Beijing NEO JOY 2019: How Can Blockchain Games Make A Difference?
NEO JOY 2019: Blockchain Disrupts The Gaming Industry was held on April 20th at the Microsoft Building in Beijing. With a focus on gaming on the NEO blockchain, members of NEO Global Development’s (NGD) ecosystem growth and development departments took the stage to explain NEO’s path forward from a business and technological perspective. The event attracted community developers, game platforms, and game developers who also had the chance to discuss the value of the blockchain game industry, and gain a deeper understanding of NEO’s game ecosystem.
1. One-Stop Solution for Blockchain Game
Jiachao (John) Wang, director of the NGD Eco-Growth Department, is mainly responsible for ecosystem building and is well known to those familiar with NEO. In his presentation, John outlined the global distribution of various NEO communities and introduced the current NEO game ecosystem. He said: “We hope NEO.Game will be the first practical scenario for the NEO Smart Economy. Through blockchain games, you can know exactly how digital identity and digital assets are integrated into reality. Furthermore, it can also constantly enhance NEO’s infrastructure and allow players to play in a more stable and secure environment.”
NEO’s game ecosystem supports mainstream engines such as Cocos, LayaBox, and Unity. Game developers can quickly begin building with NEO technology by referencing the NEO.Game Developer Guide. In addition, NEO also provides a multi-language development environment and is supported by many wallets including but not limited to Wheat wallet, Cobo wallet, SEA wallet, O3, Neon and NEO’s native wallets. NEO welcomes everyone to come on board and experience the various games in the NEO game ecosystem.
For game projects that are looking to join the NEO ecosystem, John noted that NEO, as a public chain, will support them in multi-dimensions, including marketing publicity, technological collaboration, and financial investment/loans. One of NEO’s greatest strengths lies in the sustained growth of its user base, with large communities located all around the globe. Therefore, high-quality game projects will be able to connect with an international community through cooperation with NEO.
2. Exploring the application of blockchain dApps
Yuefeng Wang, founder of the NEO-NEXT developer community, discussed the topic “down to earth exploration of small and beautiful application scenarios” focusing on blockchain dApps.
Yuefeng Wang spoke about the pitfalls of a recent campaign that required WeChat users to forward a message in order to enter a draw to win a car:
“A few days ago, the activity of ‘Forward to win a Maserati‘ appeared frequently in WeChat Moments, but the activity was called off after a short time. This is because people have weak trust in the lottery system. It is okay for drawing a schoolbag or clothes, but for large-scale activities, a real lottery assistant is needed to complete this task. Such as a smart contract. The assets should be injected into the contract first, then the program automatically purchases the prizes, or sends assets to users. In this way, the forgery can be eradicated.”
Therefore starting with small scenarios to help people gradually accept blockchain technology is the primary focus of the NEO-NEXT community right now.
3. The allocation principle and appreciation logic of blockchain game assets
Ding Wang, founder of HiggsNetwork and CEO of GAEX, highlighted the value of blockchain games and the computational logic of blockchain game asset appreciation.
Ding Wang stated he is optimistic about the prospect of blockchain games due to his belief that the promotion cost may be lower than that of traditional games:
“People who are familiar with the Internet may know why business models like those of Qutoutiao and Pinduoduo are recognized by the capital market. It is because its customer acquisition cost is lower than its competitors.” Ding Wang said, “How does this happen? The secret lies in the way of sharing, that is, the money for the promotion channel is directly distributed to the user, not to the middle channel, which becomes the killer weapon of low-cost customer acquisition. Similarly, blockchain games adopt this approach in the form of a token economy model, which can distribute part of the game’s rewards directly to the players. In theory, will it bring in a lower cost of getting customers? The answer is definitely yes, so now the ultimate goal of the blockchain game is to reduce the cost of existing channels in order to acquire customers and get more people involved in blockchain games.”
At the same time, Ding Wang reasons that the value of blockchain game assets will appreciate due to both “external” and “internal” factors.
For the external factors, Ding Wang stated, “Blockchain games will bring a new type of production relationship among game developers, players and investors. Because the direct driving force of blockchain asset appreciation comes from consumer players, once NEO enters the blockchain game industry, it will bring in a group of people who really want to consume NEO. To pay for game content they would first have to buy NEO then consume it in the NEO ecosystem, which will bring new demand for NEO. That is to say, we may all buy NEO for investments as we have faith in the future of NEO. But for those who are purely buying NEO for making payments, where are they spending NEO? They will go to games, which is why we are going to invest in blockchain games.
In addition, he noted: “The consumption attributes of blockchain games will bring sustained economic deflation. Generally, the total amount of tokens in the game is fixed. For example, the total amount of NEO is 100 million. Some would be consumed by smart contracts leading to less circulation in the market and the appreciation of NEO. The assets in the game are directly related to the price of NEO, thus leading to the appreciation of assets. This is what I call the coupling of the production relationship of blockchain games to players’ consumption behavior.
