‘The social benefits are huge’ — Web3 games transition digital ownership

There is no substitute for experience. Even if the experience feels disappointing, like getting your brother’s Runescape account banned.

Robbie Ferguson grew up to be an avid gamer, spending thousands of hours playing his favorite games. One fateful day, he logged into his Runescape and initiated a series of events that forever changed his view of digital ownership and his Web3 gaming world.

“I logged into my brother’s Runescape account, shared it, went to the wilderness, and lost all his Red Dragon armor. The next day, I felt very sick, so I bought gold from the gold farm instead.” The account was banned the next day.”

The incident left its mark on Ferguson, a software developer who became involved in the blockchain space by introducing Bitcoin in 2014. His interest was fueled in 2015 by the emergence of Ethereum and the potential of the ecosystem.

Ferguson’s Runescape ban prompted him to move into blockchain game development, frustrated by what he described as an “arbitrary impunity” in which the game’s economy and assets were controlled by mainstream corporations. It was a trigger.

Speaking to Cointelegraph at the Token2049 conference in Singapore in September 2022, Ferguson said after his first attempt at building a decentralized game, in 2018 his brother James and Alex Connolly launched the blockchain technology company Immutable. revealed the circumstances of co-founding

Ether Bots, the first foray into Ethereum-powered gaming, will teach the trio the difference between on-chain and off-chain, and serve as an infrastructure platform for building Web3-based games and non-fungible token (NFT) capabilities. laid the foundation for things. Additionally, Ferguson was keen to break the status quo of digital ownership of in-game assets.

“The reason we started with gaming is because gaming is the most exciting use case for NFTs. $110 billion is spent each year on digital assets that people don’t have rights to, and it’s a complete scam.”

Lessons learned from its first foray, the successful launch of Gods Unchained, a blockchain-powered play-to-earn tactical card game, is a platform for blockchain developers to build Web3 games with NFT integration. It played an integral role in establishing Immutable.

understand the solution

Immutability consists of two separate but inherently linked segments. ImmutableX is the company’s Ethereum Layer 2 NFT scaling platform, and Immutable Studios is the company’s game development arm.

Ferguson claims ImmutableX, an Ethereum-based layer 2 solution NFT platform, has learned valuable lessons from the development of Gods Unchained, which has shaped the capabilities of the infrastructure on which other blockchain games are built today. increase.

“A lot of gaming platforms have been built that don’t really understand the needs of the game from a technical standpoint, from a service standpoint, from a user experience standpoint.”

The Gods Unchained launch saw 50 million NFTs issued in its first week, and prices skyrocketed as gas prices in the Ethereum ecosystem skyrocketed. As Ferguson explained, this highlighted the huge need for scaling and reducing mint costs to make his Web3 NFT-packed game viable for any company.

“If this is going to go at scale, it has to have zero production costs. Take one medium-sized game with 100 million players and all of them only trade once or twice a day. That would cost the company tens of millions of dollars a week.”

ImmutableX focuses on making everyday in-game items tradable in low-cost bands. “Not because the price of Ethereum is $1,200 or $4,000, but because people trade cards to use in games,” said Ferguson. Gods again used his Unchained as an example of only a % drop.

Ferguson said high-value NFTs will always form part of the in-game market, but ease of use should drive the in-game economy. This leads to the question of profitability and how Immutable can offer free issuance of the NFTs advertised on his website.

Immutable facilitates this by paying for all costs of NFT minting using a Zero Knowledge (ZK) rollup, providing economies of scale where billions of transactions can be bundled together at a “reasonable cost.” To do. That’s still his eight-figure amount for Immutable, but Ferguson highlights a caveat.

“We will allow anyone to create these assets for free via an incredibly valuable economy, and in return monetize them by getting a small clip on every transaction. It means we have exactly the same incentives as the game and the user to maximize.”

Giving Back to the Ethereum Network

Immutable’s work to solve the scalability of NFT minting powering blockchain-based games is thanks to Starkware, an Ethereum Layer 2 platform pioneering zk-STARK proof technology.

This technology also allows Immutable to claim to be carbon neutral. Ferguson touts that he can create 600,000 NFTs with one proof that only occupies a portion of the Ethereum network’s blocks.

Nevertheless, zk-Rollups and Ethereum’s Merge have built an important platform that will enable infrastructure providers like Immutable to build a growing number of Web3-based games in the future.

“We are just a fraction of the size of the transactions per second that NFTs will ultimately perform. Trading a few assets will significantly increase the demand for the stack.”

According to Ferguson, Immutable also played a role in the development of batch minting and deferred minting, two popular NFT scaling paradigms currently used by NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea to Nifty Gateway.

Why Blockchain?

Blockchain purists have questioned whether some industries should use the technology to improve existing systems. Ferguson weighed the issue carefully, emphasizing his belief that digital users deserve rights to items and assets acquired in any digital environment.

“Our mission is to create better games that use Web3 under the hood so that people can have better experiences and have digital property rights. It’s this lie that’s been sold to consumers for the last 30 years that there should be zero rights to it just because.”

Ferguson believes that success in this area is already underway, highlighting over $9 billion invested in Web3 games in the past 18 months. This is then set up to create a stock share shift.

“The social benefits are huge. We are democratizing access to the economy by allowing people to build assets within games and allowing anyone to create content for games.

Web3 may put ownership in the hands of its users, but that doesn’t mean the mainstream AAA companies aren’t keeping an eye on the burgeoning sector. As Ferguson explained, these companies aim to stay ahead of disruptive technologies when Web3 games become the new standard in demand.

Immutables, on the other hand, continue to grow. The Australia-based blockchain technology company employs over 300 people and has raised over $300 million from investors including Coinbase, Tencent, Galaxy Digital and Animoca Brands.