Building Community-Owned Infrastructure for Games

Reflections on the launch of the Beamable Foundation

Jan 28, 2025

Today marks an important milestone in my journey as a builder, dreamer, and advocate for open ecosystems. With the launch of the Beamable Foundation, I find myself reflecting on themes that have shaped my thinking for years: openness, community ownership, composability, and the power of decentralization. These principles have driven my work across gaming and technology, and now they converge in the form of a decentralized framework for the most important media category of our time: the craft of making games.

Beamable Foundation will be the steward of the Beamable Network, a new form of infrastructure orchestration called a Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN for short). Beamable Network will provide game developers with backend and live services technology needed to build and scale games.

But why a Foundation? Foundations are not constrained by the short-term pressures or centralized decision-making of traditional models. Instead, they weave economic incentives directly into the purpose of the project, ensuring that all participants—developers, contributors, and infrastructure providers—are rewarded for advancing its mission.

The Beamable Foundation was established to bridge the gap between open-source software and the physical infrastructure that makes it operational. It enables the creation of decentralized, resilient systems that transcend the inefficiencies and risks of centralized silos. Beamable Foundation will maintain both an open-source tech stack needed to enable the Beamable Network, as well as access to the hardware resources needed to operate and scale.

The Beamable Foundation’s project is detailed in the Beamable Network White Paper. Let’s dig into more of why a decentralized approach for game infrastructure makes sense:

The Case for Decentralization

Resilience and Redundancy

Centralized systems create single points of failure. When a server cluster goes down, entire games can grind to a halt. Decentralized systems eliminate this fragility by distributing resources across a network. If one node fails, others step in, ensuring seamless continuity.

More importantly, this resilience and sustainability is established not only through technical redundancy—but by insulating the network from business decisions. Individual node operators could choose to leave the network or charge different fees, but the network endures. For example, when Gamesparks ended service on Amazon, several thousand developers were left without a backend; a decentralized network provides sustainability in the face of these changes.

Community Ownership with Economic Incentives

Decentralized systems that leverage blockchain technology introduce tokenized incentives to align the goals of participants. Infrastructure providers, developers, and contributors all benefit as the ecosystem grows. It’s an economic model that ties success to collective contributions. The Beamable Foundation integrates these principles by creating a system where resources such as computing power and storage are not only shared but also rewarded.

Helium, a successful DePIN project, exemplifies this approach. By enabling participants to deploy wireless hotspots and earn tokens, Helium demonstrated how incentivized community ownership can scale infrastructure effectively. Beamable Network will draw upon Helium and other successful projects.

Cost Efficiency at Scale

As Bitkraft points out in their analysis of decentralized infrastructure, this approach can offer 10x improvements in cost efficiency compared to centralized incumbents. Anecdotally, we’ve seen similar cost improvements amongst our own customers when they’ve switched from traditional hyperscalers like Amazon to bare-metal servers. Unfortunately, these conversions often require substantial investments in DevOps personnel and new software and can make one even more vulnerable to centralized risks.

Traditional cloud providers are powerful but expensive. Decentralized networks such as that being built by Beamable Foundation can optimize costs by aggregating underutilized bare-metal resources from top-tier data centers. This distributed approach ensures developers can scale affordably without compromising performance. By embedding incentives into the infrastructure itself, decentralized systems enable a self-sustaining economy where efficiency is a natural byproduct of alignment between participants.

Transparency and Trust

Blockchain technology underpins decentralization, enabling verifiable processes and open governance. When the rules of the game are clear and immutable, trust follows. Developers and players alike can have confidence in the fairness and security of the infrastructure they rely on. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and other decentralized governance models for Foundations can transparently align the purpose of the organization with the stakeholders with the greatest insights of the technology roadmap.

Composability: The Engine of Decentralized Innovation

One of the most powerful aspects of decentralized infrastructure is its inherent composability. As I’ve explored in "Composability is the Most Powerful Creative Force in the Universe", composability allows independent components to seamlessly interact, fostering modularity, scalability, and permissionless innovation.

In decentralized systems, composability ensures that developers can build tools and features on top of existing infrastructure without needing approval from a central authority. This approach accelerates innovation while maintaining interoperability and resilience. For example, the Beamable Network allows developers to integrate new backend tools or live service features directly into their games, creating an ecosystem where every contribution adds exponential value to the community. And as developers invent new types of software that is useful to multiple game developers, they can use the built-in payment mechanisms of the network to earn from their software creations.

From Open Source to Shared Ownership

At its core, decentralization builds on the values of open source: collaboration, transparency, and freedom to innovate. Open-source software transformed the tech industry by empowering developers to build on shared tools and frameworks. Open-source projects like the Beamable Foundation’s Unity and Unreal SDKs will ensure that the Beamable Foundation’s development process remains transparent and seamless.

But decentralized systems go beyond the source code—they create protocols that orchestrate infrastructure for the community.

A key difference between open source projects and decentralized infrastructure is that there are real marginal costs associated with deploying and orchestrating hardware.

While open source is about sharing code, decentralization adds another layer: shared ownership. Open source is collaborative, but decentralization is participatory. Tokenization introduces incentives for maintaining and improving the network, creating alignment between contributors and users, and supplying additional computing resources.

