I’ve been a long time watcher of what’s been building at blockchain PC gaming platform Ultra over recent years.
As is often the case, these sort of largescale projects take much longer than anyone would have planned. But the news today is that it’s finally released its first tokenized game.
This means that anyone who buys indie beat-’em up Josh Journey: Darkness Totems ($15) now has the potential to resell the game on the Ultra platform.
One interesting aspect of the news is that Josh Journey is a standard web2 game containing no blockchain elements, apart from the fact that ownership is now tokenized on Ultra.
However, in this case, the technical aspect of tokenization is not the tricky bit. What is harder is the actuality of the process. Clearly, the developer won’t want to see canabalization of new primary sales by cheaper secondary sales, even if it gets a cut of that transaction.
Hence — akin to the prisoners’ dilemma — conditions need to be set up that work for game developers and tokenized game owners that benefit both parties, even if they ideally want to maximize their own revenues at the expense of the other.
To be fair, Ultra has considered this with options allowing developers to set minimum resale price, desired revenue split and duration of resale period.
My gut feeling is this likely won’t be enough and that Ultra will likely need to further incentivize this activity with platform rewards such as the UOS token or special NFTs etc. In this case, it’s running a raffle ticket reward event. And I’m sure there will be plenty of lattitude for further creative retailing.
For example, it’s easy to imagine a situation in which game owners are incentivized to burn their game for UOS or a discount voucher for future sales etc rather than put it on sale. Similarly, game devs could say only the first 10,000 sales of the game are tokenized, or that the tokenized version of its game has a higher price than the standard version to cover its additional optionality.
Of course, ownership of a tokenized game could also unlock other benefits such as gated Discord channels, DAO membership, access to special tournaments, early access to expansions and sequels etc. Ignoring securities law, I could even forsee a staking mechanic that rewards holders with a higher rate of return dependent on their percentage completion of the game.
In this way, the ability to tokenize games is just the first step of what I think will be another long process of experimentation to create consensus between developers and gamers that builds a harmonious social construct.
It won’t be easy, but it has the potential to provide a powerful new primitive, both in terms of business and community for the entire games industry.
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Calendar
Mojo Melee launches Frozen Fate season — 12th December
My Neighbour Alice launches its alpha season 4 — 12th December
Legendary: Heroes Unchained releases its alpha v2 — 12th December
Genesis mint for Overworld; priced 0.15 ETH — 15th December
Ubisoft’s The Warlords NFTs mint — 18th December
Square Enix’s Symbiogenesis launches — 21st December
Talking Data news
Blockchain Gaming World marches on with the latest episode (#148) being a deep dive into Game7’s state of web3 gaming report in which head of research George Isichos and I discuss some of the report’s more significant graphs.
As ever, the audio podcast is available throughthe usual channels, the YouTube version is below and there’s an edited transcript on BlockchainGamer.biz.
Funding news
German blockchain gaming outfit Spielworks has announced it’s raised an undisclosed strategic round from Swiss non-profit The Hashgraph Association, which is tasked with promoting the Hedera Hashgraph blockchain.
The news is interesting as Spielworks has traditionally been associated with the EOS ecosystem, including WAX. Even more interesting is the reveal that it used the investment to acquire key WAX NFT market Atomic Hub, which went bust earlier in the year for failure to pay taxes to the German government.
More obviously, the deal will also see Spielworks exploring ways of incorporating Hedera’s technology into its future activities. To-date Hedera has been focused on enterprise applications of its technology.
Additional Links
The Sandbox is launching its 43-day-long Season’s Greeting event, which includes 60 experiences and 600,000 SAND in reward, worth $300,000.
GachaMonsters sold out its Poglin: Nycra mint: 5,600 NFTs at 0.05 ETH and has generated $1.2 million in trading volume. The floor price is now 0.24 ETH ($520).
FIFA is going to be minting a new set of NFTs on Polygon.
Ronin game Pixels’ website ranks #786 in the Philippines.
I’m not a fan of gaming networks selling nodes — a la Gala — but who am I to judge the market? New Arbitrum-based L3 XAI has just sold $15 million of its nodes.
Check out Nine Chronicles M using my referral code and get 0.1 NCG when you reach level 50.