OP Games Brings Purity of Gaming to Blockchain
Ever since Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, metaverse has no longer been a fresh topic in the industry. From the teaser, we can imagine a future wherein everyone can live with their own avatars to have meetings, to party, and to play games with others in an alternate dimension that seems so ravishing that it practically brings out our fantasy towards it, especially for gaming. We were first introduced to arcade games back in the old times, then we had PC games and consoles. Nowadays, various devices for VR and AR have entered gamers’ sights. Maybe it’s promising that one day we will experience those as illustrated in Ready Player One. However, before the presence of Ready Player One, there was TRON. Coincidentally, it starts with the arcade, the origin of the pure fun of gaming.
Blockchain games are technically more about good storytelling rather than making games down to the floor, from the perspective of gaming, so far. Apart from the newly invented concept of Play-to-Earn, most of the current blockchain games have not yet achieved the level of entertainment compared to traditional AAA games (Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, God of War, etc.), even more, disappointing than the ancient arcade games. It has always been project teams telling people there is Play-to-Earn and everyone apes in, while players’ ideas have not been paid attention to. What if players can just talk to the developer and say, “this is something we want in the games, can you actualize it for us?”?
That way they can literally shape the games they love. There will be a new gaming era, and that is exactly what OP Games would like to offer.
OP Games is a project built on NEAR Protocol, aiming to be the center of Web 3.0 gaming that is capable of merging NFTs and DAOs to empower users to take control of the games they love and find the pure fun of gaming like entering the arcade for the very first time. When it comes to the arcade of the metaverse, OP Games pictures that to be a platform where creators and players are able to talk to each other. Moreover, the team is setting up to build a gaming arcade online with multiple games, and these games are not owned by the arcade themselves but rather by the community. To achieve that, OP Games, for the very first time, allows developers to turn entire games into fractionalized NFTs, which means players can now own a fraction of the game and co-own the project itself, unlike the rest of blockchain gaming teams.
Through this co-ownership, players can enjoy the price appreciation if the game succeeds, and even decide where the game goes in the future by participating in the DAO of each individual game. For the game developers, they are now able to fundraise from the fractionalized NFTs and DAOs of various games. When players purchase the fractions of games, they inject a certain amount of crypto assets into the game’s treasury held by the corresponding DAO. By sharing the fractional ownership of the games they have bought, players immediately become the game owners as well as the members of the DAO, which enables them to make proposals, vote for game updates, fund additional development, and even elect new developers to onboard the development team.
In the vision of OP Games, neither project teams nor developers own the game, but the players do. The emerging worry about Play-to-Earn is that players do not really get to enjoy the pure fun of playing games. The moment that project teams implement a Play-to-Earn aspect to the games, they turn into work. Video clips, in which guild members are playing Axie Infinity with several smartphones and PCs at the same time, are all over the network. It is kind of ironic that these are demonstrated as advertisements for Play-to-Earn games. Even though it’s a game and it is supposed to be fun by nature. Not to mention that it is always the same game, same routine operations. If the game doesn’t get diversified, there is most likely going to be player fatigue.
What OP Games envisions is to build a platform with multiple types of games so that it can always be a fresh player experience, just like entering an arcade for the first time each time: there are action games here, and racing games there, with puzzle games among others.
With the launch of OP Arcade, players can finally find the purity of gaming as well as the innovative Play-to-Earn feature by participating in the tournaments to get rewarded. There are 10 different types of arcade games on OP Arcade at this moment including Classic Snake, Forest Cuties (memory game), Connection, you name it, by which players can practically name the games they would like to play on OP Arcade to have the game developers make it happen. OP Games will be bringing on their game developer partners to populate the platform as diversely as possible. The aim of OP Arcade is to be, in Paul’s own words, CTO of OP Games, “the App Store for Web 3.0 games.”
To further accomplish its ecosystem, OP Games is optimizing the Arcadians, the collection of 10,000 unique avatars that draws elements from our favorite arcade games, living on the Ethereum network. Arcadians are composable and created to have games built on top of them. This is what OP Games intends to achieve in the long run, they want to create something they refer to as game Legos which are, in the context of Web 3.0, the small pieces of code that developers can build on top of each other to create something bigger. The Arcadians will act as the genesis NFT of the OP Games metaverse, a place of endless possibilities, among which OP Games could outplay the rest and redefine how players view blockchain gaming.
