Periodic Review of Blockchain Game Development

Forward the original title: Periodic Review of Blockchain Game Development

Discussing Asset Structure, Asset issuance, etc.

Viewpoint review

《Some thoughts on the future direction of blockchain games — jojonas》In this article in August 2022, I mentioned several major problems faced by blockchain gaming projects at that time:

1. To go further, you need a more out-of-the-box narrative, and because it is launched into a market that is not completely suitable, the real source of payment has dropped sharply, making it difficult to cover development and distribution costs;

2. The freedom of transactions brought by capital tokenization causes the project party losing the pricing power of the in-game assets;

3. To-earn model on the game ecosystem causes a continuous outflow of value, the more users, the greater the economic pressure (non-linear), and the consumption brought by the gameplay (allocating reserves) is limited.

I also expressed some other views:

1. Ponzi (cash flow difficulty in covering high investment returns structure) is still a good means of user growth in the early and middle stages;

2. If blockchain games are to develop in the long run, it is still necessary to gradually “educate” the audience who regard gold as the primary goal, that is, the next direction should be economically stable and gameplay and gold coexist, rather than directly cut off gold. But in the long run, the core advantage of blockchain games is not in gold, but in verifiable free transactions;

3. Products such as skill2earn and MOBA that take competitive confrontation as the main axis of gameplay need to avoid user loss caused by the lemon market. The game structure in which players confront or cooperate with each other based on their own incomplete information, that is, innovation from the gameplay level, will be an important factor for these games to raise their upper limit;

4. The stability of the blockchain game economy will increasingly depend on player co-construction: the best incentive is the coordination between player contribution and long-term project development (incentive compatibility)；

5. The strategy of traditional serve to earn games is still effective, but it requires corresponding market coverage and product foundation.

《A prototype of a crypto game asset leasing model — jojonas》In this article from October 2022, I mainly envisioned a leasing model. Despite many flaws, since I reread it, I also sort out the points in the article:

1. The project evaluation system for non-crypto players (transaction activity, circulating supply, market value space, asset structure, etc.) is different from that of crypto players. They play various roles such as liquidity providers/arbitrageurs/speculators, etc；

2. Considering the audience as non-crypto players and crypto players at the same time will cause a split in economic design and gameplay experience. The same game behavior may need to be motivated differently according to different asset holdings；

3. What the leasing system does is resource allocation. In my summary at the time, I understood it as the exchange of time and money. Later, when I understood it more deeply, I thought that in addition to the exchange of different types of resources during the same period, “leasing” actually includes the exchange of resources across periods；

4. Renters’ incentives, or low-threshold leasing, is necessary. For some players, it is a low financial threshold, it can also be a low cognitive threshold, and a low operation threshold；

5. Instant matching is the core requirement of the leasing system;

6. The leasing system is not suitable for launching in the early stages of the game, but is suitable as a second growth point when the project has initially established a foothold and is about to face a broader market。

This article wrote a lot of details, basically focusing on the topic of “leasing” itself. Over the past year, I have looked at many projects, and products with built-in leasing mechanisms are rare, and no effects have been seen. For the reasons, I am more willing to believe that there are still no products on the current market that can reach the “out-of-the-box” stage, and most assets do not have the “practicality” that can be used for leasing.

《2022 Annual Review Summary-Games — jojonas》 In January 2023, in this article, I emphasized my reasons for being most optimistic about blockchain games in all sub-fields: the product implementation could possibly be the fastest landing, and the narrative combination is the most natural. But at the same time, the market is in a highly uncertain stage, both project parties and users are basically groping in the dark, and doubts are rising. But I look forward to the emergence of several successful products, which will establish confidence for everyone in terms of revenue and product life cycle, and bring some mature and referenceable models to this track. In this article, I added some thoughts on the industrial layout:

1. Traditional games can be seamlessly ported with cloud services, game engines, etc. FOCG may bring about new engines, mainly because it has changed many technical logics in game development.

