Can the sluggish GameFi market usher in a new round of innovation and growth?

特邀专栏作者

2023-06-08 12:00

This article is about 4478 words, reading the full article takes about 7 minutes

An opportunity to bring the next tens of millions of new users into the cryptocurrency space.

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The current overall status of the Gamefi track

The overall performance of the GameFi track in 2022 can be summarized as driving high and going low. In addition to outperforming the market in April, the market value of GameFi basically maintained the trend of advancing and retreating with the cryptocurrency market, and the decline was even greater, entering a state of deep bearishness.

The sluggishness of the market is intuitively manifested in the short life cycle of the project and the rapid loss of users. From the "Play to Earn" mode that was laid in 2021 to the "Move to Earn" and "X to Earn" modes that will break the circle in 2022, the game mode of "old wine in new bottles" is still based on a variety of Ponzi models and attractive The rewards are a gimmick, which has attracted a large number of new users for this track, but the abused Ponzi model has given wrong guidelines to project parties and players:

• For the project side, put a game shell on DeFi, supplemented by complex token economics to disguise its unsustainable nature, and once players fail to make profits and lose, all GameFi will fall into an inescapable death spiral , few projects can remain active for more than three months.

But behind the cruel reality, there is also a turning point. The GameFi track is still one of the fields that will absorb the most financing in the encryption industry in 2022, with the amount of financing nearly doubling year-on-year. During the development of GameFi, chain game ecosystems have played an important role. There are Gala Games, which led the last round of GameFi bull market, to introduce new ones, and TreasureDAO, which hatched the popular chain game The Beacon, gained brand awareness, and some are backed by Binance. The Block Ape Scissors want to realize the "big reshaping" of the BSC chain game circle. Between the old and the new, the market may have reached the bottom. After the precipitation of the bear market, they may become the driving force for the outbreak of the GameFi track in the next round of bull market.

Gala Games: Pioneer in the GameFi field, where is the "Steam of chain games"?

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Gala Games: "Steam of chain games"

Gala Games is a blockchain game development company established in 2018, aiming to build a decentralized game ecosystem and become the "Steam" in the blockchain game field. Different from the real Steam, Gala Games needs to play the two roles of game developer and game aggregation platform. In addition to the games developed by the team itself, other game manufacturers can also launch games on the Gala platform after being voted and approved by the nodes.

Gala Games is developing and operating a number of different types of games, which give players control over their assets in the game, allowing players to trade the items and props they get from the game on the blockchain. Players will not only experience the fun of the game, but also control their own game assets, and at the same time earn income with their game skills in GameFi.

In the decentralized node network of Gala Games, users can decide which games can be launched on the Gala Games platform through consensus voting, and can also decide the reward ratio of nodes through voting. Most of the in-game NFTs will be launched in the Gala NFT store, while a small part of the NFTs will be allocated to the founder nodes using a random allocation algorithm.

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Gala Games has launched 18 games

In addition, judging from the visual effects, the quality of these games has far exceeded that of some other chain games in the same period. However, while ensuring the quality of the game, it also brings some problems. High-quality games (3A or quasi-3A level) have high investment costs and long development cycles. How to integrate the economic model with the development progress in the fast-paced Crypto circle? Fitting is a huge challenge. In addition, the overall operation of Gala Games is decentralized, and the decision-making is more efficient and centralized, but the community atmosphere is relatively weak, and the scope of node governance is limited. For ordinary investors, whether it is obtaining information or participating in investment, the barriers to entry are quite high.

TreasureDAO: The "Nintendo" of the encrypted world is ready to go, "small and beautiful" is the first priority

Treasure DAO

Treasure DAO is a game ecosystem built on Arbitrum connected by MAGIC tokens, with the goal of building a "decentralized Nintendo". Every item in the Treasure ecosystem (Legions NFT, MAGIC tokens, etc.) is distributed for free, as are other collectibles on the Treasure Marketplace for free and fair distribution. Treasure was initially built based on the Ethereum main network, but later because the Gas cost of the Ethereum network remained high at that time, in order to lower the user threshold, Treasure migrated to the L2 layer Arbitrum chain to build.

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TreasureDAO Ecological Overview (Source: PKU Blockchain)

Trove is an NFT marketplace and game launcher on Arbtrium that enables the trading of NFTs. Bridgeworld is the core economic center of Treasure DAO. As a resource coordination game, it integrates many Defi gameplays around mining, farming, summoning, and exploration to promote the development of Treasure DAO's economic system. In addition, there is also the AMM protocol MagicSwap, which is committed to becoming a portal for the TreasureDAO ecological cross-game economy. Currently, Magicswap’s swap and pool only have two trading pairs: Magic/Gfly (the governance token of BattleFly DAO) and Magic/ELM (the governance token of Tales of Elleria).

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The explosive The Beacon

With infrastructure support, explosive games are needed to make the ecology flourish. The Beacon is the detonator that ignites the ecology. As a phenomenon-level product launched by Treasure DAO, The Beacon has been launched on Arbitrum for only one month, and the number of players has nearly exceeded 26,000+. The increase in DAO data has pulled the weekly active users of Treasure DAO from 5,000 to about 20,000, which has almost quadrupled.