Community-Owned Internet Resources

Decentralization is informed by the success of community-driven projects like Wikipedia, where the collective efforts of volunteers sustain a resource that benefits millions. These projects exemplify how community ownership fosters resilience and inclusivity. Wikipedia thrives because contributors share a common mission: to make knowledge accessible to everyone. Similarly, decentralized infrastructure allows contributors to pool resources for a shared goal, creating systems that are not only efficient but also equitable.

Again, there are some key differences between project like wikipedia. which tends to concentrate power in the hands of those who have learned to navigate its internal—often arcane—processes.1 While politics and bureaucracy are constants of human society, regardless of financial structure—community ownership aspires to shift more responsibility and control towards the owners of the network. And unlike for-profit corporations which exist solely to channel profits towards shareholders, decentralized projects have a mandate to deliver technologies and services important to the owner community.

Decentralized Infrastructure before Blockchain

As I highlighted in my post, "Decentralized Game Infrastructure", decentralization isn’t a new concept. Systems like the Domain Name System (DNS) have operated in a decentralized manner for decades, enabling the internet to function reliably on a global scale. These systems prove that decentralized infrastructure can succeed without requiring constant oversight by a central authority. Blockchain takes this further by embedding economic incentives directly into the protocol, making it even more scalable and sustainable.

Common Objections

I wanted to take a moment to consider some of the objections to decentralization (and blockchain) that I frequently hear:

Blockchain is too complex

One of the reasons web3 gaming has struggled to emerge is that the user experience remains far too complex. A number of companies continue to work on this problem, and I’m optimistic that the market will open up. But this critique isn’t particularly relevant to infrastructure-level projects: the end-user of a software product that is built on web3-enabled infrastructure (such as a web2 game running on Beamable Network) doesn’t need that user to know anything about blockchain—any more than they’d need to know about the workings of Kubernetes, MongoDB, Docker or any other number of enabling technologies. Like these technologies, Web3 becomes an orchestrator and enabler rather than an end-user impediment.

Furthermore, even the businesses that take advantage of web3-enabled DePIN infrastructure can expect to have a user-friendly, web2 gateways into their service infrastructure. For example, beamable.com will act as a gateway into the Beamable Network—effectively indistinguishable from its current backend-as-a-service offering.

Unlike centralized software, a key differentiator is that a protocol can enable a competitive market of other companies to operate their own service gateways as well. Beamable Network’s vision is to have an open ecosystem that allows for different payment gateways, service providers and implementors.

Blockchain is Inefficient

The slow throughput and concurrency of early proof-of-work protocols led many to conclude that blockchain couldn’t be used for performance-sensitive use cases.

Blockchain protocols have dramatically improved in performance. Two examples that can theoretically achieve over 100,000 transactions per second include Solana and Sui. Nevertheless, it is true that on-chain transactions to do things like database commits can probably never be anywhere close to an optimized, centralized data-storage system.

Here is where it is important to understand the distinction between how on-chain and off-chain work is performed. In most DePIN networks (such as Beamable Network) the moment-to-moment work needed by game servers—launching code containers, storing data, executing a microservice—are performed off-chain with state-of-the art software, without blockchain-related latency. The on-chain work is focused on provisioning, reporting and payment settlements—which have nothing to do with how the game itself is played. This is an ideal use for blockchain.

Exploitation by Bad Actors

Every system faces risks, but decentralization incorporates mechanisms to mitigate them: reputation systems, transparent governance, and consensus protocols. These tools create accountability and minimize vulnerabilities. And by having a Foundation whose purpose it is to ensure long-term health of the network, there are more built-in incentives for the community to invest in these measures—compared to the short-term profit-maximization goals of most corporations.

Why Foundations Are Essential for Sustainability

Decentralization needs more than technology—it needs stewardship. This is where foundations play a critical role. An independent foundation ensures that the network’s development aligns with community interests rather than being dictated by a single corporation.

Independent Stewardship

Foundations provide neutral oversight, ensuring the network’s governance remains inclusive and transparent.

Long-Term Vision

Foundations focus on sustainable growth, fostering ecosystems that prioritize innovation and scalability over short-term gains.

Financial and Community Alignment

Token-based incentives and diversified revenue streams fund ongoing development and maintenance, ensuring the network thrives for years to come. Foundations ensure these incentives align with the project’s mission, creating a virtuous cycle of participation and reward.

Ecosystem Governance

Foundations foster collaboration by giving all stakeholders a voice. This inclusive approach builds trust and encourages widespread participation, ensuring the ecosystem evolves in a way that reflects the community’s collective vision.

A Vision for the Future

The creation of the Beamable Foundation is the first of many steps towards accelerating game development, managing risks and decreasing costs in the industry I know and love.

There will be many more steps on this journey. But as I’ve noted above, those next steps will involve you. Are you a game developer? Do you own compute resources you’d want to contribute? Or do you want to become part of a community of stakeholders who are enabling the next generation of artistry and innovation?

To learn more or get involved, visit:

https://beamable.network

I’m excited to see what we’ll build together.

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