In the 21st century where now every field (financial, physical, and virtual) is interconnected. Now, the online world has become so sophisticated that the various smart technologies we use to manage our daily life provide us instant access to almost everything we need with a single click. In this digital world, cryptocurrency payments, NFTs, or blockchain games are now established as a significant part of the expanding metaverse. While blockchain technology is not indispensable in building the Metaverse, there is no doubt that it makes it more powerful, transparent, safe, and reliable.
Metaverse technology has been hotly debated for quite some time now and if you are interested in the technology, you must have heard about it. Fortunately, since 2021, it has gained immense popularity and various companies continue to invest heavily in its development and expansion.
The Metaverse concept aims to drive us to a more digitized economy where users can interact, work, earn, socialize, play with each other, do business, and be entertained seamlessly in a virtual world. As the blockchain-based Metaverse is a fully decentralized infrastructure foundation, the real and main priority of its liberal ecosystem is the benefit of the users.
Among various industries, gaming is benefiting immensely from this technology. Before the advent of blockchain and metaverse technology, games were based on centralized servers, which meant that players did not have full control over their data, earnings, game activities, etc. Along with the changing pace of technology, the definition of the game has also changed and now people of all age groups are being attracted by NFT and P2E (Play-to-Earn) economy based on blockchain technology.
Blockchain-powered Metaverse Gaming
The term “Metaverse” is introduced to describe a combination of virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) worlds that can be accessed through software or headsets that help people interact with virtual worlds in real-time. The blockchain-powered Metaverse is the next generation of digital evolution that could inspire the decentralized ecosystem based on blockchain to go for the mainstream adoption trend.
Now, centralized gaming platforms are shifting towards decentralized blockchain technology to meet the growing demands of consumers. Blockchain technology is a have element for the best Metaverse gaming experiences due to its following properties:
- It is transparent so that every record is traceable and available to the public. Generally, decentralized projects have a strong community to discuss the issues to find solutions if any suspicious activities are noticed on the gaming platforms.
- It is secure and dependable so, the players can trust the platform.
- It allows you to have undisputable ownership over in-game items, NFTs, and cryptocurrency. Users can remain anonymous to protect their privacy.
- It assures players of improved and effective user experiences. Players can create unique profiles on the different gaming platforms which are associated with blockchain technology that forms immutable records for the different data sets.
- It assists in genuinely verifying different activities like purchases, in-game achievements, etc.
- It allows GameFi to work on the gaming platforms so that the players can hold, trade, and sell their assets. The P2E economy is due to blockchain technology.
- It allows users to earn and safely store rewards in the crypto wallet where the player has full control over that wallet.
- There is no risk of single-point failure because it is based on the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Data is distributed to all the connected nodes and synergized accordingly in real-time.
The decentralized blockchain network processes the different operations so quickly. It identifies the transactions, requests, order exceptions, leveling different data, etc. So, it can dramatically reduce the time for providing quality services. In another hand, GameFi is the most exciting element of blockchain-powered Metaverse gaming.
Working Mechanism of Metaverse to Empower Blockchain-Based E-Gaming
Metaverse gaming is based on suitable interfaces and communications between two different virtual environments where blockchain assists to create a decentralized ecosystem for the players with the features like better efficiency, security, interoperability, transparency, etc. Blockchain technology can be used in Metaverse gaming in two ways as follows:
- The entire game is built on the blockchain: In this case, the game runs directly interacting with the layers of the blockchain.
- The game is built in centralized servers, but the blockchain is used for asset management, trading, and rewarding NFTs.
The Metaverse can be either centralized or decentralized, in this article we are talking about the decentralized Metaverse that has the following core attributes to support blockchain-based gaming:
The cryptocurrency and the digital assets are the functionalities offered by the blockchain in the Metaverse.
Photo: The Sandbox
Some platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox allow users to buy land by leveraging NFTs and crypto which means the user is free to play, create, own, and govern their in-game items. Metaverse uses AR and VR technologies to connect virtual worlds that help users have a more organic and lifelike experience like in the real world. Generally, the players have their digital avatars in Metaverse, and they are uniquely distinguished in the 3D form.
In Metaverse gaming, players are not just wasting their valuable time. There is both entertainment plus earnings because Metaverse gaming has the P2E economy to earn real money.
In addition, most of the Metaverse gaming platforms are interoperable to allow users to transfer values from one gaming platform to another one.
