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Can emerging Web3 games break GameFi's woes?

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The difficulties faced by GameFi are mainly the lack of financing scale and professional talents, the economic model is difficult to get rid of the Ponzi attribute, and the proliferation of game cheats, etc.

Original title: "Are emerging Web3 games a Ponzi game-breaker for GameFi?" "

Original author: 0xMoonda

GameFi Market Status

Entering 2022, chain games, as a segment of the encryption market, are affected by the macroeconomic environment and Affected by the DeFi black swan event, the market value of the project has fallen by more than 80% so far. After the popularity of the phenomenon-level project STEPN, the market has maintained stock activities. The total number of games has remained stable at more than 2,000, the number of independent active wallets is about 1 million, and the NFT transaction volume is about 500 million US dollars. The number of game NFTs on the Ethereum chain accounts for more than half of the market share, about 60%. Other public chains such as Solana, Polygon, and the second-layer protocol Immutable X continue to develop, and their market share continues to expand, showing a trend of catching up.

From the perspective of financing, GameFi’s total financing in Q1 of 2022 is 11.26 billion dollars, an increase of 194.19% year-on-year; affected by STEPN, games became the most sought-after track in Q2, and the financing amount rose sharply, reaching as high as 2.996 billion U.S. dollars; with the serial liquidation of DeFi, the encryption market financing fell into a cooling-off period. The amount raised was only $963 million. In the process of continuous iteration, the development of the chain game track is becoming more and more mature, and sub-directions such as vertical media, investment companies, infrastructure, game unions, and incubators have been refined.

GameFi’s dilemma

·Insufficient financing scale and professional talents

According to the development experience of F2P in the mobile terminal, assuming that a game production team delivers the product on schedule, and the development and operation are on the right track, at least US$3 million in financing is required in the pre-seed round. Among them, 50%-60% of the funds are used for research and development, usually around 10 people, and the development cycle generally lasts 18 to 24 months; the remaining funds are used for customer acquisition. If the progress is smooth and the player retention data is considerable, the founders have Opportunity to start a new round of financing. During this process, the team will encounter various difficulties, and most of them actually end in failure. The development of Web3 games has other challenges superimposed on this basis--difficulty in initial financing, lack of professional talents, and the development cycle has become longer and more complicated due to the use of smart contracts, which means that the financing amount of pre-seed is required to be greater , it is possible to survive the initial stage of product development. Secondly, Web2 games already have a mature promotion model and customer acquisition plan in operation, while the effective operation model of Web3 is still being explored. As the maturity of game products still needs to be improved at the current stage, users’ expectations for the Fi attribute in GameFi The attention far exceeds the game itself, which makes it difficult for participants to pay for the second time after the successful operation model is reproduced, which is a huge test for game operation.

·The economic model is difficult to get rid of the Ponzi attribute

As mentioned above, the technical maturity of chain games needs to be improved and the shortage of talents will inevitably affect the output quality of products, and even the available The elements of the economic model are relatively simple. In the early days, it was mainly based on tokens. The common ones are single-currency model and dual-currency model. But neither of them can fundamentally solve the relationship between the number of new players and the Token The contradiction between prices, once the number of new users stops or the price of game Token is reduced, it will enter an indefinite death spiral.

With the maturity of NFT technology and popularization of audience, many games introduce it as an economic model element. Give different game attributes to NFT through smart contracts to increase value and combine the original Token The model prolongs the product cycle of the game to a certain extent. For example, the wolf sheep game uses the "NFT+token" superposition method to realize the mutual game between players, but in essence it is still a DeFi product with a game shell. After integrating NFT elements, the player's operating space is slightly improved.

At this stage of development, players Although the scale has increased compared with previous pure Fi-based games, players who simply enjoy Web2 games have not yet entered the game due to the threshold limitation, until a group of old game IPs with loyal players integrate encryption elements into the game system and launch again , the trend of breaking the circle has emerged. The representative product is the MMORPG game Mir4 under Wemade. This game did not cause waves in the traditional game circle at the beginning of its release. Instead, it aroused strong repercussions in the encryption field. Driven by the Internet, Web2 players accidentally discovered the "business opportunity" of P2E, and started their gold digging careers one after another in the middle and late stages. However, the addition of new blood also raised the following questions.