2. Due to the requirements of high speed and low cost, the emergence of one-click chain-releasing SDKs makes dedicated game chains gradually the optimal solution for some products. At present, considering that most products have short lifespans, general-purpose public chains can meet the demand;

3. Wallets (account systems), payments, trading markets, etc., can all use general products, but from the perspective of player experience, customization is still urgently needed;

4. Community incubation would be a good direction, such as loot, Treasure DAO, Matchbox DAO, etc.;

5. Due to the current community-based promotion structure and a limited number of excellent products, the game information aggregation service is somewhat mediocre; it is suitable as an auxiliary function of the comprehensive platform, or to flex its muscles in the FOCG fiel

6. The current three major community tools, information reach rate is not high, and they do not target blockchain games for targeted optimization, looking forward to the emergence of customized chain game community tools;

7. It is difficult for data service providers to survive. However, based on the core products of data services, if they develop towards portal aggregation, they are most likely to become the entrance of the player’s chain game, except for the wallet, and can explore the distribution of small chain games (including launchpad).

In this article, I also mentioned a deeply felt point of view: first have players, then talk about economic design. It was from then on that I gradually shifted my focus on economic design from inside and outside the game to market operations, distribution, etc. The core of the operation of crypto projects lies in the community, and blockchain game projects should of course be so. Pre-operation, UGC incentives, narrative rhythm, asset issuance, etc., due to the convenience and flexibility provided by the token tool, what we can do is obviously much more than what traditional operations can do. So it comes back to these two words - “incentive compatibility”, how to make the community and the project stand together for a longer term, how to leverage community consensus at a lower cost, and how to let the community grow organically, are all worth long-term study and exploration.

There are two parts at the end of this article, which respectively mention the views on FOCG and the expectations for “gamified products”. I will continue to emphasize my expectations for “gamification products” in the following articles. Otherwise, I am really looking forward to it…

《Introduction and outlook of Fully on-chain Game — jojonas》 This article mainly talks about FOCG, and compares it with the current web2.5 blockchain games, traditional games in terms of gameplay depth, art, economic system, distribution, operation and marketing, financing, player experience, etc.

Games require a high level of computation, and as the ninth art form, a more “realistic” multi-sensory stimulation is one of the trends; the demand for peak hardware performance, and the security and fairness sought by the blockchain as a decentralized infrastructure, are in continuous contradiction. This means that the breakthroughs of FOCG will be more focused on gameplay and mechanism design. From the perspectives of gameplay design and mechanism design, I believe these are the two main directions for the future development of FOCG:

1. New gameplay similar to Texas Hold’em, Mahjong, Chess, etc., which have simple rules (high technical feasibility) but are full of countless game possibilities. Due to the global clock feature of the blockchain and the enhancement of the “fog of war” element by ZK technology, “information” in these games will be given unprecedented attention as a type of resource;

2. From the perspective of mechanism design, products will lean more towards Game-like DeFi Pro; Ponzi masters, actuarial elites, and top hackers will bring out their strongest tricks, fighting in this wild wide west, building an amusement park that is more brutal than traditional financial markets…

Of course, as long as you don’t care about losing money, and can personally participate in so many innovative projects that are the crystallization of human wisdom, it’s quite exciting to think about~

Project review

During this period, I have researched many popular projects, witnessed the rise of some convergent models, and sighed at the cruelty of the market. I will also briefly introduce a few projects that I focus on in this article, along with some personal understanding. Of course, many projects have not been deeply engaged in, so this is just a starting point, and I warmly welcome hardcore players or industry practitioners to exchange views!

Lumiterra

The most direct feeling after looking through the entire project: this team is not to be underestimated.

From the allocation of development resources, the team has built a product matrix, including the game itself, Lumi Finance financial module, operational auxiliary tg bot, exclusive chain and wallet, social module sosotribe. It’s roughly estimated that the number of blockchain developers is higher than that of the game part. The gameplay is relatively simple, but the game’s pitfalls are well-handled, and the integration with the financial module is smooth. This is believed to be the best strategy the team has made after careful consideration based on the existing development resources.

1. Gameplay

The gameplay is more like a sandbox RPG, requiring collection, planting, fighting, corresponding to three equivalent professions, the daily behavior and resource needs of different professions are cross-matched; based on the basic supply and demand match, the resource cycle is built up level by level. I often mention the industrial chain because the real economy relies on the industrial chain to operate, the demand is transmitted like a spider web and satisfied, “consumption” is a reflection of some of these demands. The advantage of using the industrial chain in the game economy is that it has higher robustness compared to the same production and sales. And Lumiterra has made a very simple industrial chain model.

