Making Better User Experience for Mobile Games with NFTs

This article will explain what is a Non-Fungible Token, why it is crucial for blockchain-based games, and how to make the user experience of NFT-based games better.

In November 2017, a DApp game named CryptoKitties brought about a storm of excitement to the world of cryptocurrency. It’s a collectible game in which people can collect digital kittens and exchange them with others. The price of some of these digital kitties even rose to USD $300,000. At its peak, CryptoKitties was contributing an average of 30% of the daily Ethereum transaction volume, congesting the entire Ethereum network. The core token used by these blockchain collectible games is NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens.

The majority of DApps and games featured on different DApp review websites, such as Dapp.review and Dapp.com, are NFT-driven games.

An NFT token is defined as a kind of token that is uniquely identifiable and distinguishable, hence non-fungible. Furthermore, an NFT token is not divisible like FTs (Fungible Tokens) tokens (ERC20 on Ethereum and TRC20 on TomoChain).

Due to the non-fungible feature of NFTs, they can be used to represent a large number of real-world goods, such as a ticket, a bottle of wine, a piece of jewelry and so on. NFTs enable us to tokenize anything valuable and trace the ownership of it, thus building a connection between information and value.

The key innovation of NFT is providing a method to record ownership of each individual and unique asset on the blockchain, making it transparent and tamper-resistant. NFTs don’t prevent others from accessing ownership information. They simply capture it.

NFT standards, such as ERC721, define an identifier (tokenId) for each virtual asset represented by an NFT token. It also allows the owner of a game item to prove the ownership of the in-game virtual asset, given its token ID.

The problem with most of NFT-based games is about on-boarding new users and improving user experience in making transactions. The first, and foremost, requirement for any user is to have the native token of the blockchain in their wallet to pay transaction fees. Unfortunately such buying requires a complicated series of steps that make it hard for the user onboarding process for blockchain games. We believe this is one of the important reasons why blockchain games and DApps in general are struggling to get significant adoption from users.

We think that this is where blockchain games need to learn from traditional games which have been providing great user experience but unfortunately lack the advantages of NFTs and blockchain as described above.

More concretely, most current games allow users to pay game providers an amount of cash for playing games using their accounts registered in the games. On-demand microtransactions and subscription packages are normally provided.

Taking this model into account on the blockchain, a similar solution could work as follows:

The above solution has several advantages compared to the current approach most NFT games are adopting:

Are you ready to build your first game on TomoChain? We have prepared multiple tutorials to start building games on TomoChain:

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