TON NFT Opens up New Opportunities for Game Creators

The 2000s saw the arrival of social networks. Soon, gaming platforms started launching there. Third-party developers got a chance to create and publish games on social network platforms, and users, to play with one another.

That gave rise to a new social games industry. Tiny dev teams quickly evolved into big corporations after having gained access to a tremendous audience and tools necessary to receive micro payments for in-game items.

At the same time, users enjoyed unlimited fun both co-building their "FarmVilles" and doing the exact opposite—competing with one another.

With TON tokens ready to go, we predict that The Open Network may become the next-generation platform for a new kind of games, which is decentralized.

We already know a couple of largely popular crypto games—think of CryptoKitties. One week into release, it amounted to 13% of all Ethereum network's transactions. According to data from CryptoKitty Sales, by December 2017, $4.5 million had been spent on breeding animated cats. Even though the game mechanics were far from sophisticated.

'free-to-play' means the game comes free of charge and is available to everyone, but you can buy some in-game items or other perks with real money if you want. That is the most popular format for modern social and mobile games.

Let's look at the mechanics of a typical non-blockchain, free-to-play game:

1. Mining. Acquisition of certain in-game items or achievements for making specific actions rather than purchasing them for real money. Once you click on the cow in order to feed it, and it grows larger upon 10 or 20 clicks—that's mining in a nutshell.
2. Items. Unique items and consumables. You can have a "unique Mythril Sword" found nowhere else in a given universe, or 10 ordinary nails needed for construction. They can be exchanged; some can interact with each other.
3. In-game currency. Many social games let you buy an in-game currency for a real-world one to later use it for internal items or improvements. This helps developers get financed to continue their work without turning the game paid.

It's hard not to see that mining, unique items/tokens (NFT, or Non-Fungible Tokens), consumable tokens (SFT, Semi-Fungible Tokens), currencies (FT, Fungible Tokens), and ways to swap them have long been part of the blockchain industry.

But up until now, game devs could not benefit from this opportunity to its full extent because of high fees (no one is going to pay $10 to feed a cow), low speeds, and hurdles with scaling a whopping amount of virtual items to a comparable number of users.

TON and TON tokens allow you to create full-fledged, captivating decentralized games.

The TON blockchain is designed to operate on a cutting-edge async, shardable technology, so it's fast, cheap, and scalable.

TON-powered tokens are, of course, the same—distributed and asynchronous.

It's around 500 times less expensive to mint an NFT on TON than on Ethereum.

Each TON NFT is a standalone smart contract, meaning you can issue a huge quantity of NFTs without bottlenecking the network. Besides, for any NFT, you can write arbitrary code that will contain your very own game mechanics.

TON empowers you to end up with billions of digital items and tokens that can be exchanged and that can interact with each other. In the meantime, transactions will be fast and cheap.

At this point, you may be wondering, Why bring FarmVille onchain?

1. TON's user experience, operational speed, and overall convenience are on par with those of centralized solutions. All else being equal, your favorite character now belongs to you, and nobody can ban or take it away.
2. Blockchain becomes a meta platform for many games. With standardized tokens, we can not only swap items/tokens of different games for each other via P2P or exchanges, but also use one token in several projects. Imagine, say, brick tokens that you can build with across several games at once. Cross-game actions may attract both players and game developers.
3. Digital items on a decentralized blockchain usually have a value. Adults and kids spend loads of time gaming anyway, why don't they start earning in the meanwhile?
4. If you publish your game through centralized distributors, you heavily depend on them in pretty much everything. You need to follow every single rule, wait for approval, use its preferred payment system, and pay an enormous fee. If your game is published on a decentralized blockchain, though, you are completely free.

We see a colossal potential for decentralized games in TON. New kinds of games have what it takes to capture the attention of many people and become a mass-adoption use-case for decentralized technologies in general.

Everything is ready for you to start developing games for TON right now.