<aside> 💡 This page introduces our rationale of building Primodium, a fully on-chain autonomous world. Visit https://www.primodium.com to play the latest version of Primodium on our testnet.
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All of Primodium’s game logic and state are executed and stored on the blockchain. This is an important distinction between the plethora of crypto-enabled games currently on the market. To clarify, we are not building:
In all the above cases, playing means that you rely on trusting a centralized server to log all your actions and execute all game logic. In Primodium, there is no centralized server processing your moves and executing the game logic.
In Web2 games, the game operator has the authority to change any aspects of the game. In on-chain games, there is no one that can change the game rules or change the game economy; on-chain games are decentralized.
While most players have no problems trusting Web2 game operators, removing the need for trust creates emergent properties that were not possible before. The emergent properties, outlined below, are the strongest reasons we have for why on-chain gaming will grow larger than their Web2 counterparts.
A sovereign game economy is an economy that does not rely on another authority to determine its value. Such economies emulate those seen in independent nations in the real world, where their values are self-determined, and as such, sovereign.
In Web2 games, the player economies are not sovereign. Centralized game operators have a monopoly on the in-game economy by withholding assets (through decreased drop rates), expanding supply (by having infinitely circulating in-game currency), altering demand (by changing the desirability or stats of items), or by confiscating player assets (through banning).
While the above are not usually problems that players voice their concerns on, the risks associated with centralized control in Web2 game economies, much like in their non-sovereign real world counterparts, create a ceiling on how much time and money participants are willing to spend. By removing such risks, on-chain economies result in more economic activity, much like their sovereign real world counterparts, which would mean significantly higher TVLs.
The positive correlation between economic freedom and GDP per capita. Centralized game economies are on the tail end of economic freedom. (Source: Jean-Pierre Chauffour, World Bank)
If Ethereum was instead centralized, as game economies currently are, it would be a lot smaller. Ethereum’s current size owes much to its participants and developers knowing that their assets will never be arbitrarily devalued or confiscated. An on-chain game decentralized in the manner that Ethereum is would therefore have economies much larger than those seen in centralized games today.
Traditional games are closed-source and require significant software licensing terms for third parties working with them. While most games welcome third-party contributors during their infancy, as these game platforms grow, third parties and game operators often become adversarial with one another. An example can be seen in Minecraft requiring monetized 3rd-party content to go through their official Marketplace (of which they take a 50% fee) since 2017, instead of providing support to their much longer running, but open, Java platform.
(L) The official Minecraft marketplace using Minecraft’s proprietary currency to buy game content. (R) CurseForge, a permissionless and open platform containing mods for Minecraft: Java Edition.
Open source games, on the other hand, despite allowing modders to contribute, have suffered from a lack of coordination and value accrual to developers. As such, no open-source game has taken off thus far. This has been a recurring theme; new open source protocols has been rare since the early internet, and centralized platforms and games came to dominate most consumer products.