Ken Anderson is the CTO of Tashi, developer of web3 and DePin gaming technology.
Multiplayer gaming is at a crossroads. It is time for us gamers to wake up and consider the future of the games that we love to play. A recent petition calling on game publishers to protect and preserve multiplayer games is gaining momentum with over 320,000 signatures to date. 27 countries have support from their citizens for the petition. Why are gamers concerned and what can we do about it?
The aim is to protect and preserve the multiplayer games that gamers have invested so much time and money in, especially as more titles are at risk of being “sunsetted” without notice. This petition is a nod to the problems faced by the traditional gaming sector, but the reality is that even a million voices may not be enough to protect the future of gaming.
Where does the problem stem from?
Publishers are the owners of the intellectual property of video games and have the right to build businesses around their IP as they see fit. This is relatively common for a studio or publisher. Part of the reason for this is that there are expenses associated with maintaining and running games, especially multiplayer games that can be server-intense when it comes to storing player progress, coordinating state sync between player computers, or even in-game live chat.
Some publishers may be more focused on IP protection than profitability. For example, a single-player game that is no longer supported by a publisher has no reason not to continue to be playable. There is a strong argument for making such games available after their end-of-life to players who have purchased the game or digital assets in the game.
Game publishers hold the reins over the games that millions of players love. Their control extends far beyond just the development and distribution of games; it includes the power to alter, suspend, or discontinue services without notice, as clearly stated in Blizzard’s End User License Agreement (EULA). This clause, while legally sound, underscores a deeper issue: players’ access to the games they invest time, money, and emotion into is not guaranteed.
This centralized control is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it allows for the consistent upkeep of games, ensuring an enjoyable experience. On the other, it leaves players vulnerable to corporate strategies that may align more with profit generating activities than maintenance of the games.
Shifting the balance of power from publishers to players
While the petition is a noble effort, its potential impact is limited by the realities of the game development industry. Forcing publishers to maintain games indefinitely may be impractical for the long term success of a studio. Game studios already operate under intense timelines and financial pressures. Imposing additional requirements for post-launch support could stifle innovation, delay new releases, and potentially push smaller studios out of the market. On a technical level there is a big risk in adding the complexity necessary to allow a game to continue operating past the end of commercial support.
Centralized servers and the reliance on studios to maintain them leaves players at the mercy of publishers. This is where web3 technology steps in as a beacon of hope for both players and developers.
Decentralization of gaming
Web3 technology offers an alternative to the traditional model of game development. At its core, web3 provides a model for distributing compute, storage, and ledger services, incentivizing participation with an economic overlay. In other words, the promise of web3 is moving those services, which traditionally live in the cloud, to the edge; orchestrating the underutilized resources of users to support compute jobs from other users. It is analogous to BitTorrent plus a loyalty program, compensating peers for supporting peers.
Technologies like Tashi’s consensus engine introduce a new model where the burden of synchronizing game state between players is distributed among players themselves. In traditional game development, the model of multiplayer game synchronization is enabled by a server-client or host-client architecture. In Tashi’s peer-to-peer architecture, each player’s gaming machine acts as both the game client and the game server, synchronizing with the other players’ servers to maintain the game’s state. This decentralized approach drastically reduces the costs associated with centralized servers and, more importantly, ensures that games can continue to operate independently of the publisher’s support.
Additionally, if a publisher shuts down a game, the in-game assets players have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours collecting disappear. Web3’s solution is to store the assets as digital tokens on decentralized public ledgers, which allows players to maintain proof of ownership of those assets beyond the commercial life of a game. Should the game resurrect using technology like Tashi’s consensus engine, those assets could also be applied as if the game never stopped.
But let’s briefly explore a more commercial benefit of web3 technology as it relates to the end-of-life of games; web3 fundamentally incorporates an incentive overlay to ensure security and availability of services, but by applying such technologies to game development, publishers and studios could realize a new stream of revenue as a perpetual commission for peer-to-peer game sessions and the movement of in-game assets between players, none of which the publisher needs to support.
The future of games is promising
Web3 doesn’t just promise better infrastructure; it changes the relationship between players and their games. Using blockchain, players can achieve true ownership of their in-game assets. These assets, whether they be rare items, characters, or achievements, are stored on a ledger, making them impervious to the shutdown of a game’s servers or the discontinuation of support by a publisher.
This level of ownership extends to the games themselves. In a web3-powered gaming ecosystem, the community can take over the management of a game if a publisher decides to move on. This democratizes the gaming experience, giving players a stake in the continuity of the worlds they love.
This move redefines the roles of players, developers, and publishers, fostering a more collaborative gaming ecosystem. While certain genres will still benefit from centralized servers, particularly those requiring complex state synchronization, many multiplayer games will thrive in a decentralized environment.
The petition to preserve multiplayer games is a step in the right direction, but it is through the adoption of web3 technology that the gaming community can truly safeguard the future of multiplayer gaming. This technology is the key to ensuring that the games we love today are still here tomorrow, regardless of corporate interests.