<aside> 💡 If you have any unlisted questions, please find us on Twitter, Discord, or Email and we will follow up with you right away!
</aside>
When we first started Planetarium, we were frustrated by the status of blockchain tools for game development. We wanted to give traditional game developers a powerful tool to create fully decentralized, complex universes through the development ecosystem they already deeply understood. And we wanted to provide application-specific blockchains for each universe, so that developers could have full control over the nature of its economy as well as its reward structure. As development progressed, we started thinking deeper about games that are powered by the community through decentralization.
Since the very beginning, gamers were modding existing games to create fresh new experiences for others. For example, DotA/League of Legends, Battlegrounds, Counter-Strike are billion dollar products that were initially mods. Games like Minecraft and Roblox (paid $70m to 2m creators in 2019) have a huge modding community that powers their success.
Yet we noticed that in massively multiplayer online worlds, a virtual community was fully controlled by a single corporation, without an opportunity for modding and creative engagement. We realized this could change through blockchain gaming. Community-powered online game is a concept that hasn't been fully explored before, and we are excited to be among the first to dive in.
Our team is also deeply technical and we are huge believers of the open source movement. We always have been passionate about creating great software for other developers. The gaming industry is notorious for its propritary technology and ownership, and we are excited to become pioneers in this way as well.
And obviously, we love games and we're thrilled for the opportunity to create online worlds that could last for decades and more.
A centralized online game is a virtual community controlled by a single corporation. Not all games need to be fully decentralized of course, but we see a future of community-powered games that run perpetually through full decentralization. This change also presents a new unique opportunity for moddable and forkable online worlds.
Since the very beginning, gamers were modding existing games to create new original experiences. For example, DotA/League of Legends, Battlegrounds, Counter-Strike are billion dollar products that were initially mods. Games like Minecraft and Roblox (paid $70m to 2m modders in 2019) have a huge modding community that powers their success.
Yet full moddability has never been offered to massively multiplayer online games (World of Warcraft, Lineage, etc.) because in the past, a company could only make money by fully controlling the ecosystem such as server access and items, since they needed to sell content directly to the gamer.
We think decentralization and the new ways of funding have created other possibilities for online game developers. Just like blockchain ecosystems, communities will be able to power fully decentralized games open for creative experimentation. Since these community-powered worlds are perpetual, talented game designers and developers can take over a stagnant world any time and breathe a new life into it.
Mining is the act of contributing your processing power to the blockchain network to help verify data. In return for the processing power that is contributed, Miners are incentivized, and rewarded 10 NCG per block mined. The block rewards, however, gets halved every 4 years. So by 2024, each block mined will reward 5 NCG. 4 more years after that, we will get 2.5 NCG per block mined. So on so forth.
The answer to this question really depends on one's own situation. Do you want to contribute to the game network? If yes, then there's no harm in turning the Miner on as it doesn't really consume that much processing power. At the moment, the Miner is locked to only use 1 core, and for the average quad-core CPU, this is about 20% to 25% of their total processing power.