Original - Odaily

Author - Husband How

Editor - Hao Fangzhou

Can GameFi be one of the flashpoints of the next bull market? The answer may be found in Bigtime.

As a product of the last bull market, Bigtime was officially launched in 2021 and went online for internal testing in April 2022. After another year and a half of polishing, the preseason version was officially launched on October 10 this year. After nearly three years, the launch of Bigtime is highly anticipated.

As a Web3 MMORPG game, Bigtime has attracted a lot of attention due to the teams luxurious lineup since its launch, and has raised nearly US$20 million in financing. The early NFT sales also received support from most users. (Conservative calculation) NFT sales raised a total of more than 70 million USDT. From a game development and operations perspective, Bigtime is well-funded, with nearly $100 million in financing plus NFT sales.

From a team perspective, the team members have outstanding resumes, and most of them are from large game companies, such as League of Legends, Fortnite, etc.

But over the past week, everyone’s sentiment towards Bigtime has gone from Fomo-dominated to gradually cold. What happened in these short 8 days?

Below,Odaily will explain Bigtime’s gameplay, input and output, and problems encountered, and determine whether the opportunity to enter the market still exists.

Bigtime game mechanics and token supply and demand

As an MMORPG game, Bigtimes overall game mechanism design is similar to that of Web2 games. The overall idea is to upgrade the monster-fighting mode; as a Web3 game, everyones immediate focus is not on how well Bigtimes games are done, but more on the game mechanics. and the compatibility with the token economy.

Therefore, we first focus on the gold-making gameplay of Bigtime.

Players need to equip the Time Hourglass prop NFT to explode Bigtime tokens by fighting monsters in the dungeon, and the Time Hourglass needs to be charged. In addition to purchasing a charged time hourglass on the NFT market, you can also purchase a Space+time guard to be self-sufficient.

This also involves another currency in the game, time crystals. Time crystals can be purchased from the official website in the game, and their functions are to meet certain advanced copy requirements and to speed up the charging hourglass of the time guard.

In different periods, the cost of NFT is different, and the optimal gold allocation strategy is different.Judging from the gold mining mechanism and the timeline of the past 7 days:

● The early opening of the server takes 1-2 days. The minimum gold standard is 1 Space + 5 hourglasses + a time guard + a certain amount of time crystals, totaling 300 USDT. If you are an old player, you can recover your capital and make a profit in one day by combining the currency price and NFT market price in the past two days. It takes about 2-3 days for new players.

● In the mid-term, as the project party reduced the dungeon explosion rate and increased the cost of the charging mechanism, players entering the market at this time will have their cost recovery period greatly extended due to the excessive NFT cost and the inconsistent daily gold production efficiency as expected. However, new ecological participants have emerged, and large companies with many time guards who charge the hourglass can operate as gas stations for hourglass charging. This reduces the entry cost for new players. For example, if you buy a well-charged hourglass for gold mining in the NFT market, although the income will be much lower, you will still make money.

● As of now, the side effects of the official changes to the mechanism are becoming more and more obvious. Especially on October 17, a copy was suspected to be generated due to a bug, and some players quickly earned tokens. The official has lowered the dungeon explosion rate again, and this problem has been fixed.

The above introduction to game mechanics and entry costs affects Bigtime’s token supply. Let’s look at GameFi’s common core pain point—token demand:

Bigtime’s token demand mainly comes from skins. Synthesizing NFT skins requires a large amount of tokens. So where is the value of skin?

Friends who know traditional online games must know very well that skins are a social tool for big players to show off. Most of Bigtimes skins also have this function and do not provide additional game values. But there are also some additional uses, such as the entry threshold for glory dungeons (advanced dungeons) and the unparalleled competition of skins.

In general,Judging from the current situation, the demand for Bigtime tokens is not rigid enough. Officials mainly maintain the long-term operation of the game by suppressing the supply side.

Player revenue declines along with game appeal

Before the opening of the preseason on October 10, the Bigtime version was updated to version V 0.28 on October 6. Some internal beta players can already produce Bigtime tokens, and it is estimated that 3,000+ tokens are produced every day. In the past four days, the official said in the AMA how many tokens were produced, the total amount has not been calculated. The total output on the 11th was nearly 10 million. It is not yet known whether this includes the amount of gold earned by players in the early internal testing period.

