Hello everyone!
I think it’s no sacramental secret that in the past years browser gaming has been greatly undermined by Mobile apps in terms of volume & audience.

Some research (that I’m not claiming to cover all aspects) indicates following key complexities that lay at the foundation for this:

Unresolved monetization question - it’s a hassle to implement payments inside the browser compared to “ready-to-go” POS inside Mobile. And besides technological aspects there is also a behavioral factor - users are not “accustomed” to paying in browser games, as historically browser gaming is the usual synonym for “free” time killer where you mindlessly click-away while standing in the queue or waiting for the bus.

Optimization issues - Different browsers and updates. As well as an open question on how to efficiently store game progress (LocalStorage? Can be flushed and it lacks mobility… How about generating some “in-game progress code” users have to write down and remember? Well, that’s just bad UX)

But as we’re living in the advent of Web3.0, I was wondering if there is any multi- or single-player project trying / thinking of integrating blockchain into their browser game to alleviate the hurdles above?
Like identifying user based on his wallet or storing game data directly on-chain… or anything like that?

And how do you think browser gaming will change in the coming years?

Would love to hear your thoughts on how do you see things evolving ?

But as we’re living in the advent of Web3.0, I was wondering if there is any multi- or single-player project trying / thinking of integrating blockchain into their browser game to alleviate the hurdles above?

I wonder: AFAIK crypto transaction fees of are usually high, so how can it help with transferring tiny amounts of money, as needed for a kind of F2P model?
The other question i have: How does a blockchain, including all it's costs for global synchronization, do better than other solutions, e.g. identifying a player by IP or account, and then storing his savegames locally on your server?

As a layman, i do not see the benefit yet. Maybe somebody can clarify.

Alex_prfct said:
historically browser gaming is the usual synonym for “free” time killer where you mindlessly click-away while standing in the queue or waiting for the bus.

Looking at some facebook games, it's free, but you have to watch 5 ads to get free tokens so you can play another round right now, or you have to wait a whole day to get them for free.
So i saw my wife watching a lot of ads.

In this sense, browser gaming is a somewhat lower tier than mobile gaming.
And we might want to raise the level here, but also technically, in terms of cutting edge visuals etc.

However, there are some problems with this idea:
My wife does not want to play AAA games, or to pay at all. And i do not want to play AAA games inside compromised and inefficient browser software, because to compensate, i'd need to pay even more for hardware.

So we have a problem of targeting a user base. Either they are happy with simple casual games, or they already have consoles or PC to play cutting edge AAA.
And all of them have mobiles, and do most of their browsing there, while also enjoying a rich offer of mobile games.

So how, and whom do we sell our idea of browser games?
This brings me to the Metaverse, which feels like a hype about an unspecified promise. The industry is excited, but the people ignore it.
Even worse, the association with blockchain, NFTs, crypto and mining generates a bad image over the entire idea. Most people just hate it and don't want it. It makes their GPUs expensive, it heatens the planet, it only is an invention of rich CEOs to milk more money. ‘Web3’ also is something which frightens people more than it attracts them, as far as i see personally.

So, on the short run, i think we better wait until those tides settle. If blockchain tech is useful, we can use it. But we might want to call it differently, to dodge the current, mostly refusing association.
On the long run, browser efficiency will improve, consoles and gaming PCs might become just too expensive, so i think browser gaming can take an increasing cut compared to other platforms.

I'm not sure I agree with some of your assessment. “browser are undermined by mobile” doesn't really make sense to me, I don't see that as what happened. Browser games transitioned and business markets changed. Flash was once king, and now is dead. Applets were once a thing and don't exist any more. HTML5 and canvas rendering are a thing, and more active than ever. The business is constantly evolving. Mobile games are a different market, and they have also been continuously evolving over the past 15 years.

Your difficulties about monetization are only up to whatever you implement in each case. Certainly mobile users are used to their app stores handling everything, that's a contractual obligation of doing business on that space. If you're on the web you don't have those contractual obligations and aren't forced into uniformity, so you're free to choose other options.

The talk of local storage is nonsense in terms of payment and sales, since you can't trust anything on the client for that.

