What does a decentralized MMO look like?
I've been thinking about this more and more lately. As a gamer I haven't really picked up any new games in years. They're all crap, and when I entered the cryptoverse I realized just how powerful the gaming industry could become. On the flip side of that viewpoint I must also admit that because decentralization is the opposite of the current paradigm, we've basically had to reboot the industry from ground zero, and it is not pretty.
Rather than make something that is actually fun to play, these centralized crypto game developers have recreated systems and grinding mechanics that are just about as boring and inefficient as they come. The problem here is that a dev team starts out with a single mindset: HOW DO WE MAKE MONEY? They never ask the important questions like how do we make a great game or how do we distribute the ownership of that game to the players/community. Nope. The overarching agenda is to always make money for themselves first and foremost, which is exactly why all these "WEB3" games are such trash.
Funny how all the crypto naysayers see the trash and assume it will be like this forever. Most people have zero vision when it comes to what tech could be used for. Rather they just look at what it is being used for in the moment and complain thoughtlessly.
Have you ever looked at the credits after beating a video game?
Hundreds of people.
If not thousands.
It costs millions of dollars in overhead costs to make one of these things, and there is no guarantee that investment will pay off in the end (much like a movie). This requires centralized capital to move in and dominate ownership of the product. How can we move away from this?
Pay to win is not an ideal model.
We figured this out decades ago. Giving people a technical in-game advantage when they pay for the game intrinsically imbalances the game and makes it not fun to play. This is a tricky subject, because some of the best WEB3 games are CCGs (collectible card games), and ALL CCGs are pay to win to matter how you slice it. If you don't have the cards then you can't win. The cards cost quite a bit because they are collectibles; that's the entire point.
So rather jump into that quagmire I'd rather focus elsewhere: inside the MMO arena. MMOs are provably the most popular type of game that tend to draw in a much more diverse range of players. For example, women are much more likely to play an MMO because of the social aspect of the game. MMOs also have less strategy and are more about the grind and progress of the given character. Strategy games have a way of repulsing players who are trying to kick back and relax rather than engage in a super competitive activity that they aren't very good at. MMOs are largely cooperative and PvE, and people like it that way. Slay the dragons.
So what does an MMO look like on a decentralized level?
Again, we are starting from ground zero in crypto, so we must look at the ground zero of MMOs. Where did they come from? What were the humble beginnings of the MMO?
Before MMO, they were called MUD.
Before Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games took the stage, they were called Multi-User Dungeons. Many of them were fully text based and played from the command line. It becomes clear to me that this is where crypto needs to start. And you might be thinking: well that's not going to go anywhere... who's going to want to play that? The answer to this question is pronged and is much more complex than it sounds.
The thing about crypto is that it puts the user in charge. A truly WEB3 game would be developed, upgraded, and run by the underlying community. Not only that they would be paid to do these things by the game's governance token. When we come at it from this angle we can see how things could start to take shape.
First, the game would only exist as a backend, with just enough of a frontend to play the game. Because there is an associated governance token involved only the hardcore gamers and technical experts would be participating in the early stages. However, a successful product leads to more development.
After the game sees success there is every reason to believe that it would begin to scale up the graphical side of the equation to get more users to jump on board. The beauty of WEB3 and open source code is that we don't have to hope some centralized entity will fork over the cash and start developing it further. The community itself will develop the game because they like the game. Players put it countless hours on the projects they enjoy working on, and they do it for free. With WEB3 paying them a living wage these same people would quit their job and work on the game full time. In fact it's possible they would put in 20-40 hours a week even if they weren't being paid a living wage as it would be seen as the ultimate investment in the product.
This is why I always say that Hive is so far ahead of the game. Show me a single other WEB3 product that pays the users to do something. Anything. It doesn't exist. A game like Axie infinity doesn't pay users to play the game. It's a pay-to-win Ponzi dominated by bots and farmers bringing nothing of value to the ecosystem. That is exactly what we need to avoid when making a real product with staying power.
Taking WOW as an example.
- You buy the game.
- You log in.
- This is what you see.
- The entire world at your fingertips.
- Everything is prebuilt and enforced by a centralized server.
I believe game developers in WEB3 should be doing exactly the opposite of this. I think they should launch the game with almost zero content. There would only be a battling system. Perhaps a leveling system. A dungeon or two... maybe. PVP... maybe. A bare bone version of the game that needs A LOT of work.
That work is then outsourced to the community.
The skeleton of the game would be slowly filled in by the players themselves using the tools provided to build within the ecosystem. NFTs would represent ownership of the work they have done.
I believe we are going to see games that start out as simulations with nothing built and will end up being a thriving economies based on the rules of the simulation. This is no easy feat but when the code is open source anyone can try anything. Decisions aren't made in some board room of a bunch of dorks trying to put money into their own pocket. Unilateral control is no longer an option.
Even the balancing of the classes/abilities would be up to the players. Each server only needs players to agree to the rules of that server. An MMO only needs like 500-5000 players per server. It it quite possible private invite-only servers would pop up just to mitigate cheating and botting.
Everything formerly considered the dev team's responsibility would be outsourced to the community, because the community is the dev team. Running the server has to be paid for. There has to be a financial incentive to do it (just like Hive witnesses). It would be up to the players to regulate their own network. Cheating would be dealt with in house, and there would need to be a reward for that as well. All jobs are paid jobs; otherwise the system will not work.
From the cheating and Sybil attack angle, it is much easier for the community to regulate itself rather than rely on the centralized entity to do it for them. In a WEB3 game, all the information is available and public. You can't "dupe" an item because there's some bug in the game that allows you to duplicate an item unfairly. This is a problem with see in many RPGs. In WEB3 it's all confirmed directly by a blockchain, which makes this bugs disappear quite quickly. Duping an item becomes just as difficult as double-spending crypto, which is usually pretty damn hard to do.
When all information is public and confirmed by encryption, it becomes much much easier for players to see if there is any funny business going on. Obviously if an account has been playing for 100 hours straight, that's not a person. Instant ban hammer. There's no need to wait a month for GMs to round up all the cheaters and ban them all at once, which is what happens in the corporate world of inefficiency.
Not only that, players have a HUGE financial incentive to keep their peers honest. Imagine holding the governance token in game and seeing someone come in and try to bot resources and undermine the value of your stack. No one would stand for that. The anti-cheating software that gets developed from such an economy would be 10x better than anything corporations could come up with. People's livelihoods are at stake, and again, that code built for a single server can then be ported to all the other servers due to the open source nature of the system.
Conclusion
There's still a lot more to be said about all of this, but the main point is a simple one: crypto needs more jobs. The users want to work, and devs must lower the barrier to entry so that making money doesn't entail learning 10 different programming languages on a full stack. I believe gaming is a big part of this ability to give users more options when it comes to creating content and being paid for their work.
There are many forms of content that can be created within a gaming ecosystem: puzzles, balancing, policing, skins, animation, terrain, dungeons, lore, and more. Each of these types of content could be shown to have objectively more value than something like a blog post, because it all feeds back into the game and makes it robust and more fun to play.
This also doesn't factor into the ability to earn money while playing the game (which isn't as important because it financially incentivizes cheating). However, given a solid economy and an efficient police force, WEB3 MMOs could usher in some insane gains to be made by those who are legitimately grinding them out within the simulation.
My vision for an MMO is HARDCORE ONLY. If you die, you're dead forever and that character loses everything. While that may sound harsh to some, it makes cheating and botting that much harder because if the bot makes one mistake or glitches out it loses everything. It's also just much more exciting and satisfying when there is that much risk on the line. I know from experience.