Although there were players who were hoarding gold and coins in advance before the game was officially launched, judging from the early development of the Bigtime pre-season, it does not seem to have caused much selling pressure on the market.

Gold mining efficiency

According to feedback from community players, each account produced nearly 3,000 tokens per day on the first day. However, after the project team made many changes to the dungeon token explosion rate, the daily gold production decreased day by day.

According to Dune inwuhuzaiStatistics on the daily gold mining volume of Bigtime tokens are as follows:

From an official point of view, since there is no pre-sale of Bigtime tokens, token output comes from game gold, and reasonable regulation can help extend the life of the game and increase daily activity.

From a players perspective, the dungeon explosion rate has been reduced, making the payback period longer for most players. The project side regulates independently and the power is too centralized.

The above-mentioned issues regarding the gold yield rate are the superficial reasons for the decline in Bigtime’s popularity. The extension of the payback cycle affects the enthusiasm of new players.In the past, invitation links required off-site purchase, but now they are distributed for free, and the number of new players is also growing slowly.

In the early days, Bigtime used its high token explosion rate to attract players, and then used invitation codes to limit the number of new players, triggering everyones FOMO emotions.

Bigtime coin price

As a recent key project in the GameFi field, Bigtime is sought after by many top exchanges. Bigtime tokens were first listed on OKX on October 11th, followed by Coinbase on the 12th. Although Binance did not list spot tokens, it opened a contract channel.

Judging from the Bigtime price trend in the figure below, the currency price has surged in the past few days, which is the same time node as the launch of the top exchanges. The initial price is 0.01 USDT, and the highest price is 0.34 USDT.

In addition to Bigtime’s listing on exchanges as a reason to boost currency prices, the overall low circulation volume is also one of the reasons for the early rise in currency prices. In the early days, the selling pressure on tokens was low, and the airdrop volume of internal beta players and the gold mining volume in the first few days of the server launch were generally not high compared to the circulating volume.

As of today, according to Dune statistics andCoingeckoAccording to data, the total output of Bigtime tokens is approximately 25 million. The total circulating supply is approximately 150 million coins.

The above discussion about BIgtime currency price shows that,The early rise in currency prices and the high gold mining efficiency are in the same direction., the currency price and output have attracted everyones attention to Bigtime, but the reduction in gold mining efficiency has also triggered a drop in the currency price, which has gradually returned rationality to players or token buyers outside the door, and looks at the development of Bigtime more calmly, without blindly Follow the trend and participate.

The entry opportunity has been missed, where is the new timing?

As of now, according to Odaily’s observation,There are three types of users who make money through Bigtime: players who make money on and before the server launches, players who hoard NFT before the server launches, and short-term speculators who buy coins after listing OKX.

Do users who have not yet entered Bigtime still have a chance?

We imagine four possibilities:

● The official has increased the token explosion rate and shortened the payback period for gold mining.

● If the token price rises, the cycle can also be shortened.

● The entry threshold is lowered, the NFT market is falling, costs are lowered, and the cycle is shortened.

● The demand side of tokens increases, empowering tokens more.

The first three above are all short-term effects related to gold players. Only by attracting new users can the popularity continue. But the core point is still to increase the demand for tokens, and demand drives supply growth. Considering the current situation of Bigtime, it is highly likely that it will be difficult to achieve.

A fact that is easily overlooked by blockchain game players is that Bigtime is a project nominally developed by an American entity, and its operating model needs to comply with regulatory requirements. To a certain extent, Bigtime is wrapped in the skin of Web3 (token economy) and is essentially the operating model of Web2. Although the assets are on the chain, the asset explosion rate is dynamically controlled by the team. The Web2 charging model is combined with the Web3 entry threshold, and NFT sales and recharge time crystals are used as the source of project income.

Currently, the functional mechanism of Time Crystal has caused the pain point of insufficient demand for Bigtime tokens.Assuming that Bigtime abandons time crystals and gives Bigtime tokens the function of charging and speeding up, the demand for tokens can be increased to a certain extent.

But in general, the launch of Bigtime has given us a basic concept of GameFis AAA masterpiece. Although there are slight flaws, the way forward has gradually become clear.

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