The Beacon is an RPG game. In the game, players can choose a basic weapon to enter the dungeon to explore. During the exploration, they can upgrade the weapon to fight better. The game modes include homestead mode, single-player PVE mode, and tavern quiz. The home mode is used to edit houses, the single-player PVE mode is to explore the dungeon within the specified time, and you can get rewards, and the tavern Q&A is mainly to answer npc questions.

TreasureDAO is targeting the long-tail game market. AAA games are only a standard that can only be achieved by a few major game manufacturers. The growing number of Web3 players will have a great demand for such small games and AA games. TreasureDAO is trying to bring this The "small but beautiful" model has been adopted. Starting from popular games, TreasureDAO has established a set of infrastructure and ecology to meet the needs of independent developers. Each game can benefit from MAGIC's economic value and shared resources, and the accumulated player activity content Can be used to form an economy. It is not affected by the short cycle of a single game, so it has a stronger ecosystem resilience.

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Block Ape Scissors: Backed by Binance, the "big reshaping" of the BSC chain gaming circle

Compared with the traditional 3A games, most of the previous GameFi projects still have a very simple gameplay, and there are many projects launched hastily in order to catch up with the hot market. They still play the old routine of DeFi mining and do it under the skin of a game. The business of "digging and selling". From the point of view of game experience, it is very different from the traditional single-player online games. From the point of view of the economic model, even many project parties regard the game as a fund, so this has also led to the dilemma of "seeing the light and dying" of chain games. The BSC chain is the hardest-hit area for this kind of "earth dog chain game". Looking back at history, some well-known GameFi 1.0 projects such as Farmer World, Spaceship, THG, Raca, Valkyrio Valkyrie, and BNB Hero cannot escape the death spiral in the end .

Block ape scissors is a game community platform based on BNB Chain, on November 15, 2021AnnounceAnnounce

Incubated by Binance Labs, the vision is to provide players with entertainment while creating lasting value through innovative mechanisms and well-designed game experiences, and is committed to building the most diverse and advanced Play to Earn ecosystem. The platform introduces the DAO governance model, breaks the traffic barriers and power monopoly of traditional game platforms, provides more opportunities for emerging developers, and provides players with a safe, fair and interesting game environment.

The most important of these is the DAO governance model. Players can obtain Token pledge rights by purchasing a platform equity card called "Ape Banana miners", which uses a POS mining mechanism. Block Ape Scissors adopts a shared economic model to encourage community members to participate in the construction and operation of the platform. Participating in games, contributing content and participating in governance activities can also obtain a certain amount of platform tokens $Banana. Developers can also earn Banana by contributing games or providing services. This sharing economy model motivates community members to actively participate and promotes a self-sufficient and sustainable ecosystem.

Community members and independent game developers will "split up". For independent game developers, at a fixed time every month, they can upload their demos in the form of proposals, and then the Block Ape Scissors DAO will process these proposals. Attractive and playable games, then Block Ape Scissors will incubate them, help developers complete the construction of the entire game, and then launch Block Ape Scissors homepage recommendation.

During the voting process, all members of the DAO organization participating in the voting can enjoy the profits after the game is launched. For example: Game A is voted and Block Ape Scissors incubates it. When Game A brings in a profit of 1 million US dollars, Block Ape Scissors can get 25% income (to support the further construction and expansion of the platform), Block Ape Scissors DAO treasury can get 15% income (for the salary of DAO organization contributors and some proposal expenses), and DAO organization members can get 10% (received according to their corresponding voting rights), and the remaining 50% will repurchase and burn $Banana (to accelerate token deflation). (The above data is an example, the exact data will be officially announced)

It can be seen that community members and independent game developers reach the same goal by different routes, project parties and game players are no longer on the opposite side, and the entire Block Ape Scissors ecosystem will be committed to developing games that are more suitable for the current chain game market. Whether it is pursuing the playability of the game or the closed loop of the economic model, community members will vote for the chain game they want, or in other words, profit-driven games can select those games that make the Block Ape Scissors ecology more profitable .

Block Ape Scissors is still exploring the content of AI. In the future, it will train an AI robot to generate different economic models. Members of the DAO organization vote every week to choose the one they think is better, so as to help the AI robot continue to optimize and find new opportunities for GameFi. s solution.

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It is worth mentioning that, according to the Block Ape Scissors team, it maintains a good relationship with many large Web2 game companies, and will gradually transform several game IPs that have swept the world in the next six months. More traditional players are brought into the crypto world. And Web3 games may break the dilemma of traditional game purchases in terms of business model (that is, attract players through paid advertisements and other means), and subvert the traditional profit distribution structure, providing developers with more opportunities to realize, and providing more opportunities for the game industry. Create new markets. In the process of transitioning the game from Web2 to Web3, it may be an opportunity for Block Ape Scissors to overtake in a corner, and the "big reshaping" of the BSC chain gaming circle may be just around the corner.

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Future Opportunities and Challenges for GameFi

On May 25, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said, "Web3 games are one of the biggest drivers of mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. In the next 6-18 months, there will be some top games released in Web3. Last year alone, Web3 games raised over $2 billion in funding.”