Voxelling for Fun and Profit

In this article I am going to start by looking at the current state of conventional sandbox games as compared to my own pet voxel world project, and then I am going to do something that I normally avoid, namely make a prediction about the future.

It is, however, only a possible future. Not something that I think is absolutely guaranteed to happen. What the prediction does is explain some of the reasons why I have been interested in the combination of #blockchain and gaming since ... well, before #web3 and the #metaverse became popular buzzwords to throw around.

And now for a diversion.

The diversion

My recent new hobby is building things in my voxel world. I find it strangely rewarding and relaxing. Last Sunday evening I took a break from childcare and work, put the kids in front of a movie, and built a church in the #Orthoverse. It is based on a tutorial I found online, and you can see the result in the title picture of this article.

When I say "my voxel world", it really is my world. There is a 96 by 96 block area on the server that is just mine. Other people can visit it and see what I've built, but they can't alter it. I am the ruler of that small yet quaint area, which is known as the Kingdom of Fangwanina. At the moment there are 1928 other lands, and 8072 more are still available to be bought. They're NFTs that cost about $3 a piece, which covers the #Ethereum gas fee, and about $0.50 goes towards running the server.

My oldest sons inform me that there aren't many other servers out there quite like this - either you set up a private server and build in your own world, or you build on a public server and run the risk of vandals smashing your build.

The question is, how is something like the Orthoverse ever going to be profitable? And in particular, could it be guided to become profitable for builders as well as me, the person who launched the project?

And no, I'm not talking about pay-to-earn based on Ponzinomics. Or speculating by buying tokens at a low price and then hoping to sell them on at a higher price, especially when the tokens being traded have no discernible value attached to them other than that imparted by the great fool theory.

I'm talking about developing a virtual world where there is genuine work that is valued and appreciated, and that people are more than willing and able to pay for.

Show me the money

At the moment, voxel game builders are mostly building structures in virtual worlds for fun. And if you're not Microsoft or Roblox, making money from voxel worlds is not easy. The odds of becoming rich by placing voxel brick ontop of voxel brick is lower than the equivalent in the real world. That's right - your average bricklayer is almost certainly going to earn more than your average Roblox or Minecraft builder, and your average architect certainly will.

I've identified three options to the sandbox builder/entrepreneur:

Make videos

If you come up with good designs, and you are lucky and get some exposure, you can make some money off your build through social media videos - the site shows adverts before, and perhaps during and after your clip, and you get a cut. On YouTube that cut is 45%, but you have to have a monetized YouTube account for those earnings to kick in. If you're not part of the YouTube partner program, they take 100%.

This means that if your channel becomes popular enough (more than 4,000 public watch hours in the last 12 months, and more than 1,000 subscribers), you can expect about $3 to $5 for every 1000 views your video garners.

Upload a mod

Or you can go to the equivalent of the Minecraft Marketplace for the game you are playing, and upload skins, mods, and builds that you have produced. Skins and buildings typically sell for a few dollars, and entire worlds might make tens of dollars per copy sold.

In the case of Minecraft, Microsoft takes a 30% cut from any sales of those you make. Skins sell for a few dollars, and the most fantastic builds and mods might go for $50.

Set up your own website

The final option is to launch your own website, connect it to a payment processor, and advertise it in various newsgroups and on social media. Then you are, in effect, building your own sales platform, which is a lot of work.

If you design funky new textures and skins, and you brush up on copyright law, you might be able to sell a non-exclusive license for your work to someone like me, for something in the hundreds of dollars. Exclusive licenses might make you a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Once again, very few artists can make a living off those kinds of returns. Most of them are doing it because they love creating and they love their voxel world of choice.

Is there another way?

No. Nothing significantly different at the moment, as far as I am aware. Your main choices are to monetize through another company and pay a large chunk for the privilege in commissions, or become a platform company yourself.

Where do we go now?

