’t include it. When they finally get back in sync, they decide to use the version that didn’t include your transaction, so your transaction never happened! This usually looks like the game is stuck. However, there is no harm done because you will not necessarily lose against your opponent, but rather nothing happens and you have to sign your transaction again. Consequently, we will use the blockchain as a peacemaker in Pinupwarlords and apply a simple rule — if it’s not on the blockchain, it never happened.
On-chain games present an exciting new horizon for game developers and gamers alike. They put developers and gamers back on the same side and provide a far superior competitive experience. All of this comes while running entirely on the blockchain, with the server supplying nothing but the UI. The future of on-chain games is looking bright, with more and more players jumping into the world of on-chain gaming.
If this sounds appealing, you can join our discord today to witness our progress in creating this exciting trading card game and be ready when we launch soon!