1. DeFi Part

The DeFi part, which is the financial module, Lumiterra combines designs such as Olympus (low-price reserve support), over-collateralized stablecoin (Nirvana), and the OLM model proposed by Bond protocol. (Of course, the design of Nirvana also draws from Olympus)

I won’t go into too much detail (you can check the whitepaper Overview — Lumi Finance). I’ll just roughly explain its core logic.

The project has issued a core token, targeting LUA’s transactions and adopting the mainstream AMM model. It’s not the mainstream AMM model, but a specially designed virtual AMM, where buying is minting and selling is burning (like friend.tech’s key). In this virtual AMM, liquidity is divided into two parts: market liquidity and price floor liquidity; once market liquidity grows beyond a certain condition, it triggers a part of it to be converted into price floor liquidity - the latter is the reserve liquidity used to anchor the price floor. In extreme cases, when the price falls to the price floor, the reserve mechanism is used for redemption and destruction (to stabilize the price).

Players can stake LUA to get LUAUSD (in-game stablecoin), LUAOP (options). The stablecoin will form a CURVE LP with some mainstream stablecoins, LUAOP can be purchased at the floor price (players profit from the difference, the ecosystem profits from the increased reserve liquidity). The stablecoin obtained from staking LUA can be used for trading NFT assets in the game, and the curve LP will receive $LUAG (governance token) in addition to the transaction fee incentive.

Through such a mechanism, the price of $LUA will be stabilized and have potential upward momentum - when the game develops and trading demand increases, more $LUA collateral will be needed. And through the conversion from $LUA to $LUAUSD, the game is actually tokenless. The trade prices of materials/equipment and other assets produced in the game are isolated from market perception. The market pays more attention to the project’s blind box and the price of LUA tokens, and these assets can attract more funds and strengthen consensus through continuous empowerment and effective growth.

1. Social Module

The financial module is the most eye-catching part of lumiterra, while in the social module, sosotribe uses the mechanism of friend.tech. According to the whitepaper, players can customize their tribe’s bond curve, transaction fee distribution, incentive mechanism, etc. Tribes need to consume LUA to create, and the subsequent tribe key transactions are all settled in LUA; the same quadratic function curve is used. But compared to ft, it lacks a few key rings. The focus of future attention can be on whether its tg bot can pry into the telegram user group (even so, telegram as a pan-IM tool, does not have the social media dissemination environment of twitter).

Sosotribe has its own launch token MFC, which can be understood more as an incentive for exploiting loopholes; there is also a class of ERC20 tokens are points, also determined by some invitation behavior, trade behavior, etc. The social module as a whole looks very rushed, perhaps because it is early in the product, so there is no clear feasible logic, so I will not go into too much detail here.

1. Summary

To sum it up:

1) On the product side, “game + DeFi” dual-wheel drive, the basic framework has been set up; social module needs to be polished;

2) Using TG bot to assist in completing some operations and asset issuance matters is relatively new; we look forward to closer integration of TG bot with the social module in the future;

3) There is a relatively smooth isolation mechanism between in-game and external assets. However, the simplicity of the game content has resulted in insufficient value support for in-game assets. Therefore, whether it is the in-game token LUAG or the new type of assets that may appear in the future, it is very likely to rely on external assets to obtain value support;

4) The design of increasing lottery tickets (sorry for not mentioning it earlier) shows the game’s awareness of self-digesting bubbles.

Gas Hero

Gas Hero is a project that I pay great attention to, not only because it is the second product of the STEPN team, but also due to the community participation and co-creation approach they used in the initial promotion process, which I highly agree with. But embarrassingly, I didn’t realize the need to buy some assets before the game launched, and didn’t participate after some analysis and judgement after the launch, so I actually haven’t played this game. The following are my personal views formed by asking friends, reading the white paper, and reading the beginner’s tutorial.

1. Asset structure

What impressed me most about Gas Hero is its regular and massive asset structure - 175 cities, each city with unlimited regions (initially 2), each region with 9 guilds, and then tribes, bases, players (base cars) from the guilds; each player can equip 6 heroes, each hero can equip weapons and pets, and there are upgrade costs for bases, heroes, pets, etc.

This asset structure and its world view setting (world elder elections, guild wars, tribal wars, etc.) are consistent from a narrative perspective, which means that players may have “consented” to this structure and “consented” to the need to use a large amount of funds to fill the gap formed by these asset structures before they realize the problem.

