We can ignite a creative revolution through onchain gaming, and we should.

The Scene

I’m writing this two months after the Devcon 2024 conference, and the fully onchain gaming space is in turmoil. With a few notable exceptions, the first generation of games is struggling to achieve traction, and the patients lack conviction in their own remedies.

Like any good doctor, I have a diagnosis, and a cure.

But today, I'm taking a step back to explain why onchain gaming is more deeply transformative than most understand.

Praise to the Greats

The onchain gaming space is permeated with creative thinking. We've been told of autonomous worlds, hyperstructures, onchain realities, worlding, composable engineering, and more, and we have been inspired to build.

But a lot of this sounds a bit too abstract to me. I understand the dream, but it's hard to imagine what the end state looks like.

This is natural: when you are describing an uncharted future teeming with possibilities, it's hard to draw a clear map.

I'm going to describe the fundamental transformation that onchain games can bring about. I hope it illuminates all of the above ideas.

Creation, and those too swamped to seek it

The creative act is one of life's most intense joy, and one of its foremost purveyor of meaning. This much is obvious to anyone that has created anything of consequence, even if only personal consequence.

It is a tragedy that some people do not get to experience this, or only ever catch glimpses of it.

One of my fondest teenage memories is when I spend a whole day and the better part of the night trying to set up a World of Warcraft private server, along with one of my best friends. The challenge was just at the right level for us: we didn't now how to code, but we were tinkerers. And so over the course of the day we chipped away at the problem, fixing build system issues, missing DLLs, making sure assets were in the right format and in the right location.

At the end of that fateful night, we were able to log into our very own world. We prompty gave ourselves 10x speed and the power of flight, zoomed over the world to survey our creation, and we saw that it was good.

We didn't create very much. But it did feel magical, and the moment captured the joy of creation: you struggle and then you are rewarded by enjoying something that you made (or in this case, made happen). The feeling would recur many times over the years, and it still is the thrill I seek to this day.

There is something extra special about creating a world, as well as any interactive experience that other people can engage with.

I want to democratize this feeling. The memory highlights that you don't need 10 years of programming practice to experience it.

Some of us have the skill to build games from scratch, but not the time. And people without the skill most likely don't have the time to embark onto a years-long learning journey.

They shouldn't, and don't need to.

But how, you ask?

UGC rules everything around me, FOCG, get the money

User-generated content (UGC) is one of these boogeymen often used while pitching games, but few people understand how powerful it truly is.

Let's look at the top 10 video games by MAU:

1. Roblox

2. Minecraft

3. Fortnite

4. The Sims 4

5. Counter-Strike (2 & GO)

6. Call of Duty (Modern Warfare II/III/Warzone/Black Ops 6)

7. League of Legends

8. Valorant

9. Grand Theft Auto V

10. Rocket League

Roblox and Minecraft basically thrive on UGC — it is what drives their enduring success. The same goes for The Sims, which has players create houses and characters, and share them.

Four other games in this list (Fortnite, Counter-Strike, League of Legends and Valorant) are refinement of genres that started as mods of other games. [1]

Without the ability to easily mod games and create user-generated content, the most popular gaming experiences available today wouldn't exist or persist.

Even if you believe the genres would have eventually emerged, there is no doubt that modability sped up their adoption. And for every mod that made it big, there are 100 great gaming experiences that didn't crack the top 100. Many of those would never have existed if modding didn't make them easy to build.

This is my thesis for fully onchain games (FOCG): By empowering people to create new gaming experiences, you unlock previously untapped creative powers.

This multiplies the opportunities for breakout success, keeps gamers engaged, and offers a diversity of experiences that cater a broader player base.

Everybody benefits: the developers of the original game, as mods drive adoption & sales, the modders (who can create something that couldn't otherwise, and can profit themselves), and most of all the players, who are served with more and better gameplay options.

Most importantly, this world is exciting. There is always something new, games keeps improving, changing and never gets stale.

[1] The original Counter-Strike is a Half Life mod; Valorant is strongly inspired by Counter-Strike; League of Legends is a MOBA, a genre that started with DotA, a Warcraft 3 custom map; Fornite is a Battle Royale, a genre that got started with PlayerUnknown's Battle Royale, an ARMA 3 mod.

Hooked on creating

UGC help foster creation by being vastly easier to build.

It took 4 years and more a team of around 30 people to make Warcraft 3. Defense of the Ancients (DotA), its most successful mod, took one guy only a few months. The mod was open-sourced 6 months later, and many alternative versions were subsequently made. The seminal “DotA Allstars” — which combines the best ideas for all these forks — comes out 8 months later. The map (and its updates) end up being played by millions of players around the world. Its successors (DotA2 and League of Legends) are played by more than one hundred million players every month.

The most famous video game map of all times (de_dust2) was made by a 16 year old in his bedroom. And these stories are by no mean unique.

UGC also provides a neat pathway into more and more daring forms of creation.

The very best games offer a gamut of creation options, from simple to very ambitious, and each successful step can naturally lead you into the next:

• tweak a few things in the game (balance it better)

• add custom units, objects, cards

• create your own map, using existing tools and assets

• modify an existing mod

• create your own map, with custom texture and scripts

• create your own mod

• create your own modding tools

At their best, UGC gamifies the act of game making itself.

Why onchain?

If traditional games are able to tap into UGC and mods, why should we build onchain?

Many reasons:

1. Onchain games enable monetizing open-source games, via network effects (e.g. match-making), a preference for the “real asset” (e.g. why NFT collections have value when everyone can copy them at zero cost), and incentives (possibility to extract real value from the game).

2. The game being open-source makes modding & UGC a lot easier.

3. Smart contracts are a perfect platform for extensibility: it's the original use cases, and there is broad knowledge on how this can be done. There is clean separation between the frontend and the backend.

4. Easier devex: deploying to a blockchain means less time spent on devops.

5. Tokens are awesome

   • They can incentivize UGC and mods. This can be done in traditional games too, it's just a lot easier on the blockchain.

   • They can be used for user acquisition, by giving out the game's currency and/or ownership, instead of spending on ads.

   • They create an easier path to funding, especially crowdfunding.

6. Everlasting games: open-source + deploying onchain means the game developers cannot kill it even if they wanted to.

7. Provable fairness: no ability for game developers & operators to cheat. This has been a real issue when value is at play, from poker site scandals to rogue MMO game masters. Operators also don't custody user assets and funds.

8. Massively (soon!) multiplayer by default, without incurring extra complexity to developers.

It's not perfect yet — building onchain still adds a lot of friction to the game making process.

We think the benefits already outweigh the costs, and it's only going to get better.

Improving this is one of HappyChain's missions! (And we are not alone).

In conclusion,

Let there be games.