What is Decentralized Game Publishing Structure in Web3?
Intro
The essence of the game is a huge Data Generator. No matter walking, fighting, communicating or other interactions, any behavior of players in the game will generate various data.
With partial or full disclosure of player data, massive amounts of data about products and channels will no longer be exclusive to a single large publisher, and everyone will be able to analyze and derive optimization strategies based on these data. As a result, the exclusive data advantage of traditional centralized game publishing will no longer exist.
In Web3, game publishing will be more dynamic because everyone can set various on-chain or off-chain incentives based on in-game data to motivate players to behave towards the benefits.
As Web3 games are getting better in quality and gameplay, the game experience itself carries more different incentives as well as rules for distributing these incentives. Therefore, a decentralized network that can freely connect game content with different incentives will inevitably happen.
Main
1/ Collaboration, Profit-sharing & Incentives
Providing players with a high-quality and robust gaming experience is always the ultimate mission of game developers.
It is undeniable that video game is a complex product with various cutting-edge technologies, and game development is a field that requires highly specialized skills.
In the past, developers have relied on their experience, ability, and passion for video games to create a series of rich and engaging game modes and experiences. Players, in turn, would choose to play which game to play based on their preferences.
However, without a reasonable incentive mechanism, developers and operation teams will gradually lose the motivation to keep updating and iterating the game and hence fail to consistently meet players’ demands for more gameplay. This will not only make players leave the game experience that they enjoy but also prevent new and high-quality content from being created.
Therefore, to create a system that can continuously meet “the demand of players for new experiences and more rights”, keep “the motivation of game dev teams to continuously create new content”, and offer “the incentives of operation teams to serve more players in long term” will significantly boost the development of the whole video game industry.
In order to help all video games that carry different experiences and economics to become prosperous eventually, Delysium designed a set of decentralized game publishing structures so that gamers, content creators, developers, operators, and investors will all get positive enforcements in this system and be willing to keep contributing to higher prosperity for the whole ecosystem.
2/ Decentralized Game Publishing
In a traditional game publishing structure, content creators often need to make countless efforts to find a publisher, and only after a long negotiation will the publisher pay the game production team a royalty fee that is barely enough to fund till the completion of the production.
Even after signing a deal with publishers, developers still have a long way to go. Due to the fact that established publishers often sign several games of similar genre at the same time, the limited marketing resource becomes so scarce that only one or two games can be properly advertised. Not to mention that nowadays getting featured on Steam or Epic is extremely difficult given so many games and so centralized publishing resource.
In this process, publishers who have a large number of distribution channels along with a robust player database in a centralized way are naturally in a relatively advantageous position and will expectedly impose many restrictions on game dev teams such as exclusive deals and rev-shares as high as 50%. However, if the publisher’s strategy fails, a game will inevitably fail. This leaves many games of superior quality unable to achieve the operational success that they could have achieved.
As a result, traditional game publishers are playing an increasingly “monopolistic/ oligopolistic” role in this market, which further hinders players’ access to more games.
In the meantime, publishers also utilize their competitive advantages such as distribution channels, huge user base, etc., to gradually change the preferences of their players, and constantly “transform” the players they contain into a group of users who will help maximize publishers’ own interests. They gradually align users’ understanding and preferences for games with the types of games that they are good at publishing. Eventually, diversity in gameplay and genre is no longer prioritized.
For players, they inevitably lose the opportunity to experience more games of different genres, play styles, and themes. In order for the gaming industry to be sustainable, we must create a fairer and more open market condition so that players can not only root for and experience the games they want freely, but also participate more actively in the game production and distribution.
Thanks to the blockchain technology, the distribution system of Web3 games has changed. As players interact with the assets on-chain, the data will be distributed and stored on-chain in a decentralized way and remain publicly accessible to all, except for in-game data.
Therefore, for Web3 players, asset-oriented operations become as important as the game experience itself. Even a game with top-notch graphics and robust gameplay could fail in the Web3 world if it fails to provide players with an economically attractive, healthy, and sustainable economic system.
Making the data accessible to the public also means that essentially, everyone can set up different incentives based on the data of player-asset interactions. Players can be hooked on and vote with their feet in ways that go beyond the game experience.
As we can see, the centralized distribution system of the traditional game industry will likely not work in the Web3 world. The Web3 game industry needs a more open and equalized distribution system so that players, game dev teams, distribution/operation teams, investors, and all other participants of the system can establish closer collaboration and achieve a win-win situation by providing mutual incentives.
3/ Essence of Game: Data Generator
The virtualization of human civilization is an irreversible process, and every interaction made in the virtual world generates data.
Traditional web2 applications are data generators essentially, and centralized data has become their core competitive advantage. These traditional web2 applications continue to collect and store into centralized databases and satisfy various user needs, thus further consolidating their business value.
In Web3, instead, the traditional centralized database unlocks its gate and becomes decentralized; the public can freely access and utilize it, and this directly invalidates the traditional web2 business model.
In addition to being an experience that allows players to voluntarily overcome non-essential obstacles, video games are a massive data generator. Players are constantly interacting with environments, objects, characters, and avatars of other players in the virtual world at high frequencies, and in this process, large amounts of data are generated.
For blockchain games, the data of players interacting with game content and assets will be partially or fully open, allowing everyone to use this to analyze and know why players behave in various ways, such as why they participate in a certain gameplay, why they stay in front of a building for a long time, why they are more inclined to buy more expensive Battle Pass, etc.
By this time, everyone has become a game operator.
