Why Lightning in Satoshis.Games?
Improving the gaming experience using micro-transactional ecosystems to offer in-game bidirectional economics flow model.
Introduction
What is Lightning Network?
The Lighting Network protocol dramatically improves the scalability of blockchain currencies like Bitcoin by streamlining the number of nodes involved in each transaction. A typical on-chain Bitcoin transaction is transmitted, verified and stored by many thousands of nodes. This can mean significant fees and delays for users.
Lightning Network transactions involve a small group of nodes that link sender and receiver. These nodes are connected via “payment channels” established on the underlying blockchain. Payment channels leverage blockchain smart contracts to enable virtually unlimited cheap, fast transactions.
Lightning Network for Games
Lightning Applications enables a high degree of efficiency in micro-transactional ecosystems. The opportunity to transfer atomic units of value (satoshis) brings the opportunity to create micro-economics systems aside from the game engine.
The standard game has the microeconomic system built in the game mechanics, which not only makes it relatively insecure, it also provides a one-way value transference route from the gamer to the game. Let us have a view of the economic design of the current in-game purchases model:
Pay to Win
The user pays in-game content to have a better gaming experience. In the same way as buying a digital service, the user executes the transaction to the game. Once the user wants to sell or send the ownership of such in-game content to a different peer, is highly limited, and most of the cases unavailable to perform this operation in a safe environment since the economic model is built into the game engine.
In-Game Economy
Games which the currency to pay in-game assets are obtained in the game. This is the most frequent case in the gaming experience. Where the character of a game has to complete missions or while completes the game is gathering gold or points to buy in-game content. A clear example of this model is World of Warcraft.
Games powered by Lightning
The opportunity to combine an economic system based on micro-transactions built aside from the game engine but connected to the game mechanics is a powerful tool to create a fairer economic model in games. It allows bidirectional routing solutions, which means the value can flow forth and back from the gamer to the game, and from the game to the gamer.
The significant advantage of exporting value from a game is substantial for its use case. In other words, the fact to sell and buy in-game content using a p2p electronic cash system allows the end user to reuse the currency used in the game (BTC) for other purposes. This feature opens a wide range of opportunities for the user experience.
Where Lightning takes place at Satoshis.Games?
There are 2 use cases where Lightning is used in Satoshis.Games. The first case is for gaming modes and the second one is for in-game purchases:
- Gaming modes: There are two different gaming modes Free & Competition. In the free mode, users can enjoy games for free to improve their skills and switch to the competition mode where gamers compete against others by paying a ticket. At the end of the competition, the winner gets the pool money from the tournament.
- LN In-game purchases: In this scenario, gamers can enjoy the benefits of paying through Lightning to acquire in-game assets. Also, in the same way as exporting the value generated in the game. An example of this is our game Super Bro, a super Mario-based game where you have to save the Queen Miss Satoshi Nakamoto to withdraw all the satoshis gathered in the game. Be careful, It is easy to die, and there are limited lives. When your character dies, you lose all the progress which includes all the satoshis gathered, or you can buy another life in exchange for some satoshis to save the Queen and withdraw the satoshis.
This bidirectional economic flow system between the game (peer A) and the gamer (peer B) requires a channel to be opened in advance between peer A and B. In Satoshis.Games we are working tirelessly to create an authentication system based on connecting your node ID to your user profile.
Conclusion
Lightning can be used for a wide range of financial applications including the gaming industry, which there is much room for improvement. Lightning allows a fairer user experience and micro incentivising the gamer for playing games without the need to use advertising to enable sustainability. We have not covered the topic of the implementation of crypto collectibles for Satoshis.Games to dramatically improve the gaming environment. However, this is coming soon.
