Many blockchain games support asset ownership, including cards, kitties, or gods. These have varying degrees of centralization.
Some of these have backdoors
Some of these suffer from high transaction fees
Our definition of decentralization requires the following provisions
- Decentralization can’t be the at the cost of absurd fees.
- In-game assets are non-custodial.
- Developers do not have the capacity to devalue in-game assets for profit.
- Developers cannot inflate or print assets for the purpose of eventually selling them.
- Developers cannot fail to support proprietary software that must be supported for assets to have value.
- Developers cannot fail to host data relevant to the game’s functioning.
- Developers cannot affect game-logic such that asset devaluation occurs through loss of rarity or significant loss of usefulness. Balancing may be required for interpretation of NFT attributes.
The minimal steps taken towards decentralization are
- All NFTs are generated by immutable minter contracts, deployed once. Metadata is stored on Cardano.
- Large files such as illustrations of NFT characters are stored on IPFS or similar technology.
- All NFTs are exposed for third-party usage (wallets, games, dApps) via an SDK
Stretch goals for decentralization are as follows
- All multiplayer game logic is accessible in a totally decentralized manner and can be run on Cardano using Hydra. This includes non-gameplay elements such as matchmaking.
- Game is fully moddable. Any first-party content is completely replicable using provided modding tools.
- Additional character NFTs or game rule changes are voted on by the community.
- Supported game modes such as modes allowing only certain NFTs are community decided.