After announcement about the pause of the project I received many messages from concerning investors about the project, so for those willing to get as many information as they can, im sharing my analysis, with some of the reasons behind, although I don’t agree in everything with everyone I do my best to understand all the points of view, from investors, devs, direction and community, so here is my letter to investors and community.
First, the most asked question: why? is not only the most easy, but also the less important to answer, so let’s start there.
Why?
The why is simple, without proof of going on the right path, keep spending on development makes no sense. The reason is simple enough, we anticipated that P2E games would fall, and those economics models are not sustainable because they are based on money emission against a fixed liquidity pool, the outcome for those models is obvious, in p2e games there is no liquidity to sustain the supposed earnings (and this do not change even if the game do NFT emission instead as there is only removing the Auto Market Maker from the equation, so it is only slowing down the inevitable, but the fall is the same).
To fight this, we moved to a ticket-based system on a competitive, and most important, fun game to play, with this we expected to attract real gamers to SPEND money on the game opposed to investing in it to receive more, this is a must to make it sustainable. Ticket system is simple enough, players pay to play, if a player kills more than he dies, he earns a part of the other player´s ticket, winners win, losers lose, a real and proven approach to make game earnings sustainable, but as any real earning possibility, imply risk.
To prove the concept, we launched the early access version of the game, codename Firewars, with a very low ticket price, the earnings were low, but also the potential lost, as we once had 80.000 daily hours from players dedicated to the old runner game, we really expected that the old community played the game, and some of you did, some loved the mechanics, and with those we were finding the balance to make it more fun and competitive. There were people of the community (you all know who they are) spending money from their own pockets to bring players to the game and paying for marketing, and with all that, the registered players count reached 350, of about 74000 current BMON holders, but mostly depended on the rewards given by the community to come and play.
At that point we had to make the call to slow down things, we were increasing game development team each month to be able to deliver frequent updates on a live product, attending bugs at the same time working on new features. It was because we had our view on the target, and we were all in, even invested from our own money to get there, improving the product and increasing community adoption for the next bull market, but there was an intermediate step before getting there.
BBM
BBM token was the tool to renew the tokenomics of the project, that were originally designed by an incubator (for BMON) whose only purpose was to feed their investors at the expense of the project fall, said in their own words: they didn’t expected the project to survive the first week, and that would be the history if Nico wasn’t crazy enough to rebuy 900 BNB worth of BMON on the first day leaving the project without funds from the start (because liquidity pool + marketing cost + incubator cost + development), we survived that, but with great effort and so for the next project stage, BBM was a must, a way of constant funding for the project with automatic and ordered distribution of the project earnings as long term investment, no pumps or dumps, no finance through token selling from the team or speculation, just funding development and marketing to finish the project, and holder´s earnings tied with the project performance, rewarding loyalty, time and effort.
The milestone we were expecting to reach for BBM launch was a minimal use of the game, to provide investors with trustworthy information about the engagement and adoption for ticket fee and market returns… but regretfully, I was left without time to totally prove the concept when the expenses had to be cut down.
Last work done
After the pause of game development, I still had in my arsenal API and contracts development paid from our own pockets, we had to make a refactor of the code based on the old runner to allow support for new mechanics, like ranking, NFTs giveaways, in-game token awards, achievements, API token trading (based on kucoin API), scholars, rent, events, configurable server rules, sponsored events, social share rewards and many other features, which were partially completed but we didn’t released, then again, we had to make another cut of expenses here, but this time based on the adoption, the reality was that the game and API, even as work in progress, had enough to prove if the concept could work or not, and it failed to do it with even the most interested users in see it working, the holders.
Adoption
As mentioned before, the adoption was mainly based on rewards gave by the community itself, it was like a new version of a P2E based on the liquidity of generous helpers and promoters of the project. So there is a lot to discuss here regarding how to improve the adoption.
Fun or earn?
For a start, if players only play if they get paid to do so, those players do not care about the game being fun or nice, doing a triple A game if the players still care only about the earnings, is not worth it, as paid players will play any ugly game as long as it gives them money, so we either remove the earn part or we adapt to what those players demand: a mediocre game, but with earning potential.
