New Trends Summit: Are On-chain Games Here to Stay?
Gabby joins Xiao Xiao, Peter Pan, Michael Tong, Carlos Pereira and Jason Suen to discuss how on-chain games reimagine gaming fundamentals and enable persistent blockchain-based gaming experiences.
During the New Trends Summit held on September 13, 2023, in Singapore, industry experts convened to discuss the trends and developments in privacy, security, zero-knowledge (ZK), gaming, social media and DeFi. The summit was hosted by SevenX Ventures, a leading web3 fund spanning and managing three direct investment funds. Additionally, they manage a fund of funds that collectively oversees assets exceeding US$300 million. SevenX Ventures has also backed Yield Guild Games (YGG) and its regional guild partner in Southeast Asia, W3GG.
In this panel discussion moderated by Xiao Xiao, Partner of HashKey Capital, Gabby is joined by Peter Pan, co-founder and CTO of Particle Network, Michael Tong, CEO of Xterio, Carlos Pereira, Partner of BITKRAFT Ventures and Jason Suen, Chief Commercial Officer of Immutable.
On the panel, Gabby shared how web3 games differ from traditional games by introducing player-owned economies. He explained how YGG’s questing programs, like the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) and Superquests, facilitate players’ roles within these economies by rewarding them with soulbound achievements. Gabby also emphasized how web3 can deepen engagement within existing game communities by granting ownership of in-game assets.
The following excerpt features the panelists discussing how on-chain gaming is reinventing the core elements of what defines a game. They also highlight the role of free-to-play web3 games as an onboarding tool to introduce users to web3. Additionally, they discuss how these developments already show the potential of on-chain games while taking a couple of years to mature fully, citing live-service games in web2 as examples that can exist perpetually on the blockchain as forever games.
Watch the full recording on YouTube.
New Trends Summit: The Next Opportunity for the Web3 Gaming Industry
Xiao (6:27:40): We can see that on-chain gaming is getting more and more popular, and a lot of people are talking about that. What do you think of on-chain gaming? Does it have huge potential, or does it have a very limited ceiling?
Gabby (6:28:02): I have a very specific take on this. I think that on-chain gaming is where the future primitives of play will be invented. It reminds me of what CryptoKitties did in 2017, which was quite new and exciting at that time and led to a lot of the development in NFTs.
I don't think it's anywhere near ready for a mass market right now, and I do think that the games that are doing — call it web2.5 or free-to-play plus web3 — have the job of bringing a lot of players into web3 and discovering what the unique aspects of web3 are being brought to gaming. But I do think that, in the future — and who knows when that might be? Five years, 10 years, three years — I do think a lot of the new forms of play will be discovered by on-chain gaming.
Peter (6:28:57): Web3 games definitely have very high potential. And we have seen [that] in the last cycle with Axie Infinity. It is a web3 game, but the profit is more than any web2 game. We are facing some challenges. Also, because I am an infrastructure builder, I think we can work together to solve all the other challenges of web3 games. The key point here is, in web3 games, the user has ownership. This is something very important. This is the key to the potential of web3 games because it’s totally different from any web2 game.
Carlos (6:30:03): Continuous innovation is [an] innovation that makes sense. And if you think about it, we have a game like World of Warcraft — we’ll now have that game with ownership and property rights. The black market will become a white market. That economy will grow. It’s easy to see where it goes.
On-chain gaming is about discontinuous innovation. It’s about something very new and fresh. For example, when the iPhone comes out and it has GPS, we look at it and we say, “Hey, I don't need maps anymore. I can just turn on GPS, and it’ll take me wherever I have to go.” And then someone makes Uber and sends a car to your house. That’s the super shocking thing that no one expected to come after the continuous innovation of putting GPS in phones.
I don’t think that we have seen today what the discontinuous innovation of on-chain gaming exactly looks like. But there are two things that are important in web2 gaming or in gaming history that I think might point us in the direction of it. One is what Jason was talking [about] earlier, forever games. Games have gone from being one hit — you pay 50 bucks, you play that game, you play the next game — into being live-service games that last for a very long time. Anything that’s built on-chain, by definition, should be able to last forever. It is the infrastructure for forever games.
The second part is, a lot of the best games that we've seen have come from mods. Dota was a mod of World of Warcraft, and League of Legends was a mod of Dota. If you think about putting games on-chain and allowing users to interact with those contracts, and mod them and grow them — which is what we've seen in Dark Forest — and then having the infrastructure to have forever games, it seems like there's enough precedent with the history of gaming to tell us that there's something there. We just don't know what it looks like yet. But I think we'll see the Uber to maps. We will have something like Eve Online with crypto or World of Warcraft with crypto, which is where web2.5 gaming sits today.
Jason (6:29:58): I think on-chain gaming is intellectually super interesting, but practically, it's far away. It's hard to say what that will materialize in. And I think that’s sort of what you're getting across the panel, but I'm here for it. I love the idea of it. We have a lot of stuff to do before. We're already breaking gamers’ brains in many ways by being like, “Hey, sign up for this wallet and you actually really own this thing, and you don't have to sell it in a closed marketplace.” It’s going to take a minute. And I'm really keen to see how that materializes, but I couldn’t tell you. We could sit here and have a really wonderful conversation over drinks, but practically speaking, I'm not sure what to do with it.
You can watch the full recording on YouTube.
Follow Gabby, Xiao, Peter, Michael, Carlos and Immutable to learn more about web3 gaming and the Metaverse.
Join the YGG Discord or follow us on X for future updates.