Whenever I talk about what might be in the future, there are always two types of naysayers, so to nip their objections in the bud, here are summaries of their arguments and why I think they're wrong:

• The ones who are of the opinion that the way things are now are as good as it will ever be. You have your bread, and you have your circuses, so what more do you want? This group absorbs technology press releases without realizing that what they're reading is usually content sponsored or produced by incumbent companies who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
• The ones who point out the obvious fact that we are not there yet, with the implied message being that we will therefore never get there. These are the people who subconsciously believe that the only way progression happens is through biological evolution despite all the evidence to the contrary. Before the hot air balloon and the airplane were invented their ilk were the ones pointing out that we don't have wings, are unlikely to grow any in the foreseeable future, and that heavier than air flight is therefore impossible.

Whenever you look at the application of a new technology to an existing domain such as the gaming industry, it is worth looking at what is going on now, where we might be in a year or so, and what the ultimate endgame might be (or rather, new beginning, not end, because games will always continue to develop).

The story so far

What we have mainly seen in the gaming industry is the use of cryptocurrency and tokens to raise funds for development. This has not gone well: scams and rug-pulls, and non-sustainable economies such as play-to-earn. To be honest, blockchain plus games has been a bit of a disaster so far.

Part of this is down to the fact that when an experienced investor or VC puts money in a gaming company, the company has usually already proved itself and is looking to scale. When the public invests in a crypto-backed game, they don't understand the difficulties in producing games, and the project managers usually don't either. Building compelling scalable games is hard. There is a reason why most blockbuster games coming out of triple-A game studios burn through nine figure sums and take four years or so to develop.

And as is usually the case with new technologies, there are opportunities for scammers to take advantage of the lack of understanding by the general public. We saw the same with email, which enabled advance-fee fraud at an unprecedented scale, and the Internet, which initially thrived through gambling and pornography sites.

It is my hope that we will see the end of this era fairly soon, and that the next generation of blockchain-backed games will be honestly produced by people who know what they are doing.

The near future

In the near future, I think the main benefits for users will be in independent identity management and the true ownership of in-game assets.

At the moment, setting up an account on any web2 site, be it a game or some other service, requires you to divulge all sorts of personal information, which is subsequently stored in badly protected databases around the world. These companies can't even look after their own data. What makes you think they will look after yours?

With a blockchain identity comes the ability for assets in the game to be owned by that identity, independently from the game company. The possibility of asset censorship remains - the game can decide to render your magic sword NFT as a banana or not at all, for example - but the assets will always be tradable on secondary markets.

At the moment, if a game company cancels your account, you lose all the items you paid for and worked so hard to obtain. Clearly, you can never get back the time you spent on a game, but with independently owned in-game items, at least you might be able to get some money for them.

The software industry, and the gaming industry in particular, have been moving towards subscription-based business models, with all the problems that paying rent to landlords entail. At least the housing market is covered by legislation to protect tenants from slum landlords and arbitrary eviction. Online game companies can usually find something in their terms and conditions that enable them to close your account if you annoy them, and even if they can't, they rely on the average user just giving up rather than seeking redress in the courts.

And the distant future

At the moment blockchains are too slow and costly to handle game data the way a database does. In the long run the cost will drop, and transaction speeds will rise. When that happens, and there are blockchains available that manage near-real-time data processing, then the game shifts some more. Censorship becomes much harder, and truly decentralized games can arise.

The final step is when game software is pushed onto decentralized file systems, and the clients communicate with each other through peer-to-peer networking. At that point we may well see games that are "released into the wild" and are completely out of the hands of the software company that made them from that point onward.

The incumbent game companies are going to push back against this, because it's a new business model, and incumbents don't like it when the business model changes. Hence we're seeing a lot of anti-blockchain propaganda in the game press at the moment.

I do think that when a gamer truly understands the difference between assets independently owned versus completely controlled by a gaming company, and when their "accounts" are not under the absolute control of a third-party company, they will start to shift towards preferring the latter. It only takes one bad experience with a gaming company to change your attitude, after all.

Back to the Orthoverse

So how much of this is real, and how much is still science fiction?

