The Past, Present, and Future of Full-Chain Games

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, the global blockchain gaming market is gaining widespread attention and continues to grow, with a market value reaching hundreds of billions of dollars. As a new form of gaming, on-chain games are gradually receiving widespread attention. On-chain games implement all game logic and states on the blockchain, possessing inherent advantages of blockchain technology such as decentralization, openness, and interoperability, providing players with a brand new gaming experience.

This article will define the concept of blockchain games, outline their origins and development history, analyze their significance, overview the current market situation, major competitors, and representative projects, dissect the technical and design challenges faced, and finally look forward to future development trends and possible directions for innovation.

1. Definition, Origin, and Underlying Technology of Full-Chain Games

1.1 The Origin of Full-Chain Games

Although blockchain gaming is still in its early stages, the imagination and related developments around it have persisted for over a decade, encompassing people's ideals of creating autonomous game worlds.

In 2012, SatoshiDice was launched as the first Bitcoin-based gambling game, marking the origin of on-chain gaming. The game allowed players to place bets using Bitcoin and determined wins and losses using preset odds and a random number generator.

In 2013, HunterCoin emerged as a prototype of a full-chain game, running on its own blockchain, with player actions submitted as transactions.

In 2015, the Ethereum mainnet went live, introducing a broader range of on-chain games, including gambling games such as vDice and Etheroll.

In 2017, Crypto Kitties created the first crypto game, allowing players to collect and breed virtual cats, enriching the possibilities of blockchain gaming.

In 2018, Axie Infinity brought assets on-chain as NFTs and created an open and fluid SLP economy, introducing more interaction and innovations in the economic aspect for on-chain games.

On August 7, 2020, Dark Forest released its first test version, which combined zero-knowledge proof technology with on-chain game logic, creating a fully on-chain game that can hide information, has no entry barriers, and is scalable, but also raised performance issues for Ethereum.

In 2021, the Loot Project was launched, becoming a symbol of foundational layer IP, spawning numerous games and applications that integrated Loot into gameplay and storylines.

In 2023, new types of full-chain games and autonomous worlds are rapidly developing as emerging industries, with major public chain ecosystems actively cultivating the full-chain gaming field, including infrastructures like LootRealms and GO L2 on Starknet, and SUI8192 on SUI also developing rapidly.

With the arrival of 2024, the whole-chain gaming field is full of expectations, as major public chain ecosystems continue to nurture and the infrastructure continues to improve and perfect. Whole-chain gaming is not only an evolution of entertainment but also an innovative application of blockchain technology, providing players with more interaction and economic opportunities. It will continue to explore innovation, bringing more surprises to players and becoming an indispensable part of the gaming and entertainment field in the digital age.

1.2 Definition of Full-Chain Games

Fully on-chain games are a game model based on blockchain technology, using smart contracts to implement all the logic of the game. In fully on-chain games, the entire game exists on the blockchain network in the form of contracts, with the game state storage and logic execution completely done on-chain, in line with the fundamental characteristics of blockchain's decentralization, permissionless nature, and composability.

The characteristics of blockchain games include but are not limited to:

• Completely on-chain game logic and state: Full-chain games store all game logic and state, including assets and other information, on the blockchain and implement it through smart contracts. This ensures a transparent, tamper-proof, and trustless gaming experience.

• The real source of blockchain data: Data from on-chain games is obtained directly from the blockchain, without relying on proprietary servers or auxiliary storage. This allows games to fully leverage the programmability of the blockchain, enabling permanent data storage and transparent interoperability.

• Open Ecosystem Principles: The full-chain game is developed based on the principles of an open ecosystem, where both the game contract and the client are open source. This encourages community participation and innovation, allowing third-party developers to customize and fork new gaming experiences through plugins, third-party clients, and interoperable smart contracts.

• The game is independent of the client: blockchain games do not rely on a specific game client, as the game's logic and data are stored on the blockchain. This ensures the continuity of the game, allowing the community to interact through smart contracts even if the client provided by the core developers no longer exists.

• Interoperability with valuable assets: Full-chain games have interoperability with digital assets in the blockchain, which tightens the connection between the gaming world and the real world in terms of value. Players can own, trade, and utilize digital assets within the game, enhancing the depth and significance of the gaming experience.

To better develop full-chain games, developers need to continuously improve blockchain technology and consider how to optimize game design to reduce the burden on the blockchain. Proxy servers and layered architecture can also be used to help improve performance, but this may reduce some decentralized features.

The Significance of Full-Chain Games

Fully on-chain games have enormous potential and significance in the gaming industry. By ensuring the eternal existence of game information, promoting open collaboration and decentralization, and facilitating interoperability between games, fully on-chain games provide players with a better gaming experience, enhance players' sense of investment and engagement, and also bring new opportunities for innovation and growth in the gaming industry.

