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Comparative analysis of GameFi games of Texas Hold 'Em

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Texas Hold 'Em Hold' em -- The best game for chain play.

原文标题：《德州扑克类 GameFi 游戏对比分析》

Source: W Labs Melon Field Lab

WLabs Editor's note: Texas Hold 'Em has always been considered by W labs to be the most suitable game for chain play. It is easy to use, strong game, and wide audience. This type of chain travel, if the economic model design is good, can not be the death spiral, really can break the spell. kevinxhxhxh gives a brief explanation of the current Texas project involving crypto. Kevinxhxhxh is his personal Twitter account.

Recently, I saw Web3 Texas Hold 'em back to back, and I wrote two research and analysis articles, which I was excited about as a player. What kind of game can GameFi+ Texas Hold 'em bring us?

A Brief introduction to the background of Texas Hold 'Em

First, a brief introduction to Texas Hold 'em poker, Texas Hold' Em Poker in English, it is a kind of player to player card game. A table at least 2 people, a maximum of 22 people, usually by 2-10 people.

There are 52 cards in Texas Hold 'em, no trump. Each player starts with two face-down "bottom" cards, followed by five up-facing public cards. After all the betting circles (three rounds, each of which will be betting), if there is still no winner, the game will enter the "showdown" stage, where all the remaining players show their bottom cards to compete, and the player with the highest card face wins. The combination of card face size is as follows:

德州扑克类 GameFi 游戏对比分析

In fact, it can be seen that the rules are relatively simple, to put it bluntly, through the hand of the card and the public card on the surface of the card consists of five cards, and other players than whose larger. But in fact, it is very complicated, because every step of the action involves probability, psychological knowledge, you can overcome the opponent through the card force, but also through the "howl" to overcome the card force is not as good as your opponent. This involves a lot of technical and tactical research. Moreover, various poker competitions held every year also attract a large number of poker players with their high prize money. The highest prize of WSOP competition is more than 10 million dollars.

High bonus stimulation, unique game and entertainment also attract the vast number of players. About 60 million people, or 6.8 percent of adults, play Texas Hold 'em regularly, according to the study. And because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to a global lockdown, many players can no longer organize cards through offline clubs, which could lead to a boom in online games.

In online Texas Hold 'em poker, it is reported that more than 50 platforms have a monthly revenue of more than 10 million RMB, and the leading game "WSOP" even once reached 60 million RMB, which shows its strong earning ability. And the entire online Depu market capacity is reaching 5 billion dollars.

Two, the game pain point analysis

As popular as games are, there are some product pain points that need to be addressed.

Anyone who has played online Texas Hold 'em will know the complexity of recharging and withdrawing money, which requires multiple checks and sometimes foreign currency transfers that can take 2-3 business days. Withdrawing money is even more difficult. Users need to go through a strict KYC on each poker platform, and chances are you won't be able to withdraw your in-game assets after KYC, or you'll have to pay high fees.

At the same time, basically all players will question the fairness of platform licensing, whether random licensing has been one of the key topics discussed by players, because many small probability events will always be encountered, such as AA by 27o BB this situation is common, and small chips in the MTT bubble period will continue to be "sanctioned" by the system. Most platforms don't do evil either, but it's hard to prove that to players.

There's no way for recreational players to make money. In traditional games, players are essentially playing a zero-sum game, and they have to pay for water, which makes the game infinitely skewed toward skilled players, and they make a lot of money from the recreational players. If this gets worse, won't there be fewer entertainment players, and more skilled players who can't make money?

Three, chain change program discussion

Use blockchain to deposit and withdraw money, all actions are completed on the chain, and the game's contract wallet can not stop any of your withdrawals. In this way, the speed of our deposits and withdrawals depends entirely on the block processing speed, and we don't have to worry about the game platform card KYC not allowing withdrawals, and we don't have to worry about the transfer speed too slow. Of course, the premise is to learn to use the decentralized wallet basics.

The issue of game licensing and shuffling will also use blockchain to generate truly random numbers while making them searchable on the chain and immutable. This not only solves the user's doubts about the platform, but also solves the problem of how the platform proves to the user.

In addition to the fun of the game, recreational players also bring valuable traffic to the platform. Recreational players can use the data such as the duration of the game and the number of cards in their hands as proof of work, and obtain part of the revenue under the rules formulated by the game (which will be explained in the white paper published by the project). However, in Web2 games, The proceeds will go to the project itself.

With that in mind, I've seen several games come out that address these issues to some extent. Coinpoker, W3poker, NUTSDAO.

Coinpoker is supposed to be an early adopter of blockchain, with the main format being similar to other Web2 products, but with the addition of digital coins and a verifiable deal shuffling, it's not easy to be so far-sighted when no one knows what GameFi is.

The other two, for my detailed report, are reinventing Texas Hold 'em in a GameFi way.

Here's a quick comparison of the similarities and differences between the three games.

Four, product comparison

德州扑克类 GameFi 游戏对比分析

V. How to combine NFT?

In traditional game currency platforms, players can obtain game currency through a variety of means, such as platform time-limited collection, daily log-in collection, daily hand reward, free MTT race collection, etc. There are many ways for white players to obtain basic game currency, which also increases user retention. Then add achievements, advanced tournaments, leaderboards and other features that are more playable, so that players have the desire to challenge. If you add NFT on top of this, what kind of functionality will it bring?

德州扑克类 GameFi 游戏对比分析

As you can see, both games use NFT to give a certain bonus to the in-game ecosystem, so that NFT players, especially those with higher rarity, can get higher revenue. However, the platform operation model of Texas Hold 'em makes perfect sense in Web2. With the addition of NFT, it is really special. In traditional poker games, the kingpin only has the advantage of chip quantity, while in GameFi, a high rarity NFT not only brings the advantage of chip quantity, It can also gain greater advantages from various functions. However, it should be noted that none of this has anything to do with winning or losing at the poker table, which I think is also a bottom line of the game, no matter how to change, the rules are not likely to change with the arrival of NFT.

From the perspective of these two projects, NFT's capabilities are more suitable for use on game currency platforms than traditional cash poker games.

而作为 GameFi 项目，肯定需要自己的Token，目前 NUTSDAO 和 Coinpoker 是有自己的 Token ，但其使用场景非常有限，暂时也看不到好的消耗逻辑。但这是一个比较大的话题，我也准备在后续研究中继续深挖。

summarize

This paper analyzes the gameplay, market, project comparison and analysis of NFT function of Depu. We can see that this is a very imaginative market, and different projects are also using their own ways to promote this game. We also look forward to having a Depu GameFi to operate for a long time ~