Opinion by: Yukai Tu, chief technology officer of CARV
Delivering interoperability across blockchain gaming remains a white whale. It’s great on paper but frustratingly out of reach in practice. Ironically, despite promising to break down the walls built by traditional gaming, Web3 is recreating similar silos by locking assets, achievements, and indeed identities within standalone platforms.
As we move into and through the new year — which is full of reasons to be bullish about blockchain gaming, from improving gameplay to invisible onboarding — we need to deliver on this long-promised yet unfulfilled vision. How? Through connecting identity with interoperability once and for all.
The digital identity challenge
Today’s gamers suffer from digital fragmentation, no matter how you view it. In traditional gaming, their history and items are trapped in isolated ecosystems. Unfortunately, the blockchain gaming sector isn’t faring much better despite promising to shift the digital status quo. Ownership is meant to be the differentiating factor, but the sector mainly recreates the same problems. There is a keen intention to enable interoperability, but without interlinking on the back end, the same mistakes of gaming’s past are being repeated.
Fragmented identities and disconnected data sovereignty hinder platform interoperability, leaving players with scattered information across multiple chains. The effect ripples throughout the blockchain gaming ecosystem. Players lose their achievements between games, developers can’t tell what players have done elsewhere, and studios miss out on complete user information to refine their offerings.
The lack of interoperability devalues the assets. The utility of gaming data, currency or items increases tenfold if they’re usable across different platforms. Interoperability makes ownership worthwhile and earning those gaming assets more rewarding. Gamers want to show off their skins and win wherever they play. It’s past time we let them.
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