Blockchain games "should" be fully onchain. But... is that the only truth?
The main advantage of blockchain is self-custody, the ownership of digital data. Therefore, blockchain games should be fully onchain to ensure that game assets are managed by users themselves (refer to our previous article for more details).
However, fully onchain games are very unlikely to become mainstream. In this article, we will highlight the issues with fully onchain games and predict the advent of a new Hybrid Games Era.
Poor UX
It is a well-known fact that fully onchain games often suffer from poor user experience. Many fully onchain game projects attempt to solve this by adopting their own chains. However, many of these chains are still in the testnet phase. Gas fees, chain security, and the labor of users having to bridge assets to the chain are still prevalent and may take considerable time to resolve. The question remains: when will we play a fully onchain game with a good UX on a public mainnet chain?
Contract Hacking Risks
Over the past few years, many DeFi protocols have suffered hacking incidents, highlighting the difficulty of developing secure smart contracts. Game contracts are likely to be even more complex than DeFi contracts. Although there is hope with updates in programming languages, libraries, and frameworks, fully onchain games are likely to contain significant vulnerabilities.
Hybrid Game Era
Is it necessary for all game logic to be onchain? The answer is "No".
In blockchain games, the important point is that your valuable assets are not stolen, ensuring self-custody. The game logic being completely onchain is not as important.
Here, we propose Hybrid Games.
Hybrid Games store only three points onchain: the initial state at the start of the game, the random number seed, and the final state. All intermediate processing is executed offchain.
This mechanism is inspired by Plasma, a concept recently gaining attention in the Ethereum core community. Plasma saves the initial and final state on Layer 1 while handling intermediate processing offchain (Layer 2). The advantage of this architecture is its infinite scalability, as intermediate processes are handled offchain regardless of their complexity. We have named this architecture PlasmaEngine.
In PlasmaEngine, there is a centralized manager called the Minister, equivalent to the Sequencer in Layer 2. Although the Minister could become a single point of vulnerability, the risk scope is minimized and does not threaten self-custody. Additionally, the transparency of the onchain random seed can make the system verifiable. By incorporating a challenge function similar to Optimistic Rollup, the centralization risk can be further mitigated.
Currently, we assume the PlasmaEngine mechanism is applicable to the auto-battle genre of games.
The Future of Blockchain Games
We foresee the advent of the Hybrid Game era, where the benefits of blockchain's self-custody are harnessed while avoiding UX and contract vulnerability issues. Leading this new era, we are set to launch an auto-battle type game utilizing PlasmaEngine.
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