Blockchain Games vs. Blockchain-Enabled Gaming

Quick Takes:

• Blockchain games are facing the problem of tilted game-finance balance, indicated by simple gameplay and profit-driven user base, which makes them neither sustainable nor competitive.
• Instead of building up new games on the blockchain from scratch, a more effective choice for game developers would be leveraging the blockchain technology and attributes to support and upgrade traditional games.

Represented by the names like CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity, blockchain games have been gaining widespread attention ever since 2017. Even with the current challenging conditions in the digital asset markets, blockchain gaming is still showing a strong momentum for expansion and keeps attracting new players into the game. According to the Blockchain Games Report published by DappRadar and Blockchain Game Alliance (BGA) in October, a total volume of $1.3 billion was poured into the blockchain gaming business in Q3 2022. Yet, under the surface of such popularity of blockchain gaming are some shared problems among most of the existing blockchain games.

Plight of Existing Blockchain Games

With core elements including cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain games allow players to own and trade their in-game assets and make earnings through gameplay. This model was furthered in 2019 by the concept of GameFi, a combination of “game” and “finance”, which provides players with a virtual gaming environment to earn financial rewards through their participation in the Play-to-Earn (P2E) blockchain games.

And this is where we can see the problem with blockchain gaming emerge — the imbalance between game and finance.

Most existing blockchain games tend to have rather downplayed gameplay yet excessive financial attributes, due to the limitation of underlying public chains and developers’ lack of experience with games. The players, as a matter of course, are naturally driven by in-game financial incentives instead of the gameplay. To them, these blockchain gaming projects have already become some gamified financial products, straying far away from the playable games in the traditional sense.

With a tilted game-finance balance as such, blockchain games are struggling with problems of unstable user base and unsustainable growth, as it is difficult for them to either satisfy existing players or attract newcomers, which usually leads to a short life cycle. We have already witnessed numerous blockchain gaming projects rise and die in the past few years, most of which cannot even evoke a tiny piece of our memory.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Blockchain gaming is still at an early stage of development, so is the blockchain technology itself. The current blockchain technology is not advanced enough to support all the complex on-chain gameplay anyway. Therefore, instead of building games on the blockchain from scratch, blockchain game developers might as well set their eyes elsewhere and take a new route.

A Future of Blockchain-enabled Gaming

Struggling with providing better playability with richer gameplay, blockchain gaming is, however, endowed with blockchain-supported features such as real asset ownership and flexible monetizing models. In comparison, traditional gaming has evolved into a much maturer industry after all these years with solid infrastructure, massive user base, and rich gameplay in place, though being overly centralized and lacking imagination regarding monetization.

The respective strengths of blockchain gaming and traditional gaming reveals a new development route for the whole gaming industry — blockchain-enabled gaming. By leveraging the experience of existing traditional games and equipping them with novel blockchain features, developers can attract more users from both the Web2 and Web3 world with stronger projects that are sustainable regarding gameplay, economic models, and more.

As a content incubation platform with rich experience in blockchain game publishing, MixMarvel is well aware of the current predicament of blockchain gaming and has been working on innovating methodologies for the next-generation blockchain games through blockchain integration with traditional games. Among the many game types out there, MixMarvel takes MMO games as the best choice for their potential in accelerating the development of player-oriented blockchain games and eventually being transferred into a greater Metaverse. MixMarvel will be exploring the possibilities for assisting MMO game developers with high potential to become quality blockchain-enabled games that are beloved by mass players.

About MixMarvel

MixMarvel is the world’s leading blockchain content-incubation platform and creators community. By in-depth exploring the open world and integrating world-renowned IP with high-quality content, MixMarvel connects investors and mass users through asset distribution, content publication, DeFi tools, infrastructure, community co-creation, and other diversified scenarios in a new ecosystem of dapps. Its ecosystem comprises a broad portfolio of FT/NFT assets, including the MIX, RPG, and HEROES tokens; blockchain content including the GameFi application DeHero; and infrastructures including Rangers Protocol and MixMarvel SDK. For more information, visit https://linktr.ee/MIXMARVEL.