What If Stardew Valley Was A Blockchain Game?

It's that time of the year again. Christmas is over, but everyday work is still at a halt. It's chilly outside and like every year, I have a mild cold. In other words, it's the perfect time for a lot of gaming! If you follow my Play2Earn Report, you will already be aware of my blockchain gaming habits. That's not all I enjoy playing, though. When ever I have the time, I love to dive into other games as well. The game I've picked up this time is Stardew Valley, one of the most successful indie games there ever was.

So while playing, a sudden thought came to my mind - what if this actually was a multiplayer blockchain game? While I'm perfectly aware that that's not going to happen any time soon, I think it's a great thought experiment and one that I'd like to share with you today. How would blockchain Stardew Valley most likely look? What mistakes might the developers of such a game make? How to get it right? Let's get right into it!

So in case you never heard of Stardew Valley before, let me give you an introduction to the game first. It's basically a farming simulation sandbox game built by a single developer but made with a lot of love. In the game, you inherit the claim to an old farm from your grandpa and decide to start live anew as a farmer. From there, the game basically leaves all decisions to you. You can work the land, explore nearby mines, forage, or just enjoy live and interact with the people living in the valley.

There's no set goal in the game and you can play it at your own pace completely. All characters come with their own background story and different ideas what they expect from their live. You can befriend them, marry, and eventually even have children. The game has an incredibly relaxing feel to it and to many, it's a great way to escape their everyday live every now and then. It's a wildly successful game, with more than 46,000 people playing it on Steam at this very moment.

Beneath all that relaxing layer still lingers an economic simulation, though. Everything has its price in the game. You can buy different seeds and animals, all coming with different attributes and yields. You can go with crops that require a lot of attention but have a high yield once or you can plant a tree once and gather the occasional fruit ever after. You can upgrade your house, build new furniture, and so on. Basically, there are dozens of ways to both spend and earn money and that's why I think it could work as a blockchain game as well!

So let's say we'd want to make Stardew Valley into a blockchain game. What is the first thing we need to consider? How to build an interesting, long term viable economy around it or How to keep the game as enjoyable and entertaining as possible? Truth be told, both aspects are very important for any blockchain game. Still, most developers seem to focus almost excursively on the former, at best seeing the latter as something that will come after the game matured a bit.

But consider this - there are ten thousands of people playing the game right now, without an economy at all. Without the chance of recovering anything from the game, without the chance of earning anything. The value they get from playing the game is the entertainment, the enjoyment, maybe even the escape from reality, even if it's only temporary. The truth is, games are usually played because they are fun, yet blockchain games usually only focus on the economy, thus attracting only those looking for a monetary return. As long as this doesn't change fundamentally, blockchain gaming has no chance to ever make it to the mainstream market.

So yes, in my opinion, the game has to still be enjoyable and as close to it's original vision as it can be. Only then we can talk about building the economy. Once we dig a bit deeper, it seems surprisingly easy to change the game into a multiplayer blockchain game without changing it up too much. Stardew Valley is played one day at a time. What you can do is both limited by the amount of energy and the amount of time you have. There are many actions in the game which require a certain amount of energy and once that is spent, you become exhausted and can only perform actions that don't require energy. And in my opinion, that's already the key to changing the game into a blockchain title: We keep the energy concept but instead of a day taking about 15 minutes, a day now takes a day.

Now add the ability to recover energy by eating or drinking stuff, and you end up with a game that's still as enjoyable as the original but already has an important parameter to build the ingame economy around. We've also set a trap for us, though. Most blockchain games would now go ahead, limit you to tiny amounts of free energy per day and would also make every single action in the game cost energy. And again, that would be a huge mistake because it would take away from the fun the game offers. Now anything that's related to actually creating stuff should cost energy and that energy needs to be limited. But everything else needs to be completely cost-free. People still need to be able to spend as much time in blockchain Stardew Valley as they want to. Just wandering around, interacting with other people, enjoying themselves, all that needs to be free and it needs to be fun!

Many developers try to trick their players into spending money on their game in order for it to become fun again. Sadly, it's a proven formula and something many (especially mobile) games do. But I believe that a game needs to be fun first and only then ask for your money or offer you options to invest something into the game. And that's how the economy of blockchain Stardew Valley could and should work:

We'd see different players specialize in different aspects of the game. Farming, foraging, crafting, spelunking, you name it. They'd then trade the items they create with each other or sell it to the game. Ideally, everything in the game from seeds to a new house would be built and sold by players. Once players actually enjoy the game, they'd be more willing to (re-)invest into acquiring that new farm building, decorating their house, getting a new a dress, and so on. The key, in my opinion, is to make players enjoy the game so much they want to spend money on it instead of forcing players to spend money in hope of making the game actually fun (again).

To me, this is what blockchain games should strive to evolve to. Games that are fun to play and where owning your ingame assets is just a cool feature but not your sole selling proposition. Instead of telling your players that they can earn while playing, tell them that they can recover (parts) of what they invested should they ever decide to move on. But make the game so enjoyable they never want to move in the first place. The magic of blockchain gaming happens when you use the stuff you acquired in one game to kickstart you in another game. So if you ever decided you'd prefer to play blockchain Graveyard Keeper instead of blockchain Stardew Valley, then (and only then) should truly owning your ingame assets be a factor.

I could go on like this for a while and there are many nuances to consider but I think we've gone far enough with this thought experiment. The fun thing is, once I started to think things through, it dawned to me how few changes would be needed in order to change many successful and entertaining games into blockchain gaming titles. At the same time, though, it showed me how far away from mainstream adaption we still are. As long as blockchaim game developers keep thinking about their game's economy first, we might see many more great Play2Earn opportunities, but mainstream adaption won't happen. Only when blockchain games become actual games first and foremost is this going to change. I'm confident we'll get there eventually but only time will tell how much longer we'll have to wait for the blockchain gaming revolution.

And that's all from me today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!

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