At the Blockchain Gamer Connect conference in 2018 in San Francisco, Ubisoft revealed what their Strategic Innovations Lab has been working on. HashCraft is an online sandbox game using the blockchain decentralized ledger technology, in which the players create their own world and share it with others.
HashCraft – An Alternative Approach to Minecraft-like Sandbox Games
HashCraft can be considered as a sandbox game that is a mix of Minecraft and No Man’s Sky due to its procedural generation and limitless building and creation options. In this game, players can create their own islands and completely customize them as they see fit. They can place challenges and treasures and then share them in the blockchain network, later on, to be accessed by other users.
The way blockchain technology is implemented in the game’s core is amazing. Each player that is playing the game makes their computer into a node that stores the whole history of the game’s blockchain. This creates a decentralized server and completely removing the necessity of a centralized main server used to store the data. HashCraft will use something similar to a Proof of Work consensus mechanism.
Players can also create their own chains, which allows them to create their own universe in-game with their own rules and challenges. The idea is that when players complete these challenges, they will be awarded cryptocurrency.
Blockchain Technology in the Gaming Industry
When people hear the word “blockchain” they immediately think about cryptocurrencies and take a skeptic’s stance on the matter. This could make things harder even for a forward thinking and innovational company like Ubisoft that created the world-famous franchise “Assassin’s Creed”.
The Strategic Innovation Lab’s goal is to assist Ubisoft to anticipate the future for gaming and make sure they are prepared for it. Blockchain technology is evolving at a rapid pace and there are tons of projects being launched that plan of implementing this technology to different markets and fields. One of those markets is of course online gaming that can benefit from the decentralized ledger technology, with which the developer of the game can forget about setting up a centralized server hub for the game data as the player’s computers will be the nodes and keepers of the ledger on the network. This technology can also remove some limitations that other games might have experienced in the past, allowing the creators to spread their wings more during the development process.