The talk about integrating blockchain into a browser game for either optimization or monetization shows ignorance of each of them. Blockchain does solve some problems regarding digital currencies by providing a decentralized, externally verifiable, self-validating ledger, but although that's a digital currency problem that's not a problem games have. So basically you're trying to apply a very complex technical solution to a non-issue. Monetization is an enormous topic with hundreds of books written on the subject, and probably millions of web articles, discussion topics, and more. There are tasks, legal requirements, and business decisions around monetization that all need to be addressed, none of them have anything to do with blockchain.

Browser gaming is going to continue to be a viable solution for games. You'll continue to see browser based games, with the logic processed on servers and either locked behind payment and account gating or through ads. Mobile devices also aren't going anywhere, and will continue to also continue to be a viable solution for games.

Alex_prfct said:
I think it’s no sacramental secret that in the past years browser gaming has been greatly undermined by Mobile apps in terms of volume & audience.

No sacramental secret, you say. I was not so sure about that, but without having any figures to check, I couldn't argue the point with you. I didn't see how mobile app monetization could have an impact on browser game monetization, so I was happy to see…

frob said:
I'm not sure I agree with some of your assessment. “browser are undermined by mobile” doesn't really make sense to me, I don't see that as what happened. … Browser gaming is going to continue to be a viable solution for games. You'll continue to see browser based games, with the logic processed on servers and either locked behind payment and account gating or through ads. Mobile devices also aren't going anywhere, and will continue to also continue to be a viable solution for games.

Makes much more sense to me.

Guys, thank you very much for your input!

@joej

"I wonder: AFAIK crypto transaction fees of are usually high, so how can it help with transferring tiny amounts of money, as needed for a kind of F2P model?"

That's definitely the case right now with the gas fees being what they are. My POV is that we're still very much at the beginning with blockchain adaptation in general and with utility in gaming specifically, hype and speculation (FOMO & FUD) are unfortunately major factors atm and as you correctly mentioned this doesn't do wonders for the reputation.

But all the hustle aside I do believe that when the dust settles there will be some dedicated blockchain or Layer 2/3 solution interconnected with other blockchains that could actually be used for gaming (and would make sense economically)

Ohh, and just to clarify, I'm not referring to Bitcoin blockchain - that's pure currency, but rather smart-contact chains like Etherium (or EMV compatible), that can host some logic and assets.

Taking a step backwards, as @frob mentioned, what are the problems (if there are any) that we could expect blockchain to potentially solve for browser gaming?

I mentioned few above that looked to be at the top - monetization & authorization/state storage, but then again they potentially could be classified as opportunities to improve.

For example:

• Authenticating the user based on his wallet
• Incentives (tokens) for game progress or ads, an in-game auctions
• Storing user profile inside smart contract on-chain to shared between games
• Or storing game state or part of game logic inside smart contract
• Assigning some in-game items as NFTs and making them cross-game transferable
• Game feature decisions driven by community via DAO

One-by-one they may not bring significant short-term value immediately and look like more effort than gain, but cumulatively may change the landscape. I guess a lot of these thoughts are taking roots at the Web3 concepts that lobby personal ownership over proxy/provider ownership.

So in sense it's a chicken-egg question, what comes first - the possibility (aka blockchain) or demand (features).

Alex_prfct said:
Or storing game state or part of game logic inside smart contract

Assigning some in-game items as NFTs and making them cross-game transferable

I take these two arguments because they would bring new options and features to games. All the other points you listed are options we already have.

Discussing these, and keeping my role as the critic, i can easily expose you, as the blockchain proponent, trying to sell me snake oil in form of arguments your technology can not enable:

'To enable sharing of content between different games made by different developers, the developers first have to agree on conventions and standards. For example a general skeleton structure of characters to transfer animation, generalized simulation properties (rigid bodies, what joints are to be supported, motors?, etc.), generalized material specifications so the objects look the same in all games, etc.
Is this possible? Yes, but at the cost of stagnation. Once we rely on common standards, those standards hold us back to achieve further technical progress.
Does blockchain technology help us with developing such standards and compatible software? Simply no.'

So this discussion is actually a nice example to show the image problem. Blockchain proponent: Hey, let's change the world! Blockchain can do it! Gamedev: You have no idea about ‘it’.

