As my previous posts & tweets have mentioned, blockchain has no place in most single-player games. Any attempt at forcing it will be detrimental to the experience. But let’s try to brainstorm if there are any niches where it makes sense, at all?

Single-player games developed by a DAO

So, maybe blockchain has no place in these games, but can blockchains help in their creation? Again, single-player games require a strong and coherent vision - a cathedral approach is basically a pre-requisite. Perhaps permissioned blockchains can aid somewhere in the process (more on that below!), but public blockchains - not really.

Perhaps a blockchain can’t help with the creative and software development of the game, but how about the business side? Fully remote studios with a truly global worker base is difficult, but achievable, as proven by studios like Moon Studios. Potentially, blockchains can help streamline financing, payroll, ownership, profit-sharing contracts etc. but the problem is it actually leads to more paperwork, not less. Even if blockchains can streamline these processes, the bottleneck are the laws and regulations of your jurisdiction.

In a future when DAOs are legally recognized and sensibly regulated, sure, it would make sense for some studios - namely the ones which are largely remote and global, have a distributed ownership structure etc. How about going the way of existing DAOs with legal workarounds? The problem is, the vast majority of revenues by single-player games will be through traditional venues. This approach may work for a DeFi protocol because their revenues are crypto native. So, really, there’s no point in bringing ownership onchain, combined with the aforementioned reality of necessarily cathedral development.

Single-player games as a platform

Coming back to development - where a DAO can help, though, is in development and financialization of mods, after the core game is finished. Mods are messy and certainly disrupt the aforementioned coherent vision. But that’s what mods are all about!

It could be mostly accomplished on a permissioned network, but maybe some larger games like a Skyrim could consider a semi-permissioned/public solution. The entire mod platform can be onchain, writes can be metered and tracked, and the distribution platform can be entirely onchain. Depending on the licensing afforded by the original game’s publishers, mods can even be financialized. As alluded to earlier, some variant of this could also potentially be used internally by the game developer.

But that leads to a larger topic - a platform of single-player games. I have previously talked about this in a multi-player games context - where the platform is one larger universe, and different communities can build their own multiplayer game inside of it within the rules of the onchain smart contacts. Likewise, you can have a single-player game with one overarching theme, but you have many subplots and subgames inside of it.

Blockchains can help with ordering and consensus on the stories in these subplots. Think of it this way - the subgames that people play are singleplayer, but the development of these is in itself a multiplayer game! Of course, we have seen large-scale mods before which are basically DLC singleplayer expansions to the original game. But what blockchains introduce is the possibility of ordering so there’s some sort of a canon and progression maintained, and the universe works holistically. The development can be organized as DAOs, with voting per in-game reputation of its players & developers.

Novel mechanics

Needless to say, onchain smart contracts are best suited to enabling novel mechanics in multiplayer games. That begs the question - can they also be used for singleplayer games? Yeah, it’s hard to imagine, because everything a smart contract can do, the game developers’ server can simply do better in the SP context. Still, I’ll leave the possibility open to a maverick designer who could come up with an idea. Of course, the aforementioned thing about singleplayer games as a platform will require onchain smart contracts.

Concluding, blockchains only make sense in multiplayer games in very specific niches; this is even more true for single-player games. You can go through a list of your favourite single-player games, and 99.99% have no place for blockchains, and indeed any attempt it at forcing them will make those much worse games. So, this is certainly a niche within a niche, but even so, I believe there could be some experiments worth attempting.