Tomorrow we will be sharing some juicy alfa on BattleFly’s gameplay. But firstly — to set the scene — we wanted to share a little about our motivations for building this game on top of $Magic.
We are still only at the dawn of blockchain gaming, and already tokens are proliferating at exponential levels.
Hundreds of NFT and GameFi projects will launch in the next thousand days. Each of them will stake a claim to their portion of the metaverse, and the majority will be powered by their own in-game token. We don’t think it’s controversial to state that 99% of these in-game tokens will — somewhat ironically — resemble the life of a butterfly: here for a good time, not a long time.
This is because unless they are a breakout success, the vast majority of GameFi tokens will inevitably smash headlong into both the laws of Physics and modern Economics. Why? As Abdul Ahad puts it:
“Money gives Power.
Power comes from Energy.
By that definition, money is a form of energy. A fundamental concept of Physics is that ‘energy can neither be created nor be destroyed. It can only be transformed.’”
The unavoidable problem of launching an in-game token is that it delays the impact of this law of Physics for a brief moment — but it’s a temporary postponement at best.
An in-game token transforms the energy of launch hype into initial value, but deep pockets are required for both world-building and marketing to sustain that energy long-term. Currency needs liquidity to survive, and so for an in-game token to thrive for months or years it relies upon an infinite and inexhaustible amount of interest to be sustained. Ponzi-coins aren’t programmed to tolerate players becoming bored, or moving on to other things — the moment they do, liquidity starts to dry up, the value of the token plummets and the project economics no longer work. For every Axie Infinity or Decentraland, there will be a thousand or more zombie coins left behind.
As $Magic’s co-founder John Patten puts it:
“Most metaverses’ monies … have utility in the network but don’t really have any function outside the walls of the metaverse except perhaps to speculators.”
We are not in-game token prohibitionists, of course. Some game worlds are so rich, and their creative ambitions so vast, that building an entire economy with a standalone currency is the only way to realize it. But BattleFly does not meet this criteria — we are building a fun idle strategy game that seeks only to complement the Treasure metaverse. BattleFly will not be immersive, and only seeks a fraction of your attention; we want you to make it as easy as possible to visit our world.
BattleFly has been conceived as an experiment to test whether a modest, but enjoyable and successful DeFi game can be released piggybacking on top of an existing and widely used metaverse token; one that we have virtually no control over. If our thesis and approach is right, our project will serve as another early proof point that $Magic could evolve to become the reserve currency of the connected metaverse.
We chose $Magic as the underlying currency for BattleFly because it was created as a free and fair distribution, has both existing liquidity and community, many multiple uses beyond our simple game, and has been deliberately created to bind metaverse narratives together.
Regardless of whether people enjoy playing BattleFly or not, the important thing is that $Magic still has undeniable and inherent value. This has enabled us as creators to focus on building something we think is cool and interesting, rather than trying to change the laws of physics and economics.
Of course, launching a sustainable DeFi game without controlling the underlying token has added complexity and risk to our game design. We can’t manufacture $Magic out of thin air, which means we have to rely on a game loop that transfers energy (and therefore $Magic) between players. This puts us right on the pointy edge of behavioral economics, which is why all this is an experiment first and foremost. We’ll discuss this in more detail in Part II.
Our ambition for BattleFly is simple; to build something fun, to test if our approach works, and hopefully, inspire some other creators to stand on the shoulders of $Magic alongside us.