·Game plug-ins are rampant

Not long after Web2 players joined Mir4, a game plug-in that can speed up and increase attack power spread, which greatly increased the mining speed of players, and professional The speed of P2E players is much higher than that of Web3 players. The speed of digging, selling and raising makes it unprofitable for players who enter the game later, and accelerates the decline of products. Common Web2 game plug-ins are roughly divided into three types:

1. Memory hanging: common in stand-alone games, it is a technique used to modify game running data. If the attack power and speed in the game do not pass through the server, the player directly modifies the attack power and speed with modifiers, and with the development of technology, many tools can complete program tampering without programming foundation, such as GG modifier.

2. packet hanging : The package is to simulate the client request and send it to the server. This kind of plug-in is very popular in MMORPG games. For example, when a character is attacking, it is actually like sending a request to the game server to tell the server the attack power of the game character and then perform damage calculation. If the server does not check the value of the client, other If a person catches the request packet of this attack and simulates sending a request to modify the specific attack value in the request packet, then the damage value it sends to the server will be the same. Therefore, server verification is a very important part of the game.

3. UI hanging: similar to the button wizard, it seems simple, but it is very difficult to write it completely. If a game can only use this kind of script, it means that the quality of the game itself is still high, because players will only use this method to complete automation when modifying the game memory and package is not feasible.

If there is a bug in the traditional game, Data rollback is possible, but the chain game data is directly uploaded to the chain, and the data is irreversible. P2E is directly related to economic benefits. Chain games have not yet been released on a large scale, and many Web2 script authors don’t know yet. If they know that the script author’s status in GameFi will not be inferior to that of scientists in DeFi.

From an investment perspective, evaluate The importance of the project party's ability to deal with plug-ins is no less important than the design of the game's economic model. With the continuous growth of players, the two together determine the life cycle of game products. It is worth noting that it is not yet known whether the chain game projects that are currently on the market have server verification. Once there is a flood of plug-ins, the consequences will be disastrous.

GameFi’s dilemma

F2O (Free to Own)

The Free to Own model was created by Gabriel Leydon, founder of Limit Break Proposed, the DigiDaigaku project was launched stealthily in the form of free mint on August 9th. From the start of the project to the present, it can be seen from the results that Gabriel's approach has indeed created a new chain game operation model and is quite effective, as follows:

·The Genesis NFT of the game project is launched stealthily in the form of free mint. Non-gamers for financial gain;

Secondly, announce the background of the game team and capital, raise market expectations, and return the airdropped NFT to market pricing;

Open the game and continue to airdrop game items or characters to players holding Genesis NFTs according to the game development route, such as DigiDaigaku Heroes and DigiDaigaku Spirits, On the one hand, this method can maintain the floor price and player expectations of Genesis NFT, and on the other hand, it can also attract real gamers to join the community;

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·In addition, what is most different from other game operations is that Gabriel personally interacts with other outstanding Web3 game founders on Twitter Seek cooperation to make the other party join the Free to Own camp, such as Castaways CEO Dayton Mills, Digi and Castaways jointly released the skin DigiDaigaku Genesis Adventure Key used in the small raft game Castaways and prize rankings among gamers who hold skins Competition activities;

Apart from Castaways, Gabriel has also interacted closely with Pas, the founder of OhBabyGames recently. I believe that after OhBabyGames is launched, there will be more interaction and cooperation between the two parties. The cooperation of the above two games has created a lot of enthusiasm for chain games in the circle and opened up a new situation;

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Gabriel, in addition to actively promoting in the Web3 game circle, also purchased the Super Bowl commercial on February 12, 2023 to continue to build momentum for DigiDaigaku, Attract more Web2 gamers.

As more and more Many new players have entered the market. The F2O operation model did not cause the price of Genesis NFT to appear a death spiral, but instead showed an upward trend. The follow-up progress is worth looking forward to. If everything goes well, it will be accompanied by the successive release of other F2O games and the game-oriented The launch of the mainnet of L1 such as Sui is expected to start a new round of game boom.