On gaming strategy, Delphi Digital recommends soulbound NFTs, seasonal engagement, and e-sport tournaments. In particular, Project NOR, as the new PlayFi (play-then-finance) narrative, is building games for plays as new and free experience toward increasing skills – before building payments, tokens, collectibles, markets as financial infrastructure around those plays.
On gaming tools, Game7 identities wallet integrations and NFT standards as key technical problems after interviewing 100+ developers. Along with Leon Do’s SDK, Harmony shall focus developing a comprehensive offering with random number generators, NFT indexing, fiat on-ramp, mobile authentication – then soon metadata updates, social wallets, tournament escrow, and embedded marketplaces.
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👩💻Gam7 Report by Developers
Open-source repository of game dev smart contracts that is actively maintained.
- NFT functionalities like Staking (locking NFT to generate yield), Crafting (combining NFTs to generate a new NFT), Lootboxes (claiming tokens by opening a randomized box).
- Tournament Escrow and Payout.
📘Research Reports on Blockchain Gaming
Importantly, the fairness of the game was also sacrosanct. There were no cheat codes, purchasable power-ups, or other consumables to give a player an edge. These games were raw forms of competition, with essentially all variables aside from their environment within the player’s control. Users had guarantees that they could win these games on pure skill alone, unlike much of what we see in the modern era. Fair play, and the thrill of risk… By focusing upon improving retention, before layering in monetization, the free-to-play games industry led to a set of behaviorist mechanics which relied upon the psychology of addiction in order to retain and monetize players. These included appointment mechanics, and careful use of notifications and social features to keep players constantly checking in.
One potential solution is to limit the transferability of consumable items in the early days of the game, until more components of the game and economy are built out. They wouldn’t be on-chain, they’d just be linked to the account that generated those resources… Another solution would be to limit the economic relevance or lifespan of these consumable in-game items or assets. By setting expectations early on with players that these assets won’t generate ROI into perpetuity, teams will be in a better position to manage and tune their economy. An example would be setting up a seasonal reset for the economy (see: Diablo II ladder, Path of Exile seasons, or wipes in Escape from Tarkov), having resources that expire, or building in lifecycles (creation, decay, and potential destruction) into in-game assets.
As with the pro sports model, scarcity of experience matters. Both in terms of skill level, but also in terms of cadence of competition. In soccer, Ronaldo will only set foot on that pitch once a week. The constraints on how often these competitive situations arise further contributes to their meaning generation. With NOR, the pioneer implementation of PlayFi, scarcity of experience and true risk are driven by permadeath tournaments. In each of these games, the players themselves are the NFTs which are permanently burned should they lose.
Platforms focused on user-generated content are well-suited to incorporating crypto. The ability to program royalties that flow across derivative creations from 3rd party developers is very promising. There is a world in which this can get granular enough to allow designers who create specific assets to participate in the economics of its usage in multiple worlds. We are especially encouraged by projects such as Webaverse in this domain, which has built an open source game engine that is entirely browser-based. Furthermore, we remain excited by the prospect of on-chain gaming. Whilst the road ahead is long, we believe that in time one of the greatest drivers of innovation will be building native to this new medium. We’re excited to monitor teams like Lattice, Topology, and Matchbox DAO in pioneering this… any of the greatest game experiences ever came out of the modding community, and on-chain gaming allows for true composability in a way other approaches don’t.
It is time to start mining the catalogue of games on BoardGameGeek.com that are considered to have a weight above 4.0. Weight measures complexity; by filtering along this parameter, we quickly find a targeted list of games to port. We should also look to BoardGameGeek’s games that enable solitaire play. These games showcase design patterns for multiplayer solitaire, allowing for fewer updates to the state.
Time-saving NFTs (but non-competitive) are potential mechanisms for game designers to approach NFT integration. One notable example is MMORPGs like Runescape or World of Warcraft, which have a variety of common objects such as resources, like wood, gold, and bricks required to build other resources but do not inherently make the player better at the competitive aspects of the game. Combining these types of common NFTs with non-tradeable competitive or social NFTs is a much better way to create utility-based NFT games.
