What is the point of Crypto in games?!
Tags: unity3d, gamedev, web3, blockchain
Published: 2023-01-31 09:35:18

Hello everyone,

Raimie here. I’m the co-founder of Metafi - an embedded crypto wallet for blockchain games.

In the last 4 months, we spoke to 200+ blockchain game developers and not a single one of them could give us a convincing answer on why blockchain/crypto makes sense for their game. In fact, after the downfall of the Play-to-Earn Ponzi-like economies, most blockchain game devs are putting a hold on the ‘crypto’ aspect and are finally focusing on building an awesome game. As it should be.

However, being the stubborn individual that I am, I refused to take that as an answer. I really needed to feel for myself how useless crypto was as a game developer before admitting to it. Hence, we did exactly that - our team of 3 embarked on a day-long project to prove that crypto does have value in games. 

**Here’s a post summarising our steps taken, learnings, and delivering our verdict on whether crypto has value in the gaming world.**

**Steps taken:**

1. We found this [Endless Runner](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/endless-runner-sample-game-87901) game from the Unity Store and found it easy enough to understand and play. (this took half an hour)
2. We implemented our [Metafi Unity SDK](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/metafi-unity-sdk-2) to turn Endless Runner into a crypto game and made minor UI changes to make the user experience seamless. (this took an hour)
3. We realised that we weren’t making the game any better with crypto. Hence, we spent some time brainstorming on how we could actually make the game better since some assets are now on-chain. (this took us half a day)
4. We came up with the idea of weekly Endless Runner contests that run to perpetuity. This comes with a token staking mechanism to encourage contest participation and an on-chain leaderboard to assure transparency of the outcome without the need for us as game developers managing the contests every week.
5. We implemented the Token Staking, On-chain Leaderboard and weekly contest mechanism. (this took us half a day)

**Learnings:**

- The only value of crypto we could think of (within a day) was how crypto enables game devs to run recurring contests and automate reward mechanisms in a transparent and efficient manner without operational management.
- This might be most valuable for high stakes games where transparency and immutability is important for players.
- Smart contracts actually make recurring contests far easier and cheaper to run. For games which run recurring tournaments/contests as a growth strategy, there is potential for these contests to be run without any operational cost from the game dev’s end.

And that’s it! It was fun working on this project, and I’m comforted to know that there might actually be value in blockchain games after all. Nonetheless, I’d really like to hear your thoughts! Did this encourage you to work on your own blockchain game? Or do you fervently disagree? All comments are more than welcome. :)

Feel free to check out our demo of the modified Endless Runner game along with our Metafi Unity SDK [here](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/metafi-unity-sdk-2).