Blockchain Games and GoCryptobot

CryptoKitties, a killer app released last December, was a quite big hit that almost paralyzed the entire Ethereum network. After CryptoKitties, numbers of blockchain games have been poured into the market, but their effect has been minimal considering the large number of new games being launched. A small market size coupled with immature technology could be one of the reasons for the slow growth, but I strongly believe that failing to properly utilize blockchain technology has played a bigger role.

Most blockchain games have simply replaced the game currency with ETH or ERC20 tokens, and game items with ERC 721 tokens. In order to play these games, users have to use ERC20 tokens or buy ERC721 tokens. In other words, this means that most blockchain games are serviced as a purchase-to-play model, while in today’s game market environment, free-to-play models are mainstream. Therefore, purchase-to-play models have a harder time to acquire a big user-base and to make profit compared to free-to-play models.

Blockchain games nowadays

So what are the measures that blockchain game developers have chosen today in order to tackle the barriers of the purchase-to-play model? Sadly, most of them are making profits by designing speculative and/or gambling game mechanisms that will not be sustainable in the long run. Though each game may differ in detail, we could say that most blockchain games are classified into the following categories:

1. Speculative, collective games
2. Betting games where players win the opponent’s tokens
3. Hot potato games where prices rise every time an item is sold and the last one to buy it is the ultimate loser
4. Pyramid scheme games where early users earn most of money and newcomers lose it all

There is no doubt that these games have some legal issues, and if your game is in an area that could be legally accountable, you might not want to release the game on the App Store or Google Play as both Apple and Google are quite strict with regulatory responsibilities. This is one of the main reasons why all blockchain games we find out there are only serviced on the web.

Looking at the current situation one might rightfully question whether blockchains have a positive effect on the gaming industry or if blockchains are even necessary when it comes to games at all. And to be honest, blockchain will never give a positive impact if game developers do not implement the technology in a more responsible way.

GoCryptobot project

This is the reason why we, at Kodebox, started the GoCryptobot’s project. We wanted GoCryptobot to be different from the games that are in the grey areas of our current legal system. So we formulated the following 4 core principles before jumping on the development:

1. No speculative/gambling game (hot potatoes, pyramid schemes prohibited)
2. Actual game play, not like collective games with low playable features
3. To publish as a mobile app
4. Blockchain technology to be selectively adopted

GoCryptobot is similar to any runner game that you may have played before. You have to run the character as far as possible to clear the stages, upgrade the character with the coins acquired during the runner mode, and battle with other users at the PvP mode. It sounds very familiar if you are a gamer. The uniqueness of GoCryptobot is that it has integrated blockchain technologies into the game.

GCC (GoCryptobot Coin), which is used to trade items and to participate in PvP, is an ERC20 token. Since GoCryptobot is a mobile game made with the Unity engine, an Ethereum wallet had to be embedded within the app to support deposit and withdrawal features.

Items that are traded at the in-game P2P market are ERC721 tokens. Unlike existing blockchain games that require players to buy characters to play, players are given with a free character at the beginning which is converted to an ERC721 token only after it has been played and leveled up by the user.

The PvP mode has a probabilistic element that somehow defines the winner of the match. To make the random item generation transparent, the program is executed by a smart contract. Users can check that there was no arbitrary modification involved in the probabilities through the Ethereum network.

GoCryptobot is the first (and remains the only) mobile blockchain game in the world to be available on both the App Store and Google Play Store. This means that we have taken into consideration serveral other details that most of blockchain game developers overlook.

For example, Google and Apple both require that mobile applications use the in-app payment system of the platform. This is the reason why GCC (ERC20) which can be charged with the wallet, can also be purchased via the in-app purchase system.

This feature leads to another very important issue as many countries require by law: the refund policy. If you are a developer and you are considering to have a refund policy in your game, you will be more careful about using highly fluctuable cryptocurrencies. In order to avoid exchange rate risks during the refund process, we have decided to peg our ERC20 token (GCC) to the US dollar.

Conclusion

One thing is incorporating ERC20 and ERC721 tokens in your game; providing a quality gaming experience and abiding by the law is another story. Many games advertise themselves as having adopted bleeding edge blockchain tech with incentive systems that magically benefit both the developers and the users. Unfortunately you and I know that most of these projects just have interest in issuing coins and making profit out of them, but not in adding value to the gaming experience by properly adopting blockchain. Even the incentive system that they constantly promote prove to have weaknesses at a simple glance. Blockchain is a useful technology, but it is way more expensive than what servers can do today. So if you want to use an expensive technology, you have to understand that blockchain has to be implemented only where it is really needed.

Translated from the original Korean version.