Transferring or storing data is just not our problem. Our problem is that games are meant to be different from each other. We want different artstyles, different levels of realism in rendering and simulation.
And because of that, the whole Metaverse idea of transferring content between different games is an illusion, and not really desired in general.
If i import my Roblox avatar into Call Of Duty, it will just look silly. If we do it anyway, games become even more similar to each other, and thus more boring.
Once Roblox and CoD are basically the same game, the final Metaverse is here. Just one game, one shared experience. More the latter than the former, probably.

To make a more practical example, i can imagine publishers enable content sharing within a set of their own games. E.g. people can take their NFT gear from Rainbow Six and wear it in the next Assasins Creed, which coincidentally takes place in present time.
And publishers may deal with each other, so transfers also work between Final Fantasy and Assassins Creed. It's some work to develop such tech, but they decide to invest, to try it out.
What can we expect from this? Huge fantasy swords and anime girls fighting against Vikings and Romans?

It just makes no sense at all, as long as our games try to represent some theme, some idea, some background and story, some definition and direction.
It is like promising new features which nobody wants, just to sell a new technology, together with a new lifestyle. It's like Musk sending a Tesla to orbit. May be awesome, but for sure it's useless.
From my perspective, the claim blockchain or NFTs would be ‘technology’ is ridiculous on its own. We've had hashes or checksums before, why is this suddenly new technology, and why do they confuse identity with ownership? Just because the database is larger now, and synchronized copies exist on multiple servers?

Alex_prfct said:
I guess a lot of these thoughts are taking roots at the Web3 concepts that lobby personal ownership over proxy/provider ownership.

Most people think that's just another false promise:
Web1: People owned their websites and made them entirely themselves. It was just some static links and some gifs, though.
Web2: Facebook owns the website, people post their 2 cents there, but FB takes the profit from shiny, animated apps.
Web3: People think they own digital property, FB thinks they own the people, but it's an illusion on both ends.

Well, i tried to be open minded, but i ended up with just ranting again… sorry for that ; )

Thanks for sharing your optimistic perspective anyway. Not following the topic specifically, i do not read such arguments often.

As a gamedev, i believe in user content. The games i've spent most time on were Quake 3, Trackmania, Super Mario X. All of them because users provided never ending new content in form of levels.
But it seems this works best on a non profit basis. Neither the creators nor the devs saw any extra money from the fact i've played those games over years, while playing others just for hours.
Ofc. we want to change this to our advantage. We need some money to make our games. And there is opportunity for the players too: Being creative over being just a consumer is good without doubt.

But, if we want to get there, we have to solve true problems. Not showing progress on them, but instead trumpeting ‘blockchain, NFT, Meatverse’ buzzwords only exposes our cluelessness.
Selling in game items to people, but claiming it's something new now because each item is a NFT, and claiming it to be unique, although it's just a random mix of modular templates, exposes our greed and borderlines scam.

We surely need to try harder, and blockchain tech won't really help us much on the real problems.

Another point is that we could do all that today if developers actually wanted to. And if it could be made profitable, developers absolutely would want to do it.

JoeJ said:
To enable sharing of content between different games made by different developers, the developers first have to agree on conventions and standards.

Totally achievable right now today.

It has even been done before. EA's Spore had a creature creator that exported fully rigged models. It was a great technology, and we used it to make a bunch of prototype creatures. They used standardized formats — Collada models — and they were useful to some people.

In practice, apart from developers using it for prototyping, there was zero interest from most of the world, and certainly not enough commercial interest to design products around it. Spore was widely panned by critics, and the functionality was seen as slightly fun but ultimately useless. Anybody could create whatever creature types they wanted, with a range of movement types from slithering and inch-worming to typical walking, running, and jumping. They could be textured and skinned to look cute and cuddly with fur and go-go eyes, creepy, or frightening with teeth, spikes, scales, and claws. A little fun, but short-lived and deemed pointless.

And as pointed out, you generally wouldn't want it. Just like above it might be fun and novel for a short time, but games must be fun, and there is little fun in that feature alone.