Perhaps Gas Hero has seized this user feature - there is a large amount of funds on the chain looking for a place to go. As long as the economy can operate steadily, such a structure can absorb a large amount of funds, and the tax extracted from the fund circulation can meet the project’s income needs and drive the cycle to continue through mechanism design.

The asset structure design of Gas Hero is undoubtedly excellent. However, the prerequisite conditions for achieving the final situation may be ignored or confused.

1. Social Design

The gameplay of Gas Hero tends to be social + casual strategy. In terms of the depth of exploration of the game itself, it is actually similar to Lumiterra. It only has a “hero + pet + weapon” framework, and a lot of gameplay expectations fall to tribes and guilds. Waiting for the follow-up social aspects. Even experienced players leading the way will affect income earning. From a certain perspective, this is actually a bit of “forced socialization”; in addition, the social characteristics of the current audience are also different from traditional social products and social games.

The current social core of the game is driven by tax distribution. World Elders, Mayors, District Chiefs, Guild Leaders, and Tribal Chiefs regularly distribute 20% of the tax revenue each. There are only 7 World Elders, who need to donate GMT tokens to participate in the election. There are many games of chance here, but due to problems with the underlying social structure, a large number of low-income players have lost, so it is actually difficult to achieve results, and it may eventually become a digital game.

1. Core Asset Annihilation

Gas Hero has a design that I think is very bold, which is the hero death mechanism. In the game, except for the creation heroes, different death periods are set according to the quality of the heroes. For ordinary heroes, the initial version is set to die in 20 days. To put it nicely, it is conducive to the health of the economic cycle, greatly reduces the pressure to throw, and establishes the psychological cost of players and guides the reinvestment through the time difference of different behaviors.

But the question is, will players accept it?

This question seems easy to answer. It’s the game setting. So many players have played it. How could they not accept it? But I have always been skeptical about this. From the perspective of behavioral motivation, as long as the player can make a profit within the deadline, regardless of whether they accept it or not, it will not prevent them from participating; but the price of assets fluctuates at any time, especially when it is hyped up in the early stage, some players can’t make a profit or even lose blood will become the norm. So just consume it? Not right, because any game, player behavior accumulation will leave asset witness, this is actually very important, necessary feedback; not only lose money, there are no heroes left in the game, either continue to invest money (prejudice: will lose) or loss (maybe someone really want to continue to play? Forced to leave), this is a really extremely risky design……

Of course, if you’re going to say that you can achieve extremely precise numerical control and dynamic adjustment, then I’ll… believe you when I see it. Are you going to control the market price to the predetermined point and just throw money at it if it’s not enough? That’s not very realistic…

This is the first level. The second level is actually deeper, similar to Soros’s famous reflexive theory, that is, the hero death mechanism will cause many waiting players to preemptively develop anxiety about recouping their investment and give up entering the game. In fact, most players will enter the game when the game is in the early stage from a macro perspective, because everyone has established a cognitive framework similar to the model. As long as the assets are there, even if the assets continue to depreciate, it is always a decision with high odds; and most players choose to perform convergent actions based on this framework, which in turn will promote the factual results to develop in a direction consistent with cognition. The hero death mechanism has largely curbed these behaviors (buying dips, early investment mentality), and new funds are reluctant to enter, which naturally maximizes the disadvantage of NFT’s low liquidity.

1. No In-Game Tokens

Lumiterra and Gas Hero both chose the design of not producing tokens in the game, it is clear that they want to avoid the consequence of the death spiral of the sub-token collapsing the entire asset system in the previous generation of chain games. In Gas Hero, all assets are traded with GMT, and no other tokens are set.

Strictly speaking, the biggest impact of whether there are tokens in the game is actually on player cognition. The price fluctuation of the token can sway the community consensus, which is like a butterfly effect, while the price fluctuation of the asset is relatively not so sensitive, has more adjustment space, after all, a game has so many assets - players to a large extent will equate it with some normal asset price fluctuations.

There are no tokens in the game, which means that many game assets NFT trading currencies need to be considered. Either the liquidity is sufficient (GMT belongs to this category, others like ETH, etc.) can be digested by the market, or the currency issuance is controllable (LUAUSD belongs to this category). Lumiterra and Gas Hero both chose not to release tokens in the game, which I think will also be a trend. The incentives in the game will be more in the form of in-game assets, because compared to tokens, assets are easier to find their real-demand counterparts, which is a better choice for both players and project parties.

Cards Ahoy!

