The Gamified Economy of Ships That Fight Underground

An intro to STFU, its gamified economy, and how we are implementing a practical hybrid of Web 2 and Web 3 game designs.

Reinventing the Genre

STFU is a first-person ship shooter, a complete re-imagining of the original six-degrees-of-freedom shooter genre made popular in the 1990’s. The original generation of games that made this genre popular had static ships with no progression. Instead, you entered a level and used power-ups and weapons you found to wipe out your opponents and complete obstacles.

Taking place primarily in The Underground — a series of hollowed out twisting tunnels and bases in the asteroid belt, STFU has been designed from the ground up with addictive single and multiplayer battle modes, class-based combat featuring 20 ships from five unique classes, stateful progression, upgradable skills trees, resource collection, crafting, and player generated content.

All of these additions can be engaged in through familiar F2P mechanics that allow you to jump in and get started for free. The core loop of the game has players collecting ships, upgrading them, harvesting resources, completing daily missions and multiplayer matches, taking part in co-op asteroid runs, and acquiring new ships to stay ahead of the competition.

A Web 2.5 game

While impressive and novel in their attempts, many Web 3 games have struggled to sustain themselves after only a few months of operation. These first games took large risks in developing their ecosystems and technology without an example to follow. We have learned much from those who traveled before us.

Assumably these Web 3 games were not made with the end goal of becoming a house of cards Ponzi. However, given the in/out flows of cash that are a product of distributed revenue systems, most of these games ended up succumbing to a core design flaw that required a constant influx of players (and their money) to be sustainable. Most Web 3 games followed a similar structure:

1. Player buys game assets
2. Player uses game assets to create more assets
3. Player sells these assets to new players
4. Player, hopefully, recoups investments and profits

In hindsight it is easy to see where this system tips towards an unsustainable collapse: once the influx of new players can no longer sustain the outflow of profits by the players that came before them.

What we are doing differently

First, we are not creating an economy sustained by a constant influx of new players. Second, we aren’t selling digital in-game assets.

Web 3 attempts at game design implemented an investment paradigm on the game assets themselves which lead to wild speculation and diminished game functionality.

This is not our approach.

STFU is a F2P game that models itself in a games-as-a-service fashion where the goal is to have continuous community involvement as we update and iterate on our design for years to come. With that in mind, our goal is not to provide value extraction to outside speculators; that is the core design fault that ran most every web 3 game into the ground and helped perpetuate the “NFTs are scams narrative”.

In their most diluted form, digital collectables are nothing more than assets stored on a decentralized database that is transparent and verifiable. Whereas game assets stored on centralized databases (as is common in traditional games) are obscure and only verifiable by the team controlling the database. As a game publisher, our most common customer service issues relate to players being frauded during attempts to buy/sell game assets stored in a centralized database. It is our hope that we can provide an alternative to the players who wish to buy and sell their game assets with the use of blockchain.

One starting point, two outcomes

As noted in our previous article on Web 2.5, the STFU game will sell all ships in our F2P store. These ships, once purchased, are stored in our centralized database. Most players will stop there and play the game to their heart’s content. But for some players, we have provided another option. After acquiring their first ship, players are able to seek out and attempt to collect resources that allow them to initiate the process of converting their Corporate F2P ship to a digital collectable Chain ship.

We envision that our design is the most balanced and fair approach to bringing both sides together in Web 2 and Web 3 gaming. Players who choose to interact and play with blockchain mechanics get to decide, every step of the way, where they want risk and reward.

Revenue Distribution

Another reason we have decided to implement blockchain relates to the maneuverability that it provides regarding asset management and distribution of revenue. The graph below illustrates how revenue from the F2P economy will flow into the blockchain economy to provide a transparent insight into the functioning and decision making of the game’s continued development and management. This core design puts the largest risk on Little Orbit, as we are giving up a portion of income to demonstrate the potential of community shared revenue.

A Tokenized Economy

The blockchain economy and the overall protocol of Ships That Fight Underground are backed by the $STFU token. $STFU will be used in the marketplace, for various item purchases, blockchain crafting mechanics, DAO voting, and protocol/Asteroid staking. Additionally, the $STFU token will be used in revenue distribution and game utility through treasury capture mechanics as seen below.

$STFU will be emitted to the ecosystem via Chain ships completing missions and objects, Asteroid Run play, multiplayer modes, and staking mechanics.

If a player wishes to take part in the blockchain economy, we will help them along the way. The reward potential is limitless as our design does not simply reward the earliest to arrive but rather the best players, most active community members, and creators that add to the STFUniverse.

Next Up

In our next article we will demonstrate how we will achieve this balanced design with an explanation of what ties everything together: The STFU Ships.

Follow us for more info!

Whitepaper: https://little-orbit.gitbook.io/stfu/ships-that-fight-underground/the-underground

Website: https://www.playstfu.com/

Discord: discord.gg/6dX28kpVjT

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PlaySTFUGame

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playstfu