Application Scenario: Games or Finance?

8btc：NEO aims to realize the smart economy. Is it going as expected as when the project was initialized?

Da Hongfei: Our general goal hasn’t changed. But down to specific focuses, like when to do what, they may vary in different development phases. Starting a business can be compared to playing basketball. A basketball player usually keeps one foot motionless and moves the other to find the best position to shoot at the basket. But the basket always stays there. For example, game development is our recent focus. We are cooperating with many game developers and hopefully more games will be built on NEO.

8btc: It can be told from your recent moves that the game industry is a major focus of NEO ecosystem, like NEL hosted NEO Blockchain Game Development Competition (http://neo.game/rules.html) and NEO Global Capital invested in Cocos-BCX, a blockchain game development platform. Why are you so optimistic about game development on blockchain?

Da Hongfei: In the early days, people were expecting to see blockchain being applied to the finance industry as the new technology may disrupt the traditional finance industry. However, implementation has been faced with regulatory barriers as the finance industry is strictly regulated virtually everywhere in the world. There are only two possible ways to integrate blockchain into finance industry by either cooperating with a licensed traditional financial institute where the license may limit your business scope and your activities may be limited to what is permitted under the license, which is a tricky issue for blockchain companies; or you may bypass the license by doing something that doesn’t need a license.

In essence, blockchain can barely survive within the existing financial regulation system. A licensed institute may find it unnecessary to cooperate with a blockchain company because it is already licensed to conduct the business. Why would it bother to be engaged in a partnership that doesn’t benefit it that much? If blockchain companies end up with no license, they won’t be legally permitted to promote massive adoption of applications.

Gradually some game developers turned to NEO for development and noticed that game development is also popular in other platforms like Ethereum. Game assets and tokens go together naturally.

However, some existing blockchain games only add a few blockchain compatible features, e.g. some game’s digital assets can be recorded on-chain. For such games, their blockchain compatibility is merely an add-on feature, in essence, they haven’t been turned into something that relies exclusively on blockchain; speaking of the games running exclusively on the blockchain, currently, they are usually built for gaming purpose. Such games may attract large groups of users in a short time because it taps into human weakness. However, what really matters in the long run is the game’s playability.

In the future, blockchain games may present a virtual world similar to that constructed in the sci-fi film “Ready Player One” where all the virtual assets are recorded on the blockchain, the implementation of which requires a flawless economic model. However, we can’t predict the timing of such games. I hope that someday blockchain games can even be played by my daughter.