I have played this card game with two accounts on NetEase and experienced it in depth. I think it is a relatively representative product on the current market, so I thought of talking about it together.

The third beta test kicked off in January this year, and the ticket was obtained through the previously issued NFT equity. In-game cards are NFTs based on real assets, while the CAC token is in the form of a test coin. Apart from a Snow King team battle with no test activities, it mainly depends on the ladder (ladder rewards are almost zero). So, it can be assumed that the heat of this test can reflect the degree of gameplay quite decoupled.

1. Player Guidance

For most games, the newbie guidance in the first half-hour largely determines whether the player will retain and bring LTV in the future. There are too many things that can attract user interest in modern society, and it is common to quit if not satisfied after a few minutes of trial play (except for those who buy assets first). In addition to some basic guidance systems, Ahoy’s trial card system can be directly used for official battles, although each will reduce 20% of gold earning. For card games, this might be a good solution.

1. Gameplay Depth

The core gameplay involves building card groups and changing card order before each battle, somewhat like an expansion of Tian Ji’s horse racing model. This seemingly simple gameplay can theoretically achieve a deeper expansion, such as daily physical changes (existing), adding new races, skill types, and changes in the time series, etc. It actually reminds me of the very popular Marvel Snap overseas.

However, based on the content seen in the third test, there are 3 camps, each camp has at most 2 styles of play, and the content depth is too poor. Although many players have a good experience, deep issues can’t be avoided. Simply updating the camp is not enough, the interaction between camps can make additional multiply, which is the minimum requirement of a TCG game, otherwise the demand for in-game cards may be seriously insufficient.

1. Economic System

The economic system is based on a chest mechanism filled with various items. However, the current setup fails to make opening these chests appealing. The main issue is the abundance of useless cards and a too apparent sense of loss. The gameplay constraints significantly compress the differentiation between cards, leading to a surplus of useless cards with no unique battle purposes. This results in a high probability of disappointment when opening a chest full of these cards. More importantly, due to the availability of free trading, players are more likely to buy the cards they need directly than to open numerous chests, making the latter far less effective. This approach overlooks the players’ gaming interests.

The card upgrade mechanism uses the Clash Royale system, but it does not consider the fundamental difference with Clash Royale. The latter is still essentially a game where micromanagement is greater than light spending, which is why casual competitiveness is established. Only when the spending difference is large, the micromanagement level cannot change the situation, which is why I emphasize its casual characteristics. But in the automated battle of Ahoy, there is no micromanagement, and spending becomes the only decisive factor. This makes the design of the card growth system a dilemma: high growth → becoming a numerical game, player loss; low growth → low synthesis cost-performance ratio, lack of asset consumption.

From the perspective of gold output, 1v1 battle is the core gold making gameplay, and the winner gets the CAC reward. CAC can be used to open chests, which brings us back to the issue of the opening experience mentioned earlier. The result is that CAC has been falling…

1. Matching Mechanism

For most combat games, the design of the matching mechanism is of utmost importance. Ahoy is more cunning in this aspect because it does not rely on real-time matching. Due to the automated combat gameplay design, Ahoy can completely achieve a matching similar to Clash of Clans to supplement the player experience.

In addition, after losing, you will encounter some opponents with poor card matching, which is presumably the official guarantee mechanism. Earlier, Skyweaver, which also made card chain games, had enough gameplay depth, so it couldn’t be as free and easy as Ahoy, after all, AI complexity requires a high degree. When I later logged into Skyweaver to relive the old dream, I found that I couldn’t match an opponent, which was very frustrating. In comparison, Ahoy has much less pressure in PVP…

Matr1x

I haven’t participated in several Matr1x tests. After all, there are too many players, and I am not a fan of FPS games (I was addicted to Fortnite and Overwatch for a while, but I quit due to my lackluster skills). But the asset issuance and narrative of Matr1x has provided a good template for many projects.

The rhythm of asset issuance is roughly as follows:

1, YATC (first generation)

Similar to the MVP of Memeland, it is a platform-level NFT with esports narrative; some are given out and some are retained. Most of the ones given out have not entered the market, so the market cap is relatively easy to calculate, and the market cap/trading volume ratio is low. The high market cap makes YATC (Trophy) a business card for Matr1x, bringing a lot of positive effects:

1) Popularity and dissemination. Not everyone wants to play a shooting game, but if the NFT series floor of a blockchain game project reaches 20 ETH, I still want to know about it.