• Eternal Existence of Game Information: On-chain games achieve the eternal existence of game information by recording all game logic and game states on the blockchain. Once deployed on the blockchain, these games become permanent, and players can continue playing anytime and anywhere, as long as there is support from the blockchain network, without worrying about game shutdowns or asset loss.

• Open collaboration and decentralization: Full-chain games utilize open-source code and a permissionless structure, empowering players to customize and modify their favorite game content, transforming them from passive consumers to game creators. This not only brings more engagement and investment for the success of the games but also sparks players' creativity and community building. The democratization of the game development process reduces development costs while also increasing the potential for innovation.

• Interoperability between games: Transferable PoGW Tokens allow players to transfer value between different game worlds. This concept will revolutionize the gaming industry, shifting the focus from asset portability to interoperability and universal reputation. Players can invest time and effort in one game and then transfer it to another, while also being able to trade these PoGW Tokens with other players, or even use them as a payment method for goods and services. This economic superstructure will be shaped by the intricate and interdependent relationships between individuals, assets, NFT bundles, and various smart contracts, with the synergies they generate connecting different gaming economies.

2. Overview of Full-Chain Game Development, Market Situation, and Key Competitors

2.1 Full Chain Game Engine

Current mainstream full-chain game engines include: MUD, DOJO, World Engine (Argus), Keystone (Curio), Paima Engine, etc. The current full-chain game engines have the following characteristics:

• Adopting an Entity Component System (ECS) architecture: ECS is a data-oriented game development architecture that can improve development efficiency and runtime performance. Mainstream full-chain game engines such as MUD, Dojo, World Engine, etc., have adopted this architecture.

• Provide on-chain data storage and state management: The engine will offer standardized data storage and state management on-chain, such as MUD's Store, simplifying the complexity for developers in building games on-chain.

• Supports high-performance on-chain computation: Optimized for gaming scenarios, supporting higher TPS and lower latency, such as the customized chain design in World Engine.

• Focus on developer experience: Provide convenient development tools and pre-made contract modules to lower the development threshold, allowing more developers to participate in the construction of the entire blockchain gaming ecosystem.

• Highly modular and open: Third parties can expand and customize based on interfaces, and can also develop plugins to enrich game features.

• Compatible with mainstream blockchains and languages: can be deployed on mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum, StarkNet, and supports languages like Solidity, Cairo.

• Some have their own Layer 2 solutions: MUD and World Engine integrate their own rollup solutions to achieve higher performance.

2.2 Full Chain Game Developer Tools

Despite the immense potential of the blockchain gaming sector, the development process faces numerous challenges. To overcome these difficulties, many innovative development tools have emerged within the industry, aimed at streamlining the production process of blockchain games and enhancing efficiency and feasibility.

PixeLAW: PixeLAW features a layered architectural design, encompassing a core layer and an application layer. The core layer is responsible for providing the fundamental systems and components, while the application layer calls the core layer's interfaces via smart contracts for game development. This architecture allows for the construction of a game development environment within minutes and, through a front-end and back-end separation strategy, enables developers to focus solely on writing back-end smart contracts, significantly simplifying the complexity of full-chain game development.

ZKWASM: ZKWASM is a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) specially designed to execute wasm code and generate corresponding execution traces for zkSNARK proofs. It provides the infrastructure for the development of Provable Games. ZKWASM enhances game performance while ensuring its credibility through the strategy of "off-chain execution and on-chain verification," utilizing the generated wasm code execution proofs.

Web3Games.com: Web3Games.com is positioned as a decentralized crypto gaming ecosystem and blockchain network that utilizes Layer 2 technology to achieve full on-chain integration of games. The platform is dedicated to accelerating the deep integration of the gaming industry with Web3 technology, aiming to empower players with "ownership" in the gaming world, thereby enhancing the transparency and engagement of games. It provides developers with a comprehensive infrastructure that includes a game-specific blockchain, development toolkit, and developer community to support the development of fully on-chain games.

2.3 Full Chain Game Chain

The development of blockchain games relies on high-performance, low-cost public chain infrastructure. Currently, the more mainstream options include:

• Layer 2 solutions: Arbitrum, Optimism, ZKSync, etc. offer higher transaction throughput and lower fees compared to Ethereum main chain, lowering the barrier for operating on-chain games. This is also the choice for many on-chain games currently.

• Customized public chains for games: Some teams have developed customized game public chains based on existing public chain frameworks, incorporating mechanisms like Tick to better meet the needs of games. For example, World Engine based on Cosmos and Curio based on OPStack. These types of public chains can further unleash the potential of full-chain games.

• Next-generation general-purpose computing public chain: for example, Starknet provides high-performance computing capabilities and can also support full-chain games. However, general public chains also have certain limitations in customization.

In addition, the whole-chain games also require ecological support, apart from the underlying public chain.