In the Orthoverse I have already implemented blockchain address login capability. It only took 25 lines of code, in which the game sends a challenge to your browser to prove that you really do control a given blockchain address, and when you click "sign" that proof is sent back to the game server. That's all.

This completely side-steps user accounts, federated logging in with Facebook or Google, and open authentication (OAuth). The only identifying information that has to be stored on the server is your blockchain address, which does not qualify as data pertaining to an identifiable natural person.

The primary asset in the game - the land that only you can build on - is already in place, and functions well. What I am trying to do is avoid the trap that so many other blockchain games fall into, which is summarized by the doctrine of turning everything that could be an NFT into an NFT and charging for it. That leads many blockchain games into the realm of free-to-play games, where every little improvement requires the player to shell out more cash. If there are going to be more NFTs associated with the game, in my opinion they need to have some utility for the user beyond constituting a barrier to game-play and a naked cash-grab by the gaming company.

And what about that marketplace for builders? One idea I am toying with is the possibility for a land owner to save the structure of something they have built to an NFT, and mint copies that other inhabitants of the land can buy and apply to their land. The original architect can then decided whether it is a limited edition, whether each NFT has a fixed or unlimited number of times it can be applied to a land, and all the other parameters. There is even the potential for a parallel system to copyright enforcement, where the server scans all the lands daily to detect unauthorized copies of a given design and deletes them.

I have plenty of other ideas (too many, in fact), but before I get to coding up the NFT build functionality or any of the other ideas there is some market validation to be done.

And what about the complete decentralization of the Orthoverse? That is still a long way off, but at least it is not inconceivable. It is not something I expect to be working on in the near future though.

At the moment, storing what could be as many as 700 million blocks that the world is made up of (at the moment we are looking at about 50 million), and updating some of the blocks as people build, is beyond the capacity of any significant public blockchain.

Similarly, converting the central game server libraries into a decentralized peer-to-peer system is a big task, and bandwidth and latency are issues to be solved.

A central server may take 30ms to receive a position update from a player, a few more milliseconds to process that, and then another 30ms to send it on to all the other players in the vicinity. Peer-to-peer networks typically experience two to twelve second delays in information propagation, which is far to slow for any kind of interactive multiplayer game.

However, network latency is only going down, as are transaction costs on the whole. Similarly, transaction processing speeds, transaction latency, and data storage capacities are going up.

The idea of downloading and displaying a DVD movie (4GB) in real time over the internet using 26kbps dial-up modems was laughable back in the late nineties. Now 4k movies (20GB+) are streamed to millions of homes every day.

I have a 32MB SD card on my desk, which I keep there as a reminder how quickly technology moves along.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

W. H. Gates III

Conclusion

If a hobbyist can put together a proof-of-concept in their spare time, there is no reason that commercial game companies cannot get in on the act too. The question is - do they want to?

And the answer is: no. Not given the profits they are making from their current business models, and from the shift to subscription-based models.

But do game players want this kind of change? Also no, not at the moment, as they are not aware of the benefits blockchain might bring to them. They are mostly either oblivious, or only aware of the negative press surrounding the technology.

Over time, as players become aware of the risks they run through centralized control and renting models, I am hopeful that they will come to appreciate the benefits of ownership within games.

But I would say that. After all, I'm all-in on blockchain...

About the author

As a researcher for the last 13 years, and a freelance consultant for the last 8, I am one of the very early participants in the blockchain space.

For the last year, as a hobby, I have been building the Orthoverse, a voxel-based game system founded on an NFT project to investigate web3 and the metaverse.

I find the only way to truly understand a new technology is to get out there and do something with it.

You can find my short explainer videos on blockchain over at my YouTube channel, and if you would like to visit my medieval-style voxel creations, go the Orthoverse and head due north from the henge to Fangwanina.

If you want to support my efforts, one way of doing so is to go to the Orthoverse NFT site and buy a land token. At current prices a token costs about 0.00181 ETH, or €2.60, of which about €0.50 goes to me (the rest covers the transaction gas fees).