Web3 gaming has been rapidly growing over the past few years. Despite an overwhelming and tumultuous year for crypto with the collapse of former industry bulwarks (Three Arrows Capital, Terra/Luna, and FTX to name just a few), web3 gaming stayed afloat and continued to attract interest all across the ecosystem in 2022.
Investments? Andreessen Horowitz a.k.a. a16z launched in $600M inaugural Web3-focused gaming fund; Web3 gaming emerged as an indisputable leader in Web3 investments, snagging $4.49B or 62.5% of the total amount invested in Web3 in 2022
Veteran gaming shops? Epic Games secured $2B in funding from Sony and KIRKBI, the company behind The LEGO Group, to spearhead metaverse development; Square Enix partnered with Enjin to bring Web3 capabilities to its Final Fantasy game
Players? despite web3 and NFTs still being a controversial topic in the world of gaming (look at the reaction to the Call of Duty Quartz project), players are getting more and more comfortable with them as Coda Labs show in their report
How About Game Devs?
With money and players flowing in, more and more developers seek to leverage the benefits of distributed ledger technology. While this has created a plethora of exciting new opportunities, it has also led to a number of challenges, particularly when it comes to ensuring a seamless and enjoyable gaming experience. One of the biggest problems with Web3 games today is that they are often developed by crypto developers rather than game developers, resulting in a focus on in-game economy at the expense of gameplay. The result is a crop of games that may be innovative from a blockchain perspective, but lack the polish and engagement that are essential for a truly great gaming experience.
Do Web3 Games Really Offer “True Ownership” and “Decentralization”?
There is a strong case for decentralized ownership of in-game assets from the resell opportunities for avid gamers to fairer monetization strategies for game publishers.
Now, the trick is that blockchain technology can’t really support this functionality in its current state. Currently, no blockchain is capable of handling every in-game event of every game session, except for very simple games (we’ve written a brief guide on traditional approaches that game developers take for multiplayer games). This has forced developers to mix centralized and decentralized architecture to boost performance, and to rely on oracles as a sources of truth, which breaks the chain of trust. Most prominent Web3 games use this hybrid approach (for example, Improbable, who supported Yuga Labs, in their prominent Otherside Game use their underlying networking engine SpatialOS that necessitates centralized servers). What’s the point of recording who owns what on a trustless network, when all transfers are controlled by a trusted party?
Tashi makes it possible to make games truly trustless and decentralized. — while handling even the most demanding AAA FPS games with ease — making it ideal for developers looking to build high-performance, engaging Web3 games. The Tashi platform leverages the latest low-latency consensus technology, ensuring the fastest distributed multiplayer session possible (4-20 ms to consensus not counting network travel time) with fair netcode and and anti-cheat functionality gamers will love baked in.
How Does it Actually Work?
For a step-by-step explanation you’ll need to stay tuned, but in a nutshell, we take P2P server approach and blend it with our own unique consensus algorithm. What it means is that Tashi’s consensus-driven game session can provide verifiable and indisputable game results, which can be sent straight to smart contracts for algorithmic verification, facilitating all kinds of on-chain, in-game economics. Once a game session is over, one of the participating nodes (i.e., player’s game client) — or a monitor node — sends a proof of the game results to a smart contract, the smart contract verifies it in a trustless manner, and publishes the results on its respective blockchain. All of this is done without a single trusted party involved.
The best part is that Tashi is integrated with the modern game development tech stack. For Web3 game developers, Unity is the engine of choice (41% of devs use it in this space), and that’s why we are starting our product launch with a Unity plugin. You can apply to participate in our closed beta at tashi.gg. Unreal integration is coming soon!
Closing thoughts
For Web3 gaming to enter the mainstream, game developers need tools that can match the performance of modern multiplayer games and that seamlessly integrate into their tech stack. Tashi helps to bridge the performance and trust gap that exists in the Web3 gaming industry with its novel serverless multiplayer engine that bring true decentralisation to games.
See more at tashi.gg.
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