Everseed 🌱 Blockchain Strategy

Why blockchain, which one, and how we plan to integrate it with Everseed 🤖

Greetings friends! 👋

Last week our lead producer Hannah shared some high-level context on Everseed’s Product Opportunity. As a summary refresher, here is the most important takeaway: “For Everseed, we will not require players to spend money on NFTs in order to experience our full gameplay loop.” Today we hope to dive deeper into what exactly that means, discussing the technical decisions we’ve made to date for our product. 🤖

But first—story time! 📖

In the early days of the famed MMORPG World of Warcraft, one of the most coveted items in the game was Reins of the Swift Spectral Tiger. Why? The only way to obtain this epic mount was by buying physical WoW TCG booster packs in 2007 and being lucky enough to pull a Spectral Tiger Loot card. (Each card had a non-fungible code that could be redeemed for the in-game item.) With odds of 1 in 7,260, the expected cost then of getting a tiger via random chance was $2,823. While some players got lucky off the packs, others resorted to paying thousands of dollars to purchase cards directly off sites like eBay.

Fast forward years later and something strange started happening in 2015. Where once Spectral Tigers were rare, the numbers appearing on WoW’s auction house began to multiply overnight, while coincidentally at the same time an influx of new accounts began peddling them in trade chat. Hackers had discovered an exploit to dupe the tigers, and Blizzard did nothing while previous player-owners watched the value of their hard-earned digital assets plummet. 📉

The above anecdote is just one example of many in the history of gaming. Digital items, no matter how real they may appear to be in game, are really only just strings of data (i.e., 0s and 1s) at their most foundational level. Before blockchain existed, this data had been stored under the complete control of gaming companies. However, game developers are not experts in information security, and so an unintentional bug can ultimately lead to huge destruction of value on both the individual player and aggregate community level. Arguably worse is when the error is not actually a bug, but an intentional feature shipped by game developers, who oftentimes have competing goals versus players. 💢

Under this status quo, for years the only thing players could do was just trust their developer overseers to be responsible stewards for their digital possessions. However, like in the Spectral Tiger example above, thanks to carelessness and/or greed so many game makers have eroded this social contract of trust with their players. For this reason, the few companies that have prioritized player trust, like Riot Games, have consistently outperformed much of the industry for years.

Our studio, Amihan, was founded by a group of industry veterans from Riot, and there we learned firsthand how deeply important player trust is to the game development process. However, we left Riot to start Amihan because we became excited about how blockchain technology could codify the heretofore informal relationship of trust between developers and players, and what beautiful innovations may emerge from that evolution. 🤝

Thanks to blockchain, player items (aka data) now no longer have to be hidden behind closed studio doors. These items, represented as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), are instead recorded on a tamper-proof public ledger that is visible to everyone. A simplified explanation of NFTs is that they are digital assets with attached smart contracts. These “smart” contracts are much better than normal contracts because they are essentially backed by math and hardcoded to be unchangeable. 🤓

This may sound like a lot of technical jargon, so let’s use a concrete example to illustrate the difference. Before blockchain, if Blizzard said, “There will only ever be 5,000 Spectral Tigers in existence,” then the only thing you could do as a player was take them for their word. Using blockchain, if we at Amihan say, “There will only ever be 5,000 Tigerlily NFTs in existence,” aside from trusting us completely, you could also verify this claim yourself by checking the public code we ship in the smart contracts of the NFTs. 🔍

This increased transparency between developer and player is not the only thing that blockchain helps unlock for Everseed. The other added benefit is that we can rely on a distributed and battle-hardened network for the safeguarding of these valuable player items instead of needing to do that ourselves. This is because the burden of securing blockchain’s public ledger is distributed by everyone who participates in the network. If hackers want to steal digital items, they would have to attack a whole network instead of a single point of failure like a game studio.

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Now that we’ve explained why blockchain, let’s dive into which blockchain and how we plan to integrate.

In doing our homework, we quickly realized that blockchain technology is still in its infancy. Even though the oldest chains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have already been live and stable for years, they still are years behind their centralized Web2 counterparts in terms of scalability. For example, Ethereum is so notoriously congested now that consumers need to pay tens to hundreds of dollars just to perform any transaction on the network. ⚠️

Our aim with Everseed had always been to reach a player audience of millions to billions, not thousands. To support such ambitious growth, from a technical standpoint we knew we needed two things from a blockchain solution: high scalability and low transaction fees. Even if it meant making compromises along other axes, these two were mission critical to our company’s vision of “equalizing opportunity for all through games.”

Enter Solana. Although officially launched only two years ago, Solana’s ecosystem has already rapidly grown and attracted many Web3 enthusiasts due to the significant differences in how their blockchain is architected. Solana’s scalability is orders of magnitude better than almost all other major L1 & even L2 solutions, and consumers only have to pay fractions of a penny to transact on the network instead of hundreds of dollars.

Additionally, because Solana uses a much more energy-efficient and innovative proof-of-history system, it was able to recently announce that the entire network is carbon neutral thanks to carbon offsets. These extra sprinkles on top were especially lauded by our team because it aligned so well with one of Amihan’s core founding values: “Leave a positive impact.” Our entire team wants to leave the world a better place than how we found it, and we believe doing well is meaningless without also doing good. 🌞

Although much of this post has been dedicated to discussing blockchain and explaining our decisions relating to the technology, we want to emphasize again that the vast majority of the game we’re making, Everseed, will not interface with the blockchain at all. We stand by our statement: “For Everseed, we will not require players to spend money on NFTs in order to experience our full gameplay loop.” Just because one can turn any item or currency into a token (non-fungible or fungible) doesn’t mean one should. Similarly, just because one can develop a game to have every single transaction be completely “on-chain” doesn’t mean one should either.

We at Amihan like to think of ourselves as passionate artisans dedicated to our craft. Imagine us as bakers preparing you a delicious cake. Everseed’s core game loop is the base sponge, its economy is the icing, and only the sprinkles on top are our NFTs that interface with the blockchain. As a player, you can decide whether you want to keep the sprinkles on or leave them off, but even if you do choose to eat them you can do so feeling guilt free. 🧁

Tomorrow, March 11, we’ll be hosting our first official community AMA at 5:00PM GMT/UTC! Tune in to our Twitter Space to ask us any questions you’d like pertaining to the blog posts we’ve shared thus far on product and technology!

Next week our game director, Incorgnita, will be revealing more details about Everseed’s game design. Get hyped! You’re all in for a treat. 😉

Until next time, friends!
Paul, CTO, keteracel
Kenny, CEO, kliuless
Naomi, Game Director, Incorgnita