don't build an onchain game

bots, devs discussing their strategies, EthCC and more

rare saturday newsletter, i hope you’re spending your weekend playing onchain games as you should.

EthCC happend with several onchain gaming events, i didn’t attend it myself but the vibes seemed great and the turnout was very positive.

Some events and recaps: Lords meetup, recap from technoir, co-hosted onchain games meetup, bullish takeaways, another great Komorebi Hacker House.

so what happened last week:

a new DEX launched on the Proof of Play Apex Chain, playing Fren Pet just became a lot easier, the FOCG Rabbit Hole launched allowing for 1-click browsing of games, Gangsters Arena is launching a new season soon and introducing Crews, Justing Gilbert redpilling the public on autonomous worlds, a new Primodium dashboard went live and playing Primodium is paying for gifts of kids, Rives got a big performance update and started a new contest.

on top of that a new onchain game got announce in Onchain Heroes, made by one of the Wolf Game developers.

we also got a first teaser from Provable Games, a new onchain gaming studio

the never ending problem of bots (or is it really a problem?)

a new onchain game in Kamigotchi launched last week and players immediatly started

fishing for the optimal way to play and building bots to hunt others. this forced the team to implement several updates to make the gameplay “more fair” or at least less prone to bots. bots are a constant topic, not only in onchain gaming but crypto gaming in general. it’s becoming evident that avoiding bots alltogether is impossible. incentives for playing is a double edged sword in that case, on the one hand they attract using bots in many case, on the other hand adapting your incentives to organic, non-bot behavior is a strong tool in mitigating bots. i remember a good quote from @0xsmallbrain on botting from the AW Assembly last year:

"it should never be better to spin up a new wallet to play a game"

which is a good orientation for game design but not the whole solution.

another good take from Skarly on this topic:

not every game is for the masses, and if botting is very present in your game, it likely falls into that category

which way western man, offchain, testnet, mainnet?

this post by Mirage dev y77c sparked some discussions on whether onchain games should be built 100% onchain from the start or not to be more flexible in the early stages.

many supporters of onchain gaming argued heavily in favour of building onchain the whole way, otherwise, why do you even want to build a fully onchain game.

but i personally think there is no inherent problem in building some parts of your game offchain first to be more flexible before pushing them onchain. we’re seeing this with the PvP aspect of Pirate Nation, which is one of the few gameplay parts of PN not onchain. the reasoning is that the game mode is not a key focus of the game yet and they want to optimize it first before making it onchain. what do you think?