Web3 Token Generation for Game Developers

The growing popularity of web3 games - digital games using blockchain technology as an underlying component of a game's economy - has offered players the ability to completely own their in-game assets and collectibles in the form of digital tokens (or NFTs.) These blockchain-built, decentralized games enable players to capture the utility and value of in-game purchases and asset acquisitions more effectively.

Web3-Enabled Games

Web3-enabled games focus more heavily on generating value for players and, according to an article from Cryptopedia, “this dynamic introduces a paradigm shift that allows players to better capture the utility and value of assets acquired through in-game purchases, regular gameplay, or promotional events.”

For instance, when a player purchases an armor upgrade in a traditional game, their only benefit is enhanced gameplay within the context of that one game. However, in a gaming ecosystem that utilizes cross-platform non-fungible tokens, the same armor can be tokenized in a way that transforms in-game purchases into transferable assets that may confer benefits across interconnected games or be exchanged for money or other digital assets.

Token Generation Flow

So, what does this mean for developers? Well, because more and more players will be searching for web3 games driven by non-fungible tokens that promote ownership, scarcity, and interoperability, developers must go through a service to automate token generation for their players.

While this manual process is quite unfriendly - dealing with long numbers and requiring a lot of steps - the exciting challenge is to make it easy and seamless.

There are a few different flows for issuing an NFT, but we've detailed a common flow (adapted from Idea Usher) that demonstrates what issuing an individual listing on an NFT marketplace, such as OpenSea, might look like:

AccelByte's service is aimed to work as a traditional game service and the flow would look something like this:

1. Developer signs up to use our service
2. Developer uses our frontend or API to create game and token definitions (names, images, etc.)
3. Developer calls our API to assign tokens to players, just like they would items in a game. Behind the scenes though, these tokens have been minted on a blockchain
4. These tokens will be viewable by players on marketplaces automatically as we'll generate a wallet for each player. If a player wants to trade their assets on an open marketplace, they will need to get a browser plugin and fund it as in your current steps
5. The developer can also create a marketplace of their own using our APIs to trade assets, in which case no explicit wallet is ever needed by the player

Web3 Potential

Using underlying blockchain networks to enable the generation and deployment of tokens within multiple gaming environments will allow players to enhance the personalization and creativity of their gaming experience. What's more, developers using blockchain-built games have the potential to expand their gaming economies dramatically, establish new gaming categories, and fuel the development of new games.

Interested in learning more about what web3 gaming means for developers? Download the full eBook here.