What is Web3 Gaming?: Types, Features, and Technology Stack

The concept of Web3 has incredibly transformed various industries, gaming being one of them. Web3 gaming platform revolves around the idea of providing decentralized and innovative experiences to the players. It allows them to truly own in-game assets and collectibles. Furthermore, people can play to earn via cryptocurrencies and NFTs in Web3 gaming. It decentralizes gaming by putting the power in the hands of the player over a central authority within a game. In addition, it also democratizes the voting and decision-making aspects and makes gaming truly player-driven.

Now that we’re familiar with the concept of Web3 gaming, let’s dive deeper into the subject and know more about what is Web3 gaming, its types, features, and the technology stack involved.

What is Web3 Gaming?

Web3 gaming combines blockchain technology and gaming. It creates a new gaming experience. Gaming is decentralized. In it, all players own gaming assets. These assets include characters, weapons, and even virtual property. No central authority owns them.

But, web3 gaming is more than just ownership. It is also about collecting rewards while playing. Web3 gaming has play-to-earn features. With blockchain, players get tokens or other prizes for playing. It's a new way to enjoy gaming while earning money on the side.

Web3 gaming provides fair virtual markets for the gaming industry. They let players fully control their assets and store them as game NFTs.

Now that we know what is web3 gaming is, let's discuss the different types of web3 gaming.

Different Types of Web3 Gaming

1. Collectible Game

This game is about collecting and trading digital assets. These assets are things like virtual characters, cards, or products. The assets tend to stay in NFT form. Axie Infinity is one example of this type of game. In it, players own their virtual character, things, or cards. They can easily buy, sell, and trade them on a decentralized marketplace.

2. Metaverse and Virtual Worlds

The metaverse and virtual worlds are immersive gaming experiences. They offer gamers a virtual environment to play, socialize, and even build. Decentraland and Sandbox are both games. They allow users to own virtual assets in the metaverse. Players can create their own virtual area. They can interact with each other and take part in various activities. These include events, games, and business.

3. Play-to-Earn Games

Play-to-earn games allow players to earn tokens or other rewards just by playing the game. This involves many activities. These include doing tasks and playing against opponents. They also include adding to game worlds via DeFi protocols. "Axie Infinity" is an example of a play-to-earn game.

Features of Web3 Gaming

Web gaming revolves around a value-exchange gaming model which involves the ability to own and trade in-game objects and collectibles. These are held and traded in the form of NFTs using cryptocurrencies. Web gaming is open-source and establishes self-sovereignty and decentralization in gaming. Here are five noteworthy features of Web3 gaming platforms:

1. Self-sovereignty and Interoperability

Ownership and interoperability are the biggest advantages offered by Web3 gaming. It offers self-sovereignty allowing players to own in-game assets and collectibles entirely in the form of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Traditional gaming also allowed players to own in-game assets and collectibles. However, they would lose all of it if they shifted to another gaming platform.

Web3 gaming addresses this challenge by offering true ownership and interoperability among gaming platforms. The in-game assets and collectibles owned by players can further be carried onto the next platform with the help of Web3 gaming.

2. Seamless Old-game Integration

The qualities that Web3 brings to the table aren’t just limited to the games that are now being developed. An amazing feature of Web3 gaming is to integrate and upgrade older game models into metaverse and blockchain platforms seamlessly. 

This enables us to make older game models decentralized and personalized in nature. In other words, every player has their preferred game. Extending old and popular games to the metaverse will allow players to design their avatars and exchange their favorite in-game assets and collectibles.

3. Audience-Driven Gaming

Web3 gaming promises tailored gaming experiences and aims to build a player-driven gaming ecosystem. It offers a multitude of benefits to the players. To begin with, the play-to-earn aspect effectively incentivizes gaming by allowing players to earn profit via their in-game items. 

Additionally, it enables old-game integration which revamps the old and favorite games of the players on the metaverse and offers the best of both worlds. Another huge benefit of Web3 gaming is that it supports self-sovereignty which benefits the players significantly.

4. Minimized Downtime

A huge advantage of Web3 gaming is that it offers significantly reduced downtimes. This is because these gaming ecosystems run autonomously and require closest to zero maintenance or intervention from any authority. This benefit stems out of a decentralized ecosystem as well. Block minting and high game data storage facility make Web3 gaming highly scalable and reduce downtimes significantly.

5. Increased Transparency

Decentralization is at the heart of Web3 gaming which essentially is a distributed process where games are hosted on the blockchain. This makes them extremely secure and unbreachable. In addition, it operates with no single point of failure. The blockchain-based gaming ecosystem depends on voting consensus to alter the gaming process. Being equally accessible to all the players present on the network, Web3 gaming promises a much higher level of transparency.

Web3 gaming indeed has incredible features to offer to the gaming industry. But how does it achieve that? What kind of technology stack goes into making Web3 games? Let’s find out?

Technology Stack of Web3 Gaming

Take a look at the technology stack used in making a Web3 gaming platform:

1. Web3 libraries/dApps

These libraries are used to interact with the blockchain platform by game developers and players. The in-game transactions and assets rely on these libraries and dApps. In addition, they also help interact with smart contracts.

2. Smart Contracts

In Web3 gaming, smart contracts are employed with the task of monitoring and governing various game processes. Additionally, they are also used in voting and decision-making for the changes to be made in the game. Remix IDE is the most popular resource to write, compile and deploy smart contracts.

3. Node/Web3 providers

These are used to extract gaming information on the blockchain network. Nodes are an inseparable part of the Web3 developer stack because they help Web3 libraries in interacting with smart contracts.

4. Digital Wallets

Every Web3 gaming platform has a blockchain-based digital wallet that identifies players using the unique wallet address. The gaming collectibles and in-game assets are stored in these wallets.

5. XR Hardware

The XR or extended reality hardware includes smart glasses, haptic gloves, scanning sensors, etc. They play the role of bridging the gaming ecosystem with the metaverse to create immersive gaming experiences.

6. Open Interoperable Media Standards

These standards are made up of texts, audio, 3D scenes, and vectors to be used by decentralized 3D applications.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Web3 gaming is a big leap that will transform the entire gaming landscape by amalgamating metaverse and blockchain technology into the gaming industry. It will effectively decentralize and democratize the industry by putting an end to central game administrators and owners of gaming platforms.