Limitations of the Blockchain Technology to the Metaverse Gaming Expansion & Solutions
The biggest public blockchain network, Bitcoin, is still facing scalability and high energy consumption issues. And now, we have so many blockchain networks offering improved scalability, high throughputs, low latency, PoS consensus algorithms to consume less energy, etc., but they are not enough. Here, the problems and possible solutions are mentioned systematically.
1. Storage Scaling Issue: Blockchain-based storage is scattered or partitioned across all connected nodes in the form of shards, each node has a small portion of overall data to sync but most of the blockchain networks that we have now, do not have huge size data sharing capabilities especially when there is huge traffic in the network and their every block can contain the very small size of data. If large numbers of players gather at the same time to create excessive events and transactions, the network can get congested.
Solution: In the future, powerful computers with huge data storing capabilities can be grouped (Decentralized) to form a cluster of computers(nodes) in a blockchain network.
2. Security: It has always been the key issue in blockchain technology. So many blockchain networks are still at the risk of 51%, DDoS attacks, etc. If the weakly constructed codes are exploited, there will be expensive losses.
Solution: Developers should be focused on inventing the proper solutions to address these issues by creating advanced blockchain solutions.
3. Complexity: Users need to create an account in the gaming platform that needs installations of crypto wallets and certain amounts of crypto in the wallet to initiate the games which could create complexities because having crypto in the wallet is not an easier task at all.
Solution: Easier user interface with biometric login detection from the AI-enabled blockchain could solve this issue.
Different Challenges in the Metaverse & How Blockchain Solves Them?
Metaverse itself is technology at an early stage, the construction process of the infrastructure required for it is ongoing and developers, engineers, and scientists are constantly working on it. We are discussing below the challenges faced by Metaverse and how advanced blockchain can solve them.
1. Data Acquisition Challenges in Metaverse Gaming: The data acquisition system of Metaverse could be affected if the gaming platforms keep creating high-quality digital data at the same time from the players engaged with the platforms. Eventually, the system could crash due to failure in processing the enormous amount of data.
Blockchain solution: All transactions and data in the blockchain are validated before including them in each new block, so there are fewer chances to include false data in the new block after achieving the consensus.
2. Data Storage Challenges in Metaverse Gaming: Especially, the data labeling issue can be closely associated with these challenges when the metaverse-based gaming platforms start to produce larger size data files. The gaming platform could stop working while deploying the gaming applications causing an excessive loss at the end.
Blockchain solution: It has a unique data sharing mechanism as each block consists of the pre-determined size of data which is verified by the nodes, there are fewer chances that fake data could get involved, or the centralized entity manipulates the data. It also dramatically reduces the risks of single-point failure of the system.
3. Data Privacy and Security Challenges in the Metaverse: Centralized platforms in the Metaverse can be at risk of hacking. If attackers manage to steal sensitive data, so many users’ sensitive data will be misused for criminal activities.
Blockchain solution: Decentralized blockchain is safer than a centralized platform as the blockchain has strong encryption to ensure the security of users’ data.
Future of Blockchain-Powered Metaverse Gaming:
There are many challenges to be faced not only by the centralized metaverse but also by the decentralized Metaverse, such as the challenges related to security and legal regulation are becoming the subject of debate, however, since this technology is in a more sophisticated and expanding stage, hope there will be solutions to all these challenges in the future. So, here are some points how what future Metaverse gaming would look like.
- Current blockchain-based Metaverse gaming projects are using AR and VR technology to allow users to interact with the virtual world but in the future, there is the possibility, that the virtual world would be the mirror of the digital world in the gaming platform.
- Development of advanced AI is going on. Once it gets to the refined and advanced stage, AI will be integrated with the Metaverse to enhance the gaming experiences to the next level.
- There may be a huge flow of money from the centralized bigger company to monopolize the Metaverse gaming platforms.
- The advanced IoT devices will help Metaverse to get expanded to search for another horizon.
- Quantum computing will transform all the Metaverse gaming tech to another level as a high-quality video game could be entirely made on the blockchain if highly powerful computers go for the mainstream use cases.
- The advanced 3D reality of Metaverse gaming would attract any sort of users from all around the world.
- The high-bandwidth decentralized blockchain network will be powering up Metaverse gaming with the fastest internet connectivity to allow seamless streaming in gaming.
Closing Thoughts:
Blockchain technology has a crucial role in the foundation, development, and advancement of Metaverse gaming. This emerging next-level technology has opened endless possibilities for game developers. It is possible that Metaverse gaming will change the course of gaming entertainment in the future because Metaverse supports NFTs, the P2E economy, etc. to support the mass adoption trends.