Coinspeaker
Revolutionizing the Blockchain Gaming Experience With TomoChain

CryptoKitties was the flagship dapp that propelled the rise and fall of popular interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that provide provable scarcity of a digital asset on a public blockchain network.

While NFTs may have dissipated from the blockchain gaming space, they have retained an interest in financial assets like real estate where they have some intriguing implications.

However, despite the mediocre user numbers of blockchain games and crypto-collectible exchanges, some projects are attempting to revitalize the once-promising blockchain gaming space. In particular, TomoChain – the secure and low-latency blockchain network – is seeking to provide the infrastructure for a new generation of blockchain-based games.

How do you reconcile the differences between the current gaming paradigm and an open, decentralized network? TomoChain believes that it is highlighting the advantages of blockchains and building creative games that will attract users, developers, and investors to the sector.

Circumventing the Current Gaming Archetype

Surveying the current gaming landscape reveals two primary takeaways:

1. The industry is largely controlled by a few major players.
2. The business model is predicated on isolation of gaming environments.

Companies like Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, and Valve Corporation dominate some of the most popular games today such as Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Dota 2, respectively. These games exist in isolated environments where the companies behind them control the release of new content, media rights, rules of the game, and major tournaments.

Contrary to blockchains, these are closed systems, where the firms have become experts in extracting value from their gaming economies via upgradeable character skins, extension packs, and other types of new content.

Although centralized, these games offer much more advanced gameplay than what blockchains can currently pump out. They exist on centralized servers integrated with famous gaming engines (i.e., Unreal Engine) and are capable of scaling to millions of players.

Blockchains, on the other hand, are not at that level of scalability yet.

According to TomoChain:

“Blockchain-based games should be creative. Heavily and highly interactive games are not a fit with blockchains at the current development stage.”

The TomoChain team is right. Blockchains are not designed as the explicit infrastructure for game engines like Unreal; they are designed with some other critical advantages in mind though. TomoChain’s concept is to fuel the next wave of innovation in gaming by fostering the adequate Game Hub environment for blockchain-based games, and eventually, even hybrid games.

Examples of hybrid games that reconcile the differences between blockchains and traditional gaming environments are already available. On Ethereum, the pending (and delayed) launch of Gods Unchained should unveil the potential of leveraging the digital scarcity of blockchains without sacrificing the gameplay of traditional systems.

And that’s precisely what TomoChain is promoting.

TomoChain and The New Blockchain Gaming Ideation Ecosystem

TomoChain provides the resources and tools for developers to create innovative gaming experiences on a blockchain network. Their scalable, Proof-of-Stake Voting (PoSV) consensus scheme enables the network to overcome the technical limitations of Ethereum – primarily high transaction costs and network congestion.

Using their Game Hub, TomoChain’s goal is to become the ‘idea platform’ for developing blockchain games. Developers don’t have to worry about some of the problems precluding many users from using games on Ethereum, and step-by-step guides are available for building on the TomoChain network.

Rather than promoting the creation of heavily interactive games, they want to back inventive concepts for utilizing the primary advantages of blockchain games: verifiable digital scarcity, tokenized assets, decentralized exchange, and open development environments.

The project is also working towards the necessary layer two scaling solutions to facilitate blockchain gaming off-chain without sacrificing the digital scarcity. TomoChain is planning on implementing sharding, EVM parallelization, and working with other scaling projects such as Loom and Enjin to usher in more seamlessly interactive gaming experiences directly within a blockchain interface.

Interoperability is another promising development on the horizon for blockchain networks, as recently demonstrated with the launch of the Cosmos Network. TomoChain already enables portability of EVM (Ethereum) dapps and smart contracts to their network – including the featured game on TomoChain, Axie Infinity.

Eventually, TomoChain may become the outlet for Ethereum developers and financially incentive-driven participants to build, interact, and invest in games. Their suite of resources for fostering a healthy token economy of games, crypto-collectibles, and developers is already available.

If you’re looking to build on TomoChain, they currently have an international Game Dappathon ongoing. Developers can even build economic models directly into games using tokens, such as monetizing specific transactions or incentivizing users to hold in-game tokens that appreciate in value over time.

The original vision of blockchain-based gaming had faded into the background along with the extended bear market throughout 2018. That narrative is once again changing, as 2019 ramps up its technical innovation and positions projects like TomoChain to cultivate a new paradigm of blockchain gaming.

Revolutionizing the Blockchain Gaming Experience With TomoChain