Forty Thousand Games, and the Problem of Real Players

The February and March product preview still offered only an outline. It had yet to explain clearly how players would enter Xai and receive rewards. The narrator was waiting to see how a platform for ordinary players would handle the barriers posed by blockchain.

The morning announcement proclaimed in an all-caps headline that 40,000 Steam games were coming to Xai. Its “Proof of Skill” would turn game achievements into onchain credentials. Players would connect their Steam accounts to Xai Play, keep playing games they already played, earn more points for rarer achievements, and receive rewards accordingly. Wallets and every other blockchain step would be hidden from them. The team said Steam had 100 million monthly active players and that all were invited. By its reckoning, Xai would support more games than any other chain, from Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 to PUBG. That evening, Vanguard: Genesis issued its phase-three commemorative badges in five tiers ranked by contribution, with the top tier reserved for the leading 5%. About 400,000 bot and cheating wallets had been removed from the leaderboard. The badges could not be transferred and would remain permanently bound to their wallets.

The narrator read the two announcements side by side: one invited 100 million real people, while the other had just cleared away about 400,000 false accounts. The player entry point could hide wallets, but a reward list still had to distinguish genuine participation. The new mechanism described how to take part; whether an invitation this broad could become an experience players wanted to stay for remained a question for actual use.