Why did Nexon choose blockchain technology?
When you hear the expression ‘blockchain game’, P2E(Play to Earn) may be the first keyword that comes to mind. In fact, many games in the early stages of the blockchain gaming industry had more emphasis on selling coins or items to earn money, and the public perception has been focused on profitability rather than the technology itself. As each person has a different perspective on the technology or concept of blockchain, no one can assert that the direction of early blockchain games was wrong. Yet, it is also true that stigma has grown among the public due to a series of unexpected issues.
As Nexon stated during NDC keynote, we do empathize with the sentiment that blockchain technology is not perfect. However, we in the game industry have seen the early days of the online, mobile, and smartphone game market and the leaps and bounds it has made since then; we know how complacent it is to rule out new technologies based on early stage’s instability and negativity.
Between the two pillars, ‘Technology’ and ‘IP’, that make up the MapleStory Universe, we will focus on the ‘Technology’ in this article to explain what we’ve discovered about blockchain and what we hope to do with it.
Pushing the Envelope: Blockchain is the Key
Nexon has always been interested in expanding virtual worlds. While video games used to be limited to localized virtual worlds, server-based online games have expanded to a vast world with tens of thousands of players. Mobile gaming has liberated PC-based online gaming from being locked in a single location, making it easy to play anytime, anywhere. A series of expansions have greatly increased the number and size of virtual worlds, but the games were still not able to be free from the last barrier, the ‘server’.
Creating a single concept of a world and keeping its unity is definitely meaningful, but in-game assets such as items, characters, game currencies, etc. could only be used within a single game. The power to control the game is given solely to a developer — owner of a server — making it difficult to allow other contributors to join in. The utility of the in-game assets gets lost the moment the game disappears. While Nexon has leveraged the strengths of a server, we were still thoroughly contemplating ways to expand our virtual world to the next level over the limits we were facing.
We found out that Blockchain technology can be the answer to our problems. Until now, the stated issues above were technically unavoidable. But In the open world of blockchain, there were new alternative options.
While there are many benefits of blockchain technology, Nexon has focused on three in particular:
(1) Transparency, with all information recorded on-chain for anyone to see.
(2) An open ecosystem, where anyone can contribute to the project and earn rewards for their contributions.
(3) Extended utility, through the free movement of in-game assets.
(1) Increased immersion in virtual worlds through transparency
In current games, the balance and economy of the game can change depending on the intentions of the developer, the server owner. This is all predicated on the user’s trust in the developer. However, this immense power comes with a side effect of decreased immersion: people naturally become less immersed in the virtual world because they become more aware of an entity that can change the world within the game rather than the game itself.
Blockchain technology fundamentally decentralizes power and relies on consensus to make decisions. Every step of the process is recorded on-chain, which means that there are rules that cannot be easily changed by the developer, that require multiple difficult consensuses to change, and that are fully visible to the user. The transparent governance of the blockchain and the decentralization of power that it provides makes developers’ design and decision-making processes fully visible and trustworthy. In this way, users can immerse themselves more easily in the virtual world as they can now look directly into the game rather than the developer behind it.
(2) Expanding the concept of “we/us/our” by fair contribution reward
While the developer’s effort is necessary for the success of a game, it is not the sole determinant. It takes a lot of hard work from contributors beyond the developer to create this comprehensive entertainment content. Until now, it was very difficult to find all these contributors, determine their contributions, and reward them when the developer had full control over the game. Naturally, some contributed only out of passion and love, without expecting rewards. Some who could have been contributors left; unfortunate for us developers, as we lost someone who could have been a part of our success.
In the world of blockchain, Nexon is not an administrator with full control of the server, but a developer in an open ecosystem. As a developer, being part of an ecosystem means recognizing other contributors, which allows for more proactive contributions and ensures that contributors are fairly rewarded for their work. Blockchain will allow us to achieve “our success” in a way that is not limited in scope but expanded to find its true meaning.
(3) Expanding utility through the free movement of in-game assets
It is difficult to move in-game assets among different games as they are operated independently. For example, an item of Web2 MapleStory has more than 70 traits. The number of traits for items in Sudden Attack or Dungeon & Fighter is different. When item traits differ even between the games inside the Nexon ecosystem, you can imagine that other companies’ games should have a much different system. This difference in the system between servers limits in-game assets exist only within the game.
Since the blockchain is a huge ecosystem with standard protocols such as ERC721 and ERC1155 from the beginning, it is easy to move NFTs within the ecosystem. This means that not only in-game assets can be transferred between different games, but NFTs in various dApps in the ecosystem can freely interact with each other too. This prevents the monopolization of any one platform or administrator, creating one giant ecosystem with a well-integrated and commonly understood environment, with no boundaries between them.
So why can’t we have an agreement to introduce a standard protocol to existing systems?
For example, if a group of entities creates a protocol, you still need an intermediary server to move in-game assets between servers, and an operating entity to manage it. This is a very complicated step that requires a third-party administrative entity to ensure the fairness of the operating entity. If you try to figure out how to achieve this in the most efficient way, you’ll end up with a structure similar to a blockchain, but probably less efficient.
Through these benefits, the blockchain ecosystem recognizes the ownership and identifies the uniqueness of in-game assets. However, a question arises. The technology can guarantee the storage, ownership, and free movement of in-game assets. But when you bring up the topic of utility, the story changes. Can it still be more than a digital sculpture the moment it loses its utility?
If a game NFT is tied to a specific game, it’s hard to see how it can preserve the utility if that game disappears — it may just become a kind of permanent token that symbolizes that the user played that game once upon a time. Starting from the question, Nexon decided that it is important to provide “trust that it will continue to provide utility” and “scalability that won’t disappear easily,” and we did a lot of thinking around it.
In the early days of mobile gaming, there were many attempts to bring successful online PC games to mobile, but many failed. Just as the most successful games understood the nature of mobile and adapted to new gamers in the mobile era, the same goes for blockchain games.
The advantage of blockchain technology lies in its openness and scalability, and only services that utilize these features well can provide proper utility and succeed as blockchain games. It is highly exclusive to confine the use of NFTs to just one game within the vast blockchain ecosystem. With the goal of leveraging the advantages of blockchain technology, Nexon sought to integrate multiple game services and establish a shared worldview and NFT ecosystem; MapleStory was deemed the most fitting candidate to introduce these new features in line with the established design.
In the next post, we’ll talk about how Nexon decided MapleStory was the best IP for a blockchain game.
