Why Decentralized Publishing Solves the Live Service Problem

A single corporate entity holds ultimate authority over a game's servers and economy. When a title underperforms, the publisher executes a sunset, deleting player-owned assets and community history. This creates a permanent risk premium that stifles long-term investment.

• $10B+ in player value lost to shutdowns
• 0% asset portability post-shutdown
• Creates a hostage economy for players

Game state and logic are deployed as immutable smart contracts on a decentralized network like Ethereum or Solana. No single party can alter the core rules or shut down the service. The game persists as long as the underlying blockchain exists, governed by code, not corporate fiat.

• Immutable game logic via smart contracts
• Censorship-resistant operation
• Permanent world state persistence

Centralized platforms like Steam and Epic Games Store take 30% royalties on all transactions, creating a high-friction tax on ecosystem growth. This model prioritizes platform profit over sustainable in-game economies, leading to predatory monetization.

• ~30% platform tax on all revenue
• Opaque data and player ownership
• Incentives misaligned with long-term health

Assets are tokenized as NFTs (e.g., ERC-721, ERC-1155) and economies are built on open DEXs like Uniswap. This enables permissionless composability, allowing assets to be used across games and traded on open markets. Value accrues to players and builders, not intermediaries.

• <2% fees on decentralized exchanges
• True digital ownership via NFTs
• Composable assets across the metaverse

Player data, social graphs, and achievement histories are locked inside corporate databases. This prevents interoperability, stifles community tooling, and makes player identity transient. Your 1,000-hour save file is worthless when the servers die.

• Zero data portability between platforms
• No user-controlled identity layer
• Fragmented social and reputation graphs

Players control their identity via ERC-4337 smart accounts or ENS names. Achievements and reputation are issued as verifiable credentials on-chain, creating a portable, user-owned gaming resume. This enables trustless guilds, reputation-based matchmaking, and cross-game progression.

• Self-sovereign identity (SSI) for players
• On-chain reputation and achievements
• Interoperable social layer

Centralized publishers own the servers, the user data, and the update pipeline. This creates vendor lock-in, arbitrary fee structures, and censorship risk. A single point of failure can kill a game or dApp.

• Single Point of Failure: AWS outage? Service is dead.
• Rent Extraction: Platform takes 30%+ of all transactions.
• Arbitrary Control: Publisher can delist or alter content unilaterally.

Publish core game logic, assets, and rules as immutable, verifiable data on a decentralized network like Arweave or IPFS. The live service becomes a permissionless front-end to this canonical state.

• Censorship-Resistant: Data lives on a permanent decentralized web.
• Composable: Anyone can build new clients or mods on the same data layer.
• User-Owned Assets: In-game items are truly owned NFTs, not database entries.

Protocols like Mirror and Lens demonstrate the model: content and social graphs are public infrastructure. Apply this to games via DAOs governing updates and smart contracts managing economies.

• Incentive-Aligned: Token holders vote on upgrades, not a corporate board.
• Transparent Economics: All revenue splits and treasuries are on-chain.
• Community-Run: Live ops (events, balancing) are managed by decentralized contributors.

Decentralized publishing separates content from execution. Rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum) handle fast, cheap state updates, while Celestia or EigenDA provide high-throughput data availability for the published content.

• Scalable Execution: ~500ms finality for in-game actions.
• Cheap Data: ~$0.10 per 100KB blob costs for updates.
• Modular Stack: Swap execution layers without changing published content.

Star Atlas uses Solana for its economy and Unreal Engine 5 for rendering, with assets anchored on-chain. Dark Forest pioneered fully-verifiable, zk-proof-based gameplay. They prove the model works.

• Real Economies: Star Atlas has $50M+ in NFT trading volume.
• Fully Verifiable: Dark Forest moves are proven with zkSNARKs.
• Client Diversity: Multiple community-built clients and interfaces exist.

The end-state is a live service that cannot be shut down. Developers are paid via protocol fees, not rent. Players own their progress. The service evolves as a public good, not a private product.

• Unkillable: Service persists as long as the underlying blockchain exists.
• Developer Royalties: Fees are programmatically enforced via smart contracts.
• User Sovereignty: Players control their identity and assets across any front-end.

Centralized platforms like Medium or Substack act as ultimate gatekeepers. They can demonetize, delist, or alter content distribution algorithms overnight, destroying creator livelihoods and community trust.

• Single Point of Failure: A policy change can erase years of work.
• Revenue Seizure: Platforms can freeze or claw back earnings.
• Algorithmic Black Box: Visibility is controlled by opaque, changeable feeds.

Live services depend on corporate infrastructure. If the company pivots (Google Reader), gets acquired (Twitter API), or fails, the service and all its data can vanish.

• Data Loss: User-generated content is not user-owned.
• Broken Links: The permanent web is an illusion; links rot.
• Sunk Cost: Creators lose their audience moat and must rebuild elsewhere.

Platforms follow a predictable lifecycle: attract users, then exploit them. Fees rise (Apple's 30% cut), features are paywalled, and user experience degrades to maximize shareholder value.

• Value Capture: Platforms capture >30% of creator revenue.
• Ad-Driven Incentives: Content is optimized for engagement, not quality.
• Innovation Stagnation: No economic incentive to improve core utility.