For the “internal” factors leading to asset appreciation in blockchain games, Ding Wang summed up two points: “ hybrid token” and “double helix asset model.”
“The concept of hybrid token is that a blockchain game economy model is not only for NEO. It can also serve other projects, like BTC or USDT. Once you hold this asset, you can bind to more than one project. A new blockchain project comes into being and its assets can grow 10 times or even 100 times, and the value of your assets will increase infinitely.”
For the “double helix asset model”, Ding Wang cited CryptoKitties as an example. He explained: “How does the holder benefit from such a high transaction price, such as in the case of CryptoKitties? He could produce ETH by mining. So in the future, the economic logic of the blockchain games we want to build is that players have certain game assets in the game, such as houses. Players can rent them out, and gain more profits than financial management.”
4. Analysis of the competitive advantage of blockchain game
Xi Chen, the founder of Blacat Platform, also shared his view of blockchain games from the perspective of “How to build games on the blockchain.”
Xi Chen stated: “For an ideal blockchain game, first of all, it has to be a game. It should have complete game logic and clear game goals for users to experience. Beyond that, since it is a blockchain game, it is necessary to have on-chain logic, such as the issuance of the on-chain assets or the corresponding asset, as well as its allocation rules. Thirdly, the blockchain game should have clear community rules and governance methods, allowing for decentralized operation, which is highly important.”
When it comes to “what can the blockchain bring to the game”, Xi Chen shared a specific game scenario — Fantasy Westward Journey.
“In fact, there has always been game assets and trading in the traditional game industry. ‘Fantasy Westward Journey’ is the best example. It has hundreds of customer service staff specializing in manual transaction auditing. Those who have played the game all know that the transactions are manually audited. The customer service staff audit the transactions every day. Why do they do this? Fantasy Westward Journey is the best game of economic system control. Its assets can be preserved and appreciated. This is what we have repeatedly said about what blockchain can bring to the game — value preservation and appreciation. But it doesn’t mean that you can preserve and appreciate your assets just by keeping them on the chain. Without the support of high-quality games and active users, your assets are worthless.”
Therefore, he believed: “Based on the blockchain and community-based operations, you can at least tell the players that if they are interested in the community, they will have a certain incentive to contribute. If the assets are valuable, there will definitely be people to maintain them, as long as the mechanisms for community operation are reasonable and the interests of all sides are taken into account. And the people who help you to promote and pay for the operations, how can they protect their interests? As long as the payment rules are within reasonable limits, I believe that after the quality of the game reaches a certain level, this model is achievable, and once such a community is formed, its standards will be very high.”
Therefore, as long as blockchain game developers can solve the issues of governance, game quality, and most importantly, the allocation and circulation of players’ assets, the game can always be maintained and the server will never be shut down.
In addition, the BIacat platform beta is planned for released in this month, and will be live in early May. Everyone is welcomed to try it.
5. FishChain — Powered by hybrid tokens
Jingyi Li, co-founder and CEO of FishChain, shared details about the upcoming NeoFish game.
The whole process of launching FishChain following the completion of four rounds of financing only took a little more than two months, due to the previous product experience.
Jingyi Li said: “We had developed a game very similar to this blockchain game long time ago. Bubblefish is a social game we made in 2008. It was launched on Renren, the most popular social platform in China at that time. We achieved pretty good results. There were more than 50 million registered users, and the highest daily active users reached 3.5 million. After the launch of FishChain, we worked on customer flow, guiding the users of Bubblefish to Fishchain. We found a particularly interesting thing. Due to the free trade on Bubblefish, the game transformed from a traditional game to a game of asset type allocation. The players are naturally divided into two types. One is the game player and the other is the asset player.”
Particularly, Jingyi Li emphasized: “To develop blockchain games, we must recognize what kind of player the targeted users are, whether they are traditional players or primarily financially motivated. Only then can we carry out a targeted marketing strategy.”
You are welcome to add the WeChat in the poster above to join the group and help build the NEO ecosystem!
6. NEO blockchain game development guidance
The last speaker was Longfei Wang, an NGD development engineer. Longfei Wang introduced the process of developing a blockchain game on NEO from a technical perspective. Topics covered include: how to build a NEO private chain locally, how to use NEO nodes and wallets, how to develop a NEO smart contract (NEP-5 token assets), how to integrate NEO SDK or wallet plug-ins into the Unity game development engine, and how to develop a simple NEO blockchain game. Finally, he demonstrated the development process of a NEP-5 contract to the participants.
NEO JOY 2019 was an invaluable conference! Thank you to all who participated for bringing us a deep and enthralling community sharing event with many use case scenarios and lots of industry data. Not only did it help more people understand how blockchain and games can be combined, it also drew attention to the growing NEO ecosystem.
To watch the playback of NEO JOY, scan the QR Code below.
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