From the termination of the contract between NetEase and Blizzard: Is the Web3 industry a false proposition?

Author: Galaxy Blitz

We all have our youthful days. For Vitalik Buterin, his youth was spent as a young warlock in World of Warcraft. However, Blizzard believed that the power of the warlock hindered the fairness of other classes. As a result, skills like Doomsday, Corruption, and Soul Drain were nerfed, and during raids, warlocks became a less desirable class, no longer able to prioritize loot as they once did.

Just like how only one Newton discovered gravity among countless people hit by apples, among the many harmed by Blizzard, only one Vitalik Buterin seemed to understand a truth at that moment: assets based on social constructs can be whimsically altered by those in power, and such changes are solely based on their own interests.

World of Warcraft: Warlock

At this time, Vitalik Buterin occasionally saw a post by Satoshi Nakamoto on Bitcointalk about BTC: In 2008, $14 trillion evaporated in a few months, and millions of Americans lost their savings, homes, and jobs. But was it their fault? No, it was clearly the greed of certain bankers that caused the losses for the American people. Yet, how could the consequences fall on millions of people? It was time to invent a true electronic cash system, one based on mathematics and code rather than social rules, where people could truly own their property without suffering losses due to the mistakes of centralized giants or other bizarre reasons.

This viewpoint resonated with Vitalik Buterin's naive thoughts, and thus he found his life's goal: to establish a decentralized infrastructure, a parallel asset system to the current financial system, where the assets completely belong to the individual. And so, ETH was born.

Time flies, and now ETH has become a project with a market value of $43 billion, while Activision Blizzard was acquired by Microsoft for $68.7 billion. From the perspective of market value, decentralized development still hasn't surpassed that of centralized traditional corporate organizations.

However, centralized Blizzard seems to have not changed its style from ten years ago. Blizzard announced the complete termination of all licensing and agency agreements with NetEase on January 23, 2023, which means that all character assets of Chinese players in World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Diablo III, StarCraft II, Warcraft III: Reforged, and Heroes of the Storm would turn to zero, whether it's a mage in World of Warcraft or a legendary card in Hearthstone that you painstakingly drew, or even a skin for Tracer in Overwatch.

If calculated using the cost method in accounting (this is an exaggerated calculation, meaning that the total amount you spent on World of Warcraft game cards equals the total value of your character's assets, but valuing assets in Web2 games is a very difficult topic, so this is the only way to calculate), Chinese players lost a total of $4.3 billion in digital assets (NetEase's $3.6 billion + The9's $700 million in agency revenue).

However, Chinese players did nothing wrong; the problem arose between NetEase and Blizzard, yet the consequences had to be borne by Chinese players. This is also the reason why Satoshi Nakamoto expressed his belief in inventing BTC on Bitcointalk: your property should always belong to you and should not be lost due to the mistakes of centralized giants or other bizarre reasons.

On this point, Web3 games perfectly fill the last gap left by Web2 games, where game assets completely belong to the players, sealing off the final risk.

However, now, it has been a full 8 years since the invention of smart contracts in Web3, while the mobile internet, which started at the same time, has profoundly changed human lifestyles. Yet, Web3 remains a niche circle of self-entertainment. This is largely due to the slow development of infrastructure, making it difficult for the application experience to compare with Web2 counterparts. For most people's preferences, the risk of assets is far less than the experience of applications, but this situation is slowly changing.

Web3 will gradually catch up with Web2 in terms of experience and will address the last pain point of asset protection that Web2 can never achieve. The quality of Web3 games will slowly catch up with Web2, such as SLG games like GalaxyBlitz, which will usher in a new internet era covering billions of online users today.

Comparing the art of Galaxy Blitz with COC, which has accumulated $8.5 billion in revenue, it can be seen that the details in Galaxy Blitz are clearer. Galaxy Blitz is the first Web3 game that has reached top-tier Web2 quality and has undergone multiple public tests, with test data far exceeding the average of Web2 games.