Notably, skill capes in Runescape weren’t tradeable which increased their social value because obtaining a cape couldn’t be gamed… NFTs imbued with a culture of grinding breeds a community based on shared experience… The design space is wide open for new types of NFTs and DAOs and communities that adopt time-scarce NFTs might experience stronger communities that aren’t solely financial in nature.
Building AAA quality games does not follow the “lean startup” methodology, where teams can iterate on their product with relatively small sums of money. The average AAA game costs $60-80 million to make. At peak, STEPN had over 100,000 daily active users (DAU) — all gained within a few months post-launch. In contrast, Aave has had around 100,000 all-time unique depositors. The only DeFi apps which can compete with gaming user numbers are DEXs, but those DAU figures are much more likely to be skewed by trading bots engaging in arbitrage on exchanges.
Immutable averaged roughly $250,000–$500,000 a day in trade volume or $5,000–10,000 in fees throughout April and May. That’s ~$2.0–3.5 million or so in fees annually on the ~$194 million market cap. That’s a P/E of roughly ~50–100. Not bad at all for a rapidly expanding protocol in a fast-growing segment of the market. The one point of concern is the fully diluted valuation which clocks in at $1.65 billion. There are some big unlocks coming in Q4 2022 from the early investor base which will meaningfully dilute the supply.
Merit Circle’s treasury has four asset types backing it: cash, staked assets, NFTs, and tokens. Cash and cash-like staked assets are necessary for responsible treasury management. Merit Circle’s cash positions include $43 million in stablecoins, mostly USDC. The protocol’s other core holdings include another ~$10 million in stablecoin pools, ~$10 million in MC token liquidity pools, and ~$3 million in BTC and ETH. This leaves the treasury with ~$35 million in GameFi assets with venture-scale potential.
It’s clear that communities are mapping to the technical specifications of marketplaces, which is not how the world should work. Marketplaces should map to the unique characteristics of communities, not the other way around. The design space for online communities is vast, considering the ability to leverage and configure novel elements across DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, social tokens, and more.
BAYC is already doing this: 2.5% of each trade goes to Yuga Labs (in addition to the 2.5% that OpenSea charges). There is no reason to believe that BAYC holders are particularly loyal to OpenSea. On the contrary, I would expect that if Yuga Labs launched a BAYC exchange where 100% of fees flow back to the ApeCoin-governed community treasury, the vast majority of BAYC and MAYC volume would quickly move there simply as a function of brand loyalty and a desire to grow the community treasury.
🕹️ Games on Harmony
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🌳Industry Analysis
There are two common places that tie these hangout spaces together: games themselves, and NFT marketplaces. People chat about the games mostly outside of the game, and then go into the games to play. Similarly, they learn about what NFT communities are doing on social channels, then go to NFT marketplaces to complete a transaction. Communities are unlikely to ever congregate in one place. At a minimum, there will always be a Twitter-style global stream that is not community specific. And so communities will want to embed their marketplaces in a Twitter-like product, in addition to Reddit-like and Discord-like products. It’s therefore paramount that the NFT marketplace that powers these communities is API-first. It should be a marketplace that’s intended to live within other user interfaces from chat to livestream to dedicated two-dimensional HTML.
Despite OpenSea’s astronomic growth in the last two years, Kim argues that horizontally integrated marketplaces like OpenSea will follow eBay’s path. Emerging NFT verticals like profile pics (PFPs), crypto gaming, art, and others will eventually be serviced by specialized marketplaces, rather than by generalized marketplaces like OpenSea.
Decentral Games will be introducing ICE Poker SNG (Sit-n-Go) tournament mode, which will launch in tandem with the mobile app expected in August 2022. ICE Poker SNG is a fast-paced, single-elimination tournament that begins immediately once six players join a table. SNG tournaments will have larger prizes that differ from the rewards won in normal ICE challenges, thus not directly inflationary to the ICE token.
