Having followed both Hoard and OmiseGo for some time I’ve long been sold on the prospect of True Ownership in gaming, and the value it represents to both gamers and developers. After reading the excellent Hoard AMA’s (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and seeing their progress, I got to thinking about how much value Hoard could bring to Plasma validators on the OMG network.

With that in mind I have knocked together this entirely speculative and just for fun example of a triple A game integrated with Hoard, based on the data found in the AMA’s and an estimate on what tx fees may be.

I’m going to be fairly specific in this example so it can hopefully be kept in the realms of the conceivable, in terms of value to the developers, assignment of tx fees, gameplay mechanics, etc and of course it will assume the major success of a game title launched with Hoard integration (no mean feat in itself). But in that regard it could equally apply to a collection of smaller, less successful games.

Overview

The fictional game here is going to be called "Dungeon Raider", a free to download MMO RPG title which over time has garnered a strong following, the game has many different character types, armour sets and weapon sets with an ever evolving meta which encourages an active trading community. Fed up with playing a mage? Sell your gear and kit yourself out as a warrior. Stuck on a particular time limited event or dungeon boss? Sell your ineffective bow for a broadsword, that sort of thing.

Gameplay revolves around character building and dungeon raiding to receive loot, dungeon raids take around 30 minutes and generate ~ 30 NFT loot drops (average 1 tx per minute) over the course of the raid. The loot comprises of XP packs, which you can either use on your character (which burns the token) or sell, and in game items of random rarity and quality, which can be equipped, sold, rented out, or even burned.

Over time Dungeon Raider has amassed a player base which averages out at 260000 concurrent players online at any one time. At 1 transaction per player per minute this takes the current capacity of a single plasma chain to its upper limits, processing 4333 tps (stats here derived from Hoard AMA, part 2).

For this game the developers generate income from the NFTs being traded or leased, x% of every transaction of this type would be sent back to the developers indefinitely. For this fictional game I'll leave it at that in order to maximise the fun of looting 😁, but of course in the real world they could monetize it in many other ways.

Value to Plasma Validators

The $ part...for this example I'm going to use a flat tx fee of $0.001 for NFT's generated on loot drops and sent to players wallet. This would also apply to XP tokens being used on characters (sent to burner wallet).

Based on 100m tokens staked, this would generate $1.37 per OMG token, per year.

((4333tps*$0.001*60s*60m*24h*365d)/100,000,000 tokens staked) = $1.366)

The cost of writing a plasma block to Ethereum, assuming this level of volume, current Eth prices ($250), a gas cost of 40 gwei and 50k gas requirement, would be $0.5. If 65535 txs (approx 4000 TPS) are in a plasma block then plasma tx cost = $0.5/65535 = $0.0000076. Taking this cost into consideration this brings the revenue to $1.356 per token per year.

(Thanks to Thilagavathy for helping me with the breakdown of costs involved with writing plasma blocks)

In addition to this there would be the secondary markets where items are traded and rented (in this particular example these may end up on an additional plasma chain). For these transactions there would likely be a mixture of a flat fee and a percentage fee as the items would have $ values attached at this point. I’ll leave this part alone for this example though as I have no frames of reference, but the potential here, especially in games such as this which are actively built around trading, is considerable.

Cost to the player

With the tx fees cited above it will cost the player $1 in transaction fees to collect 1000 items, if the players wallet ran out of funds they would be able to continue to play, but will no longer be able to collect any loot. At an average of 1 tx per minute $1 would allow close to 17 hours of play with loot collecting active.

In games which are popular and have bustling trading communities, it could prove easy to play for free by trading loot, perhaps games could even have options to automate the process, one way may be to auto list items at market rates that players mark as junk, or a similar 'auto sell xp' option. In short, even with players paying for transactions, it could prove easy for them to play at zero cost or even generate a profit.

In this example I've used a developer who has chosen to have the player take on the tx fees, but a developer could well chose to take on the costs themselves, backing the game with tokens maybe, an interesting subject in itself.

TLDR

This fictional triple A title, based on data from Hoard’s AMA part 2 and assumed tx fees of $0.001, could generate ~$1.36 per token per year for validators, based solely on receiving in game loot drops. Secondary Markets will increase this figure. Players could bear the transaction costs while potentially maintaining a net positive balance through trading.