Blockchain Gaming – Shifting Power to the Player

One of the largest issues within the gaming industry is that players feel voiceless and disenfranchised. Gaming studios are notorious for ignoring the desires of their fanbases and focusing more on profit margins. As a result, this leaves communities disillusioned.

These issues gave birth to decentralized video games. Blockchains allow gamers to gain control over both the digital items they use, as well as voice their concerns and suggest changes via governance tools. While the first blockchain-powered games focused mostly on the financial aspect of blockchain and NFTs, the latest trend aims to empower gamers by merging the best aspects of traditional gaming and blockchain.

A great example of such is Life Beyond – a AAA MMORPG game created by ex-Ubisoft devs and powered by blockchain technology. This game utilizes some of the most revolutionary aspects of the blockchain space to provide an experience that gives users more control and overall autonomy. Let’s take a look at how Life Beyond is doing this.

True Governance

One of the most significant elements of the blockchain gaming movement is that users can now be involved in making crucial choices about the media they play. By decentralizing the decision-making process, gamers are given the power to vote on how the games they love function and operate on a fundamental level.

For instance, with Life Beyond, the developers will be setting up a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) that will give true governance controls to active community members. Here, users will be able to make key changes to the game and take charge of how it is developed and programmed. In the near future, players will be able to vote on how the economy within the game works, how the social structures and politics of the game work, how certain items operate, the game mechanics, and even the aesthetics of the game.

DAOs are an instrumental part of many web3 projects, but they are especially powerful in conjunction with gaming projects as they let the user base take the helm and democratically enforce ideas that the community wants. This is in stark contrast to simply waiting for developers to listen to requests from fans, which can often feel like screaming into the void.**

DAOs in games such as Life Beyond give players a seat at the table. By holding onto digital tokens, users are able to have their voices heard and collectively craft the gaming experience they truly want.

True Ownership

Another huge difference between web3 games and traditional games is how ownership of digital goods works. In Life Beyond, in-game items can be turned into NFTs, meaning that users can gain full ownership of them, placing them in their crypto wallets and selling or trading them across blockchains.

This is unlike most traditional games, where items are owned and controlled by the gaming studios. In Life Beyond, items belong squarely with the players, offering them full autonomy over what they do with their assets and how they store them. This is particularly exciting as it allows a separate economy to exist running alongside the game itself, where some NFTs may fluctuate in market value depending on their rarity and utility within the game itself.

In the words of the co-founder of Twitch, Justin Kan: “allowing gamers to have ownership of the assets they buy and earn in-game allows them to participate in the potential growth of a game. It lets gamers preserve some economic value when they switch to playing something new”.

What’s best is that NFTs can also be used in conjunction with DAO governance tools, where players can alter the importance of certain utility-based NFTs by voting to make changes to the way the game itself works, therefore making some NFTs more useful than others. Not only this, but by changing the importance of specific NFTs, players can have a dramatic effect on the economy of the game, as NFTs are sold and traded.

Moving the Needle in the Gaming World

By taking advantage of blockchain technology, Life Beyond is actively changing the nature of the gaming industry by placing the desires of the player at the forefront. Rather than simply forcing particular elements of a game onto the fanbase, they are giving the fans the ability to radically adjust the way the game functions, tailoring it to the community. Not only this, but with NFT ownership, gamers can take full control of their digital assets– selling and trading them in whatever way they wish. The Life Beyond team are trendsetters in this industry, working hard to ensure their fanbase is heard and empowered, which is a breath of fresh air in an industry where studios have a reputation for focusing on profits over the experiences of players.