The future of Gaming on the Blockchain with Cartesi

4 min readJul 25, 2020

“Cartesi will unleash vast new possibilities for blockchain games. Game Developers will be able to use traditional tools and libraries that can be compiled for Linux. Additionally, game state processing will be free from the computational limits and high fees of blockchains without the need to sacrifice decentralization.”

Over the years, the gaming industry has experienced massive growth, at some point in the last few years, this growth stalled. Then came the advent of mobile games which increased the number of user conversions as more people could access games from their mobile phones. However, 8 to 9 years after the adoption of mobile games, the growth of mobile game usage is stalling and growing at about 65%. A shift is needed to increase the growth of the gaming industry in general.

A greater percentage of the game users never pay a dime, hence the game developers hardly see conversion for games produced. Now, the game players are using the experiences of the game developers without paying a dime.

Gaming with Blockchain

If the game developers can change the conversion rate to generate lots of revenue that will increase the value of the gaming industry. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) is here to make this difference. The Non-fungible token can make objects in a game permanent, tradeable, transferable, and unique.

The blockchain is a decentralized database that is transparent and immutable (very had to tamper with). Blockchain technology will disrupt many sectors and industries including the gaming industry. However, most people are focused and drawn only to the cryptocurrency aspect of technology. The gaming industry is one industry that the blockchain will positively disrupt. Crypto collectibles are in-game objects that use the blockchain to ensure that the player uses the collectible owned by the gaming company to guarantee the rarity of the object. Also, to ensure that the collectible is non-duplicable.

Benefits of Gaming with the blockchain

Software development kits (SDKs) by Blockchain startups use frameworks for game developers that include wallets, game plugins, and other apps for virtual item management and payment gateway.

Purchasing in-game assets with Cryptocurrencies:

Players do not have to rely on 3rd-party payment providers to process their fiat currency transactions, instead, they can buy game collectibles instantly. As a game developer, you can help players by enabling them to purchase in-game assets using cryptocurrencies.

Safe environment for game developers:

Blockchain platforms like Cartesi use highly powerful data encryption technologies like the private key-public key to secure crypto token transactions.

Interoperable profile for gamers:

if you build an interesting enough game on the blockchain, players won’t shy away from projecting real value on intangible digital collectibles. The key is a game that’s fun to play.

Blockchain-based games allow players to own their own in-game assets:

Players can own their assets. A blockchain-based game will use smart contracts to govern transactions inside the game, and that makes all the difference.

The future of Gaming with Cartesi

Cartesi is a platform that enables the development and deployment of scalable decentralized applications including gaming applications. Cartesi builds hybrid decentralized applications that can run both on-chain and off-chain.

Introducing Creepts

Creepts is a classic tower defense blockchain game built by Cartesi. Creepts is a single-elimination style tournament, where players compete for the highest score. It relies on a Tournaments are scheduled on the blockchain and each one is comprised of 4 phases:

Commit

The player can choose to participate in any tournament. The selection will set the maze and the player will be able to play repeated times in order to improve their score; At the end of each game, information about the score and player moves are sent to the blockchain.

Reveal

At this point, the score of each player is overtly revealed on the blockchain, and from this point on, no one is allowed to try and improve their scores.

Rounds

This is the phase in which the single-elimination process happens. Player claims are organized on a bracket structure where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated. Each winner is promoted to the next round in the bracket until the final match-up, whose winner becomes the tournament champion.

End

The tournament enters the end state when the last match-up is concluded with a winner. From this point on, all players involved in the tournament are able to replay the game of the winner.

Several weeks ago Cartesi held a gaming contest in partnership with Binance with $50000 worth of giveaway. Features of creepts that makes it amazing includes:
- It is open-source, and
- Reproducible (gamers can replay each others game actions).

Cartesi runs blockchain games off-chain computations, made fully verifiable on-chain, built using traditional software stacks. Consensus and security guaranteed by the Ethereum Blockchain.