2) Confidence in subsequent series. As mentioned earlier, there is a reflexive relationship between consensus and actual market price.

3) Cost substitution. An NFT worth 10+ETH. After the project team stabilizes the market value, it will be more important to use the hundreds of NFTs in hand. Of course, it’s impossible to abuse it, and the floor will always be papery no matter how stable it is, but at least there are more cards to play with.

1. Matr1x 2061 (second generation)

This pfp series represents the rights of the shooting game, the style is imitated from Azuki, but it fits the trendy temperament brought by the game’s own narrative.

Accompanying this pfp series is a world-view story background with millions of words, early release of game characters, elements reflecting the world view in many places, and the convergence of Eastern and Western cultures. The minting right priority guaranteed the YATC holders.

The 2061 series played an important role in equity distribution in subsequent tests.

1. KUKU (third generation)

A series that represents the IP rights of the platform (narrative triangle: e-sports, games, IP culture), so its actual positioning is higher than that of the 2061 series.

How to get whitelist eligibility?

As you might have guessed - part of the whitelist comes from staking the first and second generations.@Matr1x_Official/matr1x-kuku-nft-%E6%8C%87%E5%8D%97-bd2d35220da3"> Specific rules are too detailed to explain here.

1. FIRE & MAX (tokens)

One is a game coin and the other is a platform coin. At present, there is no obvious difference, and the roles they play are all the final targets for expectations.

Taking the latest max event as an example, the MAX airdrop allocation is finally determined through basic points and point multipliers (user invitations). In previous tests, the test rewards often included MAX tokens, FIRE tokens, and blueprints and many other game assets. It is precisely because of the expectation of these rewards that the value of the test ticket has an anchor - it makes it a natural thing for the official to sell tickets, and it gives the premium tickets that can be obtained through early asset staking a pricing expectation, which in turn stabilizes the price of early assets.

The approach of Matr1x is a template that I think is very suitable for blockchain games at this stage. Blockchain game projects are different from other niche areas, and many times they can leverage high market effects with a small team at low cost. Not only are blockchain games high in investment and long in cycle, but more importantly, the market direction is uncertain, the economic design is complex, and the risk of sudden death is high. Therefore, a more suitable issuance method for blockchain games should be to prioritize operations, carry out asset issuance and community operations simultaneously, and continue to carry out technical tests and economic tests as the game develops.

The asset issuance structure of Matr1x can largely solve some problems for both the project party and the players. Through the issuance of early assets and continuous empowerment, the project can have some cash flow during the ongoing development process, avoiding the embarrassment of long-term lack of rice (this is the end of most game development); and the gathering of early asset holders, as well as the joining of new players during the whole process, is the process of community gradually forming a consensus, everyone has become a common stakeholder; this is rare in traditional games.

The multi-level asset structure also solves the problem of operation topics. The early issuance stage of the project is subdivided, corresponding to the multi-level asset structure, and the main line of operation is very clear. Each type of asset’s rigorous design carries some responsibility of the game, for example, 2061 actually played a big role in IP promotion.

In fact, early assets also solve the problems of test qualifications, test rewards, etc - these holders are the most suitable testers, and the targets for test rewards. The project party gets the most real feedback and data, empowers the early assets, and also reduces the operating costs; the player’s early investment gets a return, and they also get to play the game they are optimistic about.

As for the tokens that are still in their early stages of development and have not yet fully revealed their potential, we can use the same logic to analyze them. As the final instruments for sustaining expectations and absorbing bubbles, their future trajectory should follow this line of reasoning.

Reflections and Prospects

Limited by my personal energy, I did not mention many projects in the summary of this article.

For example, xpet, which determines output by consuming reverse, turns playing games into reverse playing futures; it uses Twitter’s random treasure box to fission, indeed achieving higher recognition with lower cost. Then there’s Hero of Mavia, a game that imitates the play style of Clash of Clans, and goes to great lengths to avoid policies related to virtual currency in distribution channels. Blocklords, a game that imitates the play style of Age of Empires, incapacitated one of my hands only for me to find out it was developed by the same team as Seascape (they cut me twice, this time physically). Then there’s Big Time, an early blockchain gaming giant, which issued a series of assets and suddenly listed them as the early holders were deeply buried, entering a frenzied second stage, and was then morally sanctioned for being too frenzied. SkyArk, relying on bold publicity to ride the trend, as well as a method that is called a lottery but is actually an auction, issued thousands of NFTs at a price of 0.6ETH each…

In short, through these projects, I believe there are many places worth learning and thinking about. Here, I would like to make some reflections and prospects as the final wrap-up of this article.

