Introducing Planetarium: Powering Games with Freedom
People often ask us if we are making blockchain games or building blockchain for games. Technically, we are doing both. We want to tell you why and what we want to achieve by bringing distributed ledger technology (a.k.a Blockchain) to gaming.
When we tell our growing audience that we are building both a blockchain and games, we often get asked, ‘Why? Why don’t you make games on existing blockchains such as Ethereum or EOS.’ Yes, it’s true. We have been met with many worried faces when we tell people that we are building yet another blockchain.
Let me be clear. For us, blockchain is only a means of thing that enables a new experience for both game developers and the players.
Gamer communities are awesome — sometimes even crazy.
Let’s take a quick look at gamer communities before we go further into blockchain topic. These days, almost every company claims that it has built a community, having almost no idea what a real community should look like. Let’s see what the most enthusiastic, loyal, and crazy community members are capable of.
Who are they? Of course, gamers.
1. Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess “Cliffe” Cliffe created Counter-Strike as a modification (“mod”) for Half-life. Sooner, this mod became one of the most iconic games of all time. It eventually got acquired by Valve.
2. A Starcraft gamer made a game called ‘Aeon of Strife,’ which later became the world’s most popular game genre ‘AOS’ (a.k.a Multiplayer online battle arena, MOBA**).** For other games in this genre, you may have heard of Dota 2 or League of Legends (“LoL”). LoL generates more than 2 billion dollars a year.
3. On Steam, there are more than 3m+ user-created contents. Some of the creators are making money while doing that. Others are just producing content for fun.
4. Ted John is reverse-engineering RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 to make the game open-sourced. For your information, 99% of the code for RollerCoaster Tycoon is written in x86 assembly language. Here’s how assembly language looks like:
5. Roblox is well known for its active modding community: its monthly active users has reached 100M and the number of creators 2M+. Revenue for creators has exceeded $200M.
So how does it relate to Blockchain? Why another blockchain?
As we’ve observed, gamers are able to build cool things with what they have as of today: You can build MOD on Minecraft and play it with your friends. Or you can design skins on CS: GO or Dota2. Players love creating new and innovative experiences based on existing games. Thanks to their contributions, the gaming industry is rapidly evolving.
Yet massively multiplayer games have always been outside of their reach. The full potential of community-driven gaming has yet to be unleashed. If a user wants to play Online MOD with others, one should host a server. When developers build online games, they have to deal with servers, not only the game itself. As you know, server management is no joke. 🤮
What if we can make online games without server?
At Planetarium, we are pioneering a new form of games with blockchain technology. We use blockchain to enable massive peer-to-peer online worlds powered by the community.
We have developed a blockchain engine, ‘Libplanet,’ that allows developers to make their game online at almost no cost. And it’s not a promise. we are already shipping it — please visit our GitHub if you are interested.
Unity has opened a new era of game development by allowing code to be deployed across different platforms. We envision Libplanet to open up a wide range of possibilities by breaking away from the limitations of servers.
Traditional multiplayer gameIn many traditional multiplayer games, it was up to the game server to manage the network and the state of games.
Multiplayer game with LibplanetBut with Libplanet, all game clients can manage their own game state, enabling multiplayer games to be implemented without a central server.
For the design rationale of Libplanet, refer to this article.
There is no coin or token you have to buy. If you are a player, feel free to come and play. You will hardly tell a difference anyway. Are you a developer? After building a game with Unity, you can implement Libplanet to make your game online without needing to install servers.
👀 How does it can improve gaming?
When a game is built with Libplanet, players connect to each other and power a massively distributed world together. (It resembles how bitcoin maintains its network without a central server.)
It brings a few interesting yet powerful features to gaming.
A. Libplanet set to transform the longevity of games. The players can connect with each other. The players become nodes. So as long as there is at least one player who still play the game, it will never be shut down. We all have some nostalgia for games we used to play, that we can’t play anymore. On Libplanet, we won’t miss anything anymore.
B. Developers, now you can make online games live at almost no cost. You can focus on making fun games when Libplanet is at your service.
C. When it comes to blockchain, it’s open-source from Day 1. So Forget about MODs, you can fork the games. Gamers have been doing crazy things with editors. Imagine what they are capable of when they have the whole codebase.
Our First Game, Nine Chronicles.
We are proud to launch ‘Nine Chronicles, our very first game on Libplanet,’ which is a peer-to-peer fantasy world powered by the player community. Nine Chronicles will be open-sourced to provide full creative freedom to the players. Do whatever you want to build with the game. We are looking forward to it. 😎
We are also making games not only blockchain, the underlying technology. Since we are bringing something new to the world, we feel obliged to showcase some references to the audience.
Legendary computer scientist Alan Kay once said, “If you’re serious about your software you should make your own hardware.” At Planetarium, we are making our own software(games) cause we are serious about our hardware(blockchain).
Our Vision
Through decentralization and open source, we will enable gamers to become the actual owners of massive virtual world that flourish through collaboration and experimentation.
We aware that it is ambitious goal. We are to make whole new gaming experience with a small team. As stated above, we are making our works open-sourced including the blockchain and even the games.
Open source is not just a way to share code — it’s one of the most powerful ways of distributing software, and a way for small teams to deliver world-class products through community effort.
Join our Discord to keep updated ❤️
Planetarium is an open-source blockchain platform set to transform the longevity and the profit model of games. Rather than simply introducing blockchain technology into games, we intend to make the games run forever through decentralization and pioneer a new form of community-powered games.
🎮 Do you play games? You can Sign up here to Nine Chronicle’s Alpha-beta.
👨💻 Are you a game developer? — We’d love to talk! Please join our Discord and let’s start from there.
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