Digital Ownership Affected By Web3 Gaming’s Social Benefits

Robbie Ferguson, the co-founder of Immutable, says Web3 games might change digital property ownership and value sharing. Experience is invaluable. Even if you ban your brother’s Runescape account.

Robbie Ferguson spent hundreds of hours playing games as a child. One day, he signed onto Runescape, which changed his attitude on digital ownership and Web3 gaming.

“I entered into my brother’s shared Runescape account and lost his Red Dragon Armor. The following day, I felt so awful that I purchased gold from a farm. The account was banned the next day.”

Ferguson, a software engineer who discovered Bitcoin in 2014, was affected by the event. In 2015, Ethereum and its ecosystem piqued his curiosity.

Ferguson was angered by the “arbitrary impunity” with which mainstream firms handled gaming economies and assets after the Runescape ban.

Ferguson said at the Token2049 conference in Singapore in 2022 how he, his brother James, and Alex Connolly co-founded Immutable in 2018 after building a decentralized game.

Ether Bots, their first Ethereum-powered game, taught the three what should be on-chain vs off-chain and established the groundwork for a platform for constructing Web3-based games and NFT capabilities. Ferguson wanted to change the digital ownership of in-game assets. Games are the most fascinating NFT use case, so we began there. $110 billion a year is spent on digital property to which consumers have no rights.

Advertisement

Gods Unchained, a blockchain-powered play-to-earn tactical card game, helped create Immutable, a platform for blockchain development businesses to build Web3 games with NFT integration.

Solution understanding

Immutable has two connected parts. ImmutableX is a layer-2 Ethereum NFT scaling platform, and Immutable Studios develops games.

Ferguson said ImmutableX, an Ethereum-based layer-2 NFT platform, learned key lessons from Gods Unchained, which affected the functionality of subsequent blockchain games.

“Many gaming platforms don’t comprehend games’ tech, services, and user experience demands.”

Gods Unchained’s debut created 50 million NFTs in its first week, leading to a price rise owing to high Ethereum gas expenses. This underlined the need to scale and minimize minting costs for Web3 NFT-packed games, as Ferguson said.

If we want something to scale, we must make it free. If every participant in a medium-sized game trades once or twice each day, the company’s weekly cost is tens of millions of dollars.

ImmutableX trades in-game goods in low-cost bands. Gods Unchained trading cards are only down 10% from market highs because “people exchange cards to use in the game, not because Ethereum is $1,200 or $4,000,” said Ferguson.

Usability should drive in-game economics, says Ferguson, not high-value NFTs. This raises the issue of Immutable’s profitability and how it can provide free NFT minting.

Immutable pays for all NFT minting expenses utilizing zero-knowledge (ZK) roll-ups, allowing economies of scale that enable billions of transactions to be packaged for a “fair fee.” Still, an eight-figure payment, but Ferguson included a condition.

Advertisement

We design it so anybody can build assets for free through very valuable economies and monetize by taking tiny clips on every transaction, so we have the same motivation as games and consumers to increase volume.

Starkware, the Ethereum layer-2 platform that pioneered the zk-STARK proof technique, helped Immutable tackle the scalability of NFT minting to power blockchain-based games.

Ferguson touts Immutable’s potential to mint 600,000 NFTs in a single proof that takes up a fraction of an Ethereum block.

zk-Rollups and Ethereum’s Merge have created an essential framework for future Web3-based gaming infrastructure providers like Immutable.

“We’re just at a fraction of NFTs’ transactions per second. With billions of players worldwide, exchanging a few assets per day will boost demand for the stack.”

Immutable helped create batched minting and postponed minting, two NFT scaling methodologies used by OpenSea to Nifty Gateway.

Blockchain?

Blockchain purists dispute if certain sectors need to update old systems. Ferguson extensively studied this subject, emphasizing his opinion that digital users have rights to digital objects and assets.

“The objective should be to produce a better game that leverages Web3 so people have intellectual property rights. Since the 1980s, customers have been told that if something is intangible, they have no rights to it.”

Ferguson says the sector’s success is already evident, citing $9 billion in Web3 gaming investments over the previous 18 months. This, in turn, is expected to generate a change in equity sharing:

“Social advantages are enormous. With individuals producing in-game assets and the potential for anybody to develop game content, Web3 can now allow those people to monetize better.”

Web3 may give consumers control, but it doesn’t mean AAA businesses aren’t watching the industry. As Ferguson noted, these corporations will want to position themselves ahead of the disruptive technology if Web3 games become a new standard that is in demand.

Advertisement

Immutable grows. The Australian blockchain startup employs over 300 employees and has funded $300 million from Coinbase, Tencent, Galaxy Digital, and Animoca Brands.

For More NFT News, Click Here.