Releasing content in blockchain is also the exact opposite of what most developers want. Blockchain is immutable by design. There are no upgrades, no bug fixes, no corrections from hacks or exploits. This is usually what we want from an online currency, once somebody has made a transaction, for better or worse it is permanent with no corrections. There are occasionally issues where someone transfers funds into the void where they are permanently irretrievable, and there are occasional mistakes where people send to the wrong account, which are all human error that banks and entities often deal with but are difficult to address in blockchain. In games, that permanence means exploits are permanent, it means tuning (also nerfing) are impossible, it means that once a defect is found it will remain forever. There is no patching around it, no rollback, no undo, no reverting, no server reset. At worst, it means a single defect destroys the IP forever.

For payment processing, if a developer wants to accept it as currency nothing is preventing that today. In fact, people can already pay with digital currency right now today. Not only can a payment processor accept various credit cards, direct money transfers, and currency conversion, there are payment processors (including PayPal) that are willing to take Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others.

I've been involved in quite a few discussions at work and in other sites where people propose all kinds of ideas for integrating blockchain into games. None of them have stood up even to basic questions, let alone deep ones. Anything the person wanted to do already had better, cheaper, easier, lower-risk solutions. Most data solutions had better cheaper solutions in traditional databases. Currency solutions could be solved cheaper and easier with a payment processing gateway (e.g. PayPal) or some other intermediate in-game currency just to avoid the tremendous volume of problems associated with currencies.

Mixing two blockchains together is a popular theory that people have, somehow tying their game's blockchain with a currency blockchain. Unfortunately that also fails fantastically because of classic database engineering flaws: you must have the ability to abort or rollback for consistency. The concept of futures in a blockchain comes close to solving this, but doesn't completely because the two systems aren't fully entwined. Although a single blockchain can make ACID guarantees, the moment you mix two ACID falls apart. People have tried to build systems that could handle it, but so far none work both as digital currency ledgers and as pieces in secondary transaction. It's been solved in traditional databases for 70 years, among the first business requirements that needed to be met.

So far, I've not seen a single actual problem in games that is better solved through blockchain technology. That doesn't mean it isn't possible to use them, people can contort and distort and squeeze problems into a blockchain solution, but apart from online currency (which is the problem current blockchain tech was explicitly designed and crafted to solve) the tech has been a bad fit for games. It is possible someone will discover a problem for which it is a good solution in our industry, but I've not seen one yet. It is a great solution tailored to a specific problem another industry had, but it isn't a good fit for any problems we currently have.

First: Integrating payments is easy, compared to building a full, competitive game. Anyone who says it's hard, certainly doesn't have enough time and skill to ship a competitive game. Supporting Square, or PayPal, or Google Pay, or Amazon Pay, is no harder than integrating a crypto SDK.

Second: Regarding “item portability:” I don't understand how anyone believes developers would have any incentive to import someone else's item into their game. The economics aren't there. Consider:

1. I'm building a Renaissance world exploration game.
2. There's some magic sail cloth that can make my ships sail 50% faster. Ultra powerful!
3. I now have the option of:
   1. Selling this for $25 in my own item store
   2. Checking whether the player has bought some particular item in some particular other game, and granting this effect for free to my player

If you were a game developer, which of these would you choose?

If you choose option 2, then that's almost certainly for marketing purposes – e g, trying to entice players of successful game 1 to switch to your game. But marketing items are almost always “pre-order custom skin” type items, not actual valuable game items. AND, if “stealing players because of inventory" was actually a mechanic that worked, then the first game developer is incented AGAINST publishing a particular player's inventory.

So, even if the technology could work, the economics don't. And as for the technology, any publisher can, today, provide a REST API that lets you verify ownership for some player of some item. No block chain needed. Very quick and easy. And nobody does it, quite likely because the economic incentives absolutely work against this ever happening.

So, anyone who makes this “re-use items between games” claim, goes on my “persons who don't think hard” list. Not because they like crypto – I like crypto for use cases it works for! – but because they didn't spend even 15 seconds thinking about how or whether the proposal would work.

hplus0603 said:
So, anyone who makes this “re-use items between games” claim, goes on my “persons who don't think hard” list.

What if it's you who does not think ahead far enough?

The argument is decentralization. Instead mighty banks, use crypto.
Similarly: Instead buying games from greedy publishers, made by lazy devs, make a better game yourself in the metaverse, and even earn by doing so.

Our days are counted… :D