Folius Ventures Aiko comments on the BigTime economic model: Putting aside tokens, the game itself has already failed half way
Original author: Aiko (Twitter/X: @0x AikoDai)
Original source: Folius Ventures
Editors note: Recently, the launch of the much-watched Web3 game BigTime has ignited a new round of gold-making craze, and invitation codes are even more difficult to find. As the first Web3 native MMO game, is BigTime a success? Can its operating model be learned and copied by the Web3 game team? Does BigTime’s economic model stand up to scrutiny? Where is the ultimate value capture of its tokens? Aiko, a researcher at Folius Ventures, wrote in detail about BigTime’s economic model. Odaily summarized it as follows:
Looking at the economic model is actually translation, translating all blind box opening, release, transaction, output and drop into: where does the money come from, where does it go, who makes money, and ultimately Where is the value captured.
After taking a look at BigTime’s current economic model, my experience is as follows:
Only faucets are designed for $TIME, but there is no sink at all in the game.Basically, the logic is to use cash to buy NFT to earn TIME and dump it back in the secondary market. There is no strong consumption scenario for TIME, and it is only mined and sold as mining currency.
The token has no sink and no cash flow to buy back.The current circulating supply is very small, and the MC is around 30 million (two million yesterday), which is extremely mismatched with the primary market rumored valuation of 300 million/600 million. Except for those who rush to MEXC to speculate in coins, everyone else is on their way to get their money back.
So where is the value captured? All in OpenLoot, the first party sells fiat-equivalent soft currency and blind boxes, and all future NFT transactions take a 5% commission, and all the money earned is cash flow.
Cash flow is indeed very important to the team, but long-term value capture of tokens cannot be missed.This design is largely similar to the In-app Taxation we wrote last year (that is, any production process is divided into levels and functions + random numbers, mathematical expectations are full, and any mismatch of supply and demand caused by randomness will It is to promote transactions and collect taxes), but in our design we not only increase the frequency of transactions, but also design token sinks everywhere to capture value for tokens in the long term. It is a pity that Bigtime does not pay attention to the latter.
IAT is indeed very likely to replace the original single and double currency + NFT, and is more suitable for complex/multi-level game ecology, but it does make me feel how boring a game with only IAT is...
The last layer, the consumer layer, unfortunately has not seen BigTime’s attention.All items in the game are still purely ROI-oriented mining machine logic.Even the skin color level is related to buff. Attaching numerical values to appearance is a taboo. If you want to create a market driven by appearance/conspicuous consumption, you must discard these numerical values while rolling out art.
Tokens aside, as the first Web3 native MMO game, BigTime has already failed half the battle.From the current design, it seems that it does not meet everyone’s basic requirements for social drive and imagination of an open economy. It is just another legend-like dungeon-based gold-earning game. But whose fault is it? Limited industrial production capacity and a founder who doesn’t understand games yet insists on becoming a gamer? As the rumor said, the game is sold as a shell to a third-party management team? The nature of impetuous pursuit of profit and difficulty in breaking out of the circle? So should we still look forward to the web3 version of EVE Online? Do you still want to continue to look forward to the Web3 MMO made by Fantasy Value? What will it look like then? Additionally, server issues and asset bugs should not be bugs at this stage of the game.
There are many analyzes on the market regarding this token launch operation, with mixed reviews. But what the Web3 game team needs to see more is that the BigTime team has been doing NFT sales in the past two years, including many local promotions and door-to-door sales. They have tried their best to run the holder community, which may have been the foreshadowing of todays incident. This operation is only useful for game projects with high reputation (survival time is too long) high product potential (so-called 3A) a large number of assets have been released, but the replicability is poor. BigTime has indeed played its cards and it suits itself. road. But here is a reminder that all game teams should return to and pay attention to community users, and more importantly, do growth beyond the existing market.
I have analyzed Web3 games for two years. Now let’s look at the case of BigTime. It can be analyzed from multiple perspectives such as first-level/second-level/finance players/game players/game designers/game teams. It is really interesting. I and other people in the industry There are also a lot of benefits from communicating with friends, but due to space limitations, I will not go into more details here. So I really hate those investors who say that Web3 games are in the era of Xiaobawang game consoles, and they will always only see slices. The interesting thing about Web3 games is the ecological multi-party game. Monsters and monsters all show their magical powers. In the end, some people really make a lot of money, leaving behind myths of wealth creation, research topics for the academic world, and a lot of intricate social relationships and evaporation of value. , this is probably something other people won’t understand.
