Current NFT Gaming

Landscape

Giving gamers ownership over in-game assets and allowing them to increase their value by actively playing the game are key components of the new business model. By embracing the concept of an open economy and providing financial benefits to all players who add value to the game world, GameFi is likely to introduce new game concepts and retention models not yet seen in modern gaming.

This new era infuses gaming, blockchain or DeFi, and NFT to create a gaming ecosystem where players can participate and earn simultaneously while being rewarded with both fungible and non-fungible tokens. However, there are still unsolved questions that bother gamers technically and socially.

In-game genres like Trading Card Game (TCG) and SimuLation Game (SLG), the current NFT protocol (once written, immutable for life) is sufficient for all needs. Moving to more complex game modes, fascinating elements of exploration, upgrading, competition, and creation directly or indirectly interact with player assets (characters, props, money) and thus trigger changes in quantities and attributes. ERC-721 is certainly one of the best options but will increase the risk of centralisation of the economic system.

Would LOOT be a good solution? LOOT-based NFTs share good on-chain consistency as their metadata are stored on the blockchain rather than via URLs. The txt form metadata then provides the possibility for NFT to interact across different ecosystems but is generally impractical in reality as game attributes can be fundamentally different across ecosystems. Characters, pets, props, and the attributes vary greatly from game to game, for example, you would hardly use Leather Boots in a Starshark game, right?

Solution

For the first time in history, Ethereum has made the sovereignty of complex digital assets indisputable and has pushed ownership of these assets out to the edges of the system. For the next step of history, a trustless and simultaneous paradigm to ensure the creator-asset interaction is heeding the call, where the interoperability of metadata becomes a blessing rather than a hurdle.

We, therefore, decided to adopt EIP-4985 and BEP-129 which blend the loot style and mind-free user creation. Building on the features of LOOT, it allows the creation of any digital properties in the form of numbers, with every piece of metadata stored on the chain. Compared to textual content, digital properties significantly lower the barrier to cross-ecosystem collaboration. NFTs are now the magical Bifrost to various games. The best part is that it supports real-time modifications with validation, allowing owners to modify the metadata of the NFT subject to certain rules.

By this implementation, we intend to explore a new territory of GameFi 2.0 that fully enables on-chain implementation of upgradeable characters/props and unleashes its potential for playability. Here comes the AL world, where the new NFT protocol is in conjunction with the ERC721 standard.

Attribute ID (of the NFT) = The sole ID of an attribute under the game registry, like “20220425”, combined with its name in Game A, stands for “frozen skills” in Game A; Value (of NFT) = the numerical value of an in-game performance attribute, like “305%”

Indeed, an editable, evolvable, and interoperable NFTgameplay is the inaugural exploration.