The Era OF Triple A, Web3 games is about to begin
The combination of Holochain and the .NET bridge HoloNET is poised to reduce the gaming industry’s reliance on AWS - and usher in a new wave of scalable, P2P games.
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Data is at the heart of everything we do in the modern world. And the companies which can provide us with reliable access to it wield great power.
This couldn’t be more apparent than with gaming - a ‘state-intensive’ field where even a second of lag can ruin a battle.
Given these parameters, Amazon Web Services has emerged as a behemoth, providing 90% of all games with stable, relatively scalable compute power - and earning $88 billion in annual revenue as a consequence.
Indeed, underneath most state-intensive dApps you’ll find AWS as the data storage provider. So underneath the hype, we just aren’t really at Web3 yet.
Which is why the arrival of Holochain is so timely.
BreakING THE BLOCKCHAIN TRILEMMA
Holochain is the first decentralised, server-less architecture equipped to handle ‘state-intensive’ applications. The first to break the infamous ‘blockchain trilemma’. The first to offer a truly democratic hosting model, where everyday people make up the network with their own compute power - which is then combined as ‘shards’ to the client, working very much like a Torrent.
In short, Holochain is the data storage and compute power provider that gaming, Web3, even the world in general, has been waiting for.
Thanks to its revolutionary architecture, Holochain is set to not only match AWS’ performance specs, but quickly outpace them. With no central bottleneck for transactions, there is no limit on speed. As Rainlang’s David Meister has said, adding more machines to the network ‘reliably increases performance and security throughout’.
These benefits also apply to player limits - with no servers, Holochain gaming has no technical ceiling on the number of players who can join a game. Most major MMO games hit their server ceiling on a daily basis.
Likewise, by bypassing the need for expensive server farms, Holochain should be able to offer hosting with better performance, less lag - and for a lot cheaper than AWS - allowing a new class of game developer to arise - everyday creators, empowered by access to new tools and new architecture, who will create the true Metaverse. This is coming, in the very near future. In the same way as Youtube democratised content creation, Holochain and its affiliate services will democratise Metaverse creation.
holonet brings unity gaming to holochain
But new architecture is only one part of the solution. Making it easy and convenient for game projects to connect to it is also vital. This is one place where our project, HoloNET, can help.
HoloNET is designed to work like Amazon GameLift for .NET, allowing apps to connect to Holochain easily. This means Unity games (think Pokemon Go, Subnautica, Genshin Impact) can now access fully decentralised, distributed, scalable data storage + compute power, with better performance specs and lower cost.
No matter whether you care about Web3 or not, these are compelling benefits. Adding Unreal Engine support is also within reach - which would allow the likes of Fortnite, Ark: Survival, Gears of War, and Bioshock - to join the party too.
As Tom Ffiske from Immersive Wire writes, Fortnite may actually be the best-positioned game to kickstart the metaverse due to its dominant market position - switching to Holochain through HoloNET would certainly help with this.
There’s a phrase going around - slowly then suddenly. With regards to Holochain gaming, and indeed this shared dream of the Metaverse - it seems highly applicable. LFG.