Asset Structure

Gas Hero presents a case where a meticulous and in-depth asset structure prepared in advance can help the game attract market funds in the middle and late stages (of course, you have to first get to the middle and late stages). In contrast, many games have a rather chaotic asset structure. Without enough “pits” prepared and the “nourishment” to support these pits, it’s actually quite difficult for funds to enter the market.

At the same time, we need to consider where different player roles are positioned within such an asset structure framework. Under what circumstances will players enter, and when will they leave? All these are closely related to game design.

In addition, besides in-game assets, external assets are also worth careful consideration, with Matr1x being a typical example. The role of external assets is similar to a salesperson, marketing to the market how high quality the game’s assets are (in plain language: can increase in value), how meaningful the IP is (in plain language: appealing), and how promising the future is (in plain language: about to issue tokens). In short, external assets are a window for the game to face the overall crypto market, because the majority of coin speculators will basically not enter the game to play …

External Asset Isolation

Many games have implemented some isolation measures, making the price performance of external assets relatively detached from the game’s economic cycle, and more influenced by the community, market, and project party. The reason is not difficult to think of. The first-generation blockchain games did not have external assets, and basically used the price of in-game assets to reflect the overall health. However, due to the collapse of the economic system, the price of assets plummeted, which affected the consensus, and in the end, the whole game fell apart.

To be honest, the fact that game projects are restricted by the separation of in-game and external assets is quite cruel. Even games that have experienced major problems, such as ‘No Man’s Sky’, can make a comeback after a few years of updates. After all, games are inherently complex systems, and it’s normal for there to be minor problems. It’s not fair to kill a game just because of these problems. (I’m not trying to make excuses for game developers.) By separating in-game and external assets, not only can the content and gameplay of the game be relatively isolated from the influence of operation and publicity, but also in case of internal economic problems, external assets can be used to stabilize the community and self-rescue through timely economic policy adjustments.

Incentive Compatibility

In the previous text, I mentioned some “worth exploring and learning long-term” issues, including: How to make the community and the project stand together in the long term? How to leverage community consensus at a lower cost? How to allow the community to grow organically? All of these can be addressed by looking for measures with the idea of incentive compatibility.

Incentive compatibility, as it’s called, is about adjusting parameters to align the interests of individuals with the collective (different participants).

Existing solutions include early participants holding early issued assets, similar to early stock holding. No matter what, they have to stick until the stock is issued (IPO), otherwise, they can only look for potential buyers in advance in a VC/PE style (although liquidity is much better). Early participants holding stocks will naturally help with promotion and align interests.

So how to achieve “long-term”?

I believe the answer lies in “stable expectations”, which I won’t go into detail now.

Financial Module

In fact, Lumiterra serves as a reminder to all chain game project parties to make good use of the tools at hand, which may have more than just the existing uses.

Nirvana is an Olympus-like project that most people know about; fewer people know about OLM, but after all, they are existing achievements. The innovations of traditional finance are more reflected in complex derivative design, unknown to the public, which means that on-chain innovations can be more complex and more amazing. And all these can be part of the blockchain game project, and just an external module, which in essence does not affect the game experience.

Compared to games limited by traditional publishing, blockchain games are actually more open and can therefore accommodate more content that developers want to express, or gameplay they want to implement. At least that’s the case at this stage.

Social Module

Crypto always brings out exciting innovative pieces, Friend.tech is one of them, although its template is derived from DeSo a few years ago.

The social aspect of traditional games is actually quite clear: for games leaning towards single-player buyout direction, social interaction is more about online experience, basically based on existing familiar relationships; while games inherently carrying a stranger social environment, most of them have made a big deal around social interaction, with all kinds of designs emerging, different from the experience of familiar social interaction or stranger social interaction in the real world, we can call it “virtual social interaction”.

Blockchain-based socializing can be said to have added the element of “finance” to the basis of “virtual social interaction”, turning social resources into social capital. Hence, the resulting game-like nature is expected to be strong. Blockchain games combine the characteristics of all three, it’s still worth looking forward to what kind of social experience it can eventually create, and what genius designs can emerge from the social module.

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