Under such a rational, in order to make the game content more dynamic and satisfy more users’ preferences, we should lower the threshold and cost for players to become game operators as much as possible, and even let everyone become game operators for free. When the access to game data is opened to all, the whole game experience becomes Free-to-Own-to-Operate.
Meanwhile, everyone can use this data to provide various forms of incentives to players, allowing them to experience the game while also better participating in the development and iteration of the game product.
4/ Game-as-a-Service(GAAS)
Once we agree that the game is a data generator, it becomes naturally clear that the Web3 game should be composed of three structures, which are: the experience layer, the data layer, and the incentive layer. Teams with different capabilities and experience can play different yet crucial roles in this structure.
In the context of traditional games, Game-as-a-Service(GAAS) refers to the continuous provision of different game content for different groups of players, turning games from a traditional “one-time purchase product” to “a service that can continuously meet the players demands”.
For Delysium, Game-as-a-Service(GAAS) encompasses not only the continuous experiences built around players’ data but also the open data and its application for developers, operators, and investors; the goal is to share the value of a thriving ecosystem.
With that being said, Delysium game development and producer team aim to create top-quality game content and make it available to everyone along with our robust data capacity. Anyone can set up his/her own economic system and incentives and then operate and monetize Delysium as a high-quality site that generates gamified interaction data.
Experience Layer
The game is a product that consists of various cutting-edge technologies, and only a professional team can support the continuous development and operation needs of the game. Therefore, in order to provide players with a stable and robust gaming experience, Delysium game development and producer team will be the primary contributors to the game experience and responsible for developing various in-game items, gameplay, mechanics, game modes, etc.
Of course, in order to let everyone participate in the creation and operation of the game, increase the diversity of the game experience, and prolong the life cycle of the game, Delysium Game Dev Team and Producer Team will not only provide a series of development tools and operation support, such as UGC editor, user account system, game launcher but also be responsible for the deployment, operation, and maintenance of the game server, so as to bring players a stable gaming experience and achieve the network effect of Delysium at the same time.
Data Layer
In order to provide a stable and smooth gaming experience, part of the interaction data generated by players in-game will be stored as Open Data in a centralized way; whereas all the interaction data between players and on-chain assets will be recorded in a decentralized way.
At the same time, the data that’s stored centrally can be requested to fulfill different needs. In other words, everyone can get the valuable part from it and set the corresponding incentive or change the operation strategy for this data.
Incentive Layer
Incentive systems are part of a product that always needs to be designed.
In the past, every Web3 project needed to provide a set of economic cycles or incentives around its product in order for users to continue generating value within the system. While the vast majority of these economic incentives were decentralized tokens or other entitlements, the value could only be captured by the incentive system set by the project itself since the data in the product itself was not open.
However, when data can be shared, the incentive layer will be decoupled from the experience and data layers, thus maximizing the value of the product itself. At this point, everyone can access the data and use it to determine what kind of incentives should be provided. Users are engaged in different ways to participate in the development of the product and the whole ecosystem.
To achieve this, Delysium team will provide an API that has access to Open Data. Everyone can issue different incentives for different players, making our open-world MMO game more interesting and prosperous.
5/ Future of Web3 Gaming Industry
With more and more professional game teams entering the Web3 industry, the quality of Web3 games on the market will be more polished, and the categories and gameplay will also be greatly improved.
At this time, with Delysium’s Incentive Layer, the same gameplay can carry many different rules for incentive issuing. For example, with Battle Royale + Ranking-based gameplay, we can incentivize not only the top-ranked players but also the bottom-ranked players, as well as the number of kills/deaths, survival time, etc.
Compared with the centralized and single incentive approach of traditional games, the decoupling of the Experience Layer from the Incentive Layer will waive restrictions and provide players with more differentiated incentive forms and rules, thus promoting the creativity of the whole market.
Once the market realizes that the publishing structure of Web3 games has changed significantly, there will be a large number of Web3 games that immediately choose this way to join the party, and they will eagerly search for channels or publishers who can provide effective incentives.
At that point, the token economy of publishers will gain unprecedented utility. These new generation of Web3 publishers will be able to get users to demand their tokens across various games and experiences, thus making the real value even more solid.
When publishers around the world collaborate with a large number of game experiences in the Free-to-Own-to-Operate approach, a decentralized game publishing network is formed.
Soon, when more games with the quality of Delysium emerge and use such a decentralized game publishing structure, the Web3 game industry is truly going to flourish.
ABOUT DELYSIUM
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Building AI-Powered Virtual Society with $AGI.
Buy DMA and earn $AGI early: http://delysium.com/dma
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The goal of Delysium has been to construct a virtual world where 1 billion individuals and 100 billion AI Virtual Beings coexist on blockchain.
These virtual natives can be not only the digital version of ourselves but also our companions and Non-Player Characters (NPCs) shuttling across diverse scenarios including games, communities, media platforms, and more.
In Delysium, everyone can create their own AI Virtual Being and gradually develop their personalities and capabilities. Besides playing games with them, players can interact with their AI Virtual Beings to learn about crypto, check & trade crypto assets, discover crypto opportunities, and get warned ahead of the risks through natural language conversations.
Moreover, powered by the decentralized game publishing structure, an increasing number of games with customized tokenomics and on-chain assets (such as NFTs or tokens) will be connected, and that will gradually make the AI-Powered Virtual Society more prosperous.
As of now, the AI Virtual Beings are available to use on Delysium official website, and Delysium is the first playable game with AAA-quality that has been listed on Epic Games Store.