Platform
On the adoption hand, a PC only game targeted to mid — high end systems for competitive play, reduce the audience a lot, of course mobile version was considered, but for this game style is not the best, for it the game should be greatly changed, and even worst is to make the game browser-based, there you had to change the engine completely. So this whole idea of a unreal engine triple A game, originally proposed on the deck for a single player game, doesn’t adapt well to the current objectives of the project (multiplayer competitive game), to really solve this, we should be remaking the whole game in a new engine, adapt game mechanics to be mobile compatible, sacrifice quality for playability, audience and mechanics, target lower end systems and allow it to be playable on browser. Even better, the development costs would be reduced drastically with that approach, with an agile approach, more practical visuals, and more targeted gameplay.
Security
The other issue was future, in systems and most of all, game development, there is not such a thing as “finish the product”, alive products are… alive (forgive the redundancy), new content, events, bug hunt and solving, marketing and DAU, and for a competitive game, security is a big part of this constant development need, considering all the hacks and bots attacks it will suffer, and for proof just check the Binamon history:
- First quick battle contract has been exploited and a user stolen 300k USD in a single night from it.
- NFT auto staking left residual earnings on transfer, and tons of users were transferring constantly to get those cents
- When market sales were high, random NFT formula was broken to mint high value cards, then sold on the market
- There were scammers doing phantom token launches, phantom lotteries, project copycats, acting as NFT mediators before escrow, impersonating team members and more
- Runner had some know bots using computer vision to hit the keys without a player
These are some of the security problems that can be checked on transaction’s history publicly to unalterable smart contracts, so the possibility of wrongdoing on a competitive game with potential earnings in real money are huge, this requires a big team behind security along with all the rest of the game development, and the game should be simple enough, not only for adoption, but also to minimize the possible forms of exploiting it. Even games without earnings fail when the game get flooded by cheaters.
On this aspect, we should have a full team dedicated to security and anti-bot/cheat fight, or remove the earning potential.
Marketing effort
I won´t be covering a lot on this aspect as is not my area, but competitive games require triple the costs invested in development put in marketing to be somehow sustainable, part of it in reward incentives. This is key to have sustained grow and maintaining active users. The users attract more users, that is why the common effort from all the current community to play once per day/week can improve greatly the adoption, even if all the holders play once a month during 15 minutes, the servers would be filled with players for 5 cents a month each.
Although I received a lot of messages of people having fun with the game, and there are exceptions that deserve my eternal gratitude, I didn’t saw the community of players growing outside those players that were paid to play… and we are talking of an internal community that get a benefit of making the game popular, because it uses the NFTs from Binamon (adoption will increase market sales), tickets are paid in BMON (so each ticket sold is removing circulating supply).
It should be understood that the mechanics and economics of the game are being adapted to fit with the elements of the Binamon metaverse; when for adoption’s sake, it would be million times easier to remove ticket paid in BMON and NFTs requisites, we are doing that to give use cases to the assets you hold, but we need the holders to be the first promoters because of that.
Economics
I believe we still have work to do to balance incentives to play and earnings for the game, we were working on a new approach for this too but based on the same, not all players can win. This approach is far more flexible and interesting for participants, without the feeling of risk on each play and with more to win both in tokens and benefits; but forget of earnings without risk, that model is long gone, the only way this could work is a business model that work for the company and the company share a big part of it with the users, this have a strong relation with the BBM approach, providing a DAO to balance it, as the proposed senate a time ago.
Conclusion
For adoption, the current state of the game failed to get minimal user base among the holders and that is useless to attract new investors, so the logical would be to do a new approach, which is in resume:
- Remaking the game on a new engine for mobile and browser support
- Adapt or completely change game mechanics to make it simpler and more possible to play on mobile and web
- Reduce visual quality to get to a broader audience
- Make the game access free, remove NFT requisites at first
- Add meta game incentives
- Adapt economic model
- Renew site and content to reflect this move
- Make game accessible and easy to anyone without crypto knowledge
Some of these points were already on the roadmap, but adding all we are practically talking about making a new game. By doing the remake in a new engine only the visuals could be used, and those had to be adapted to fit the new platforms compatibility, if we don’t do that, then targeting good visuals with a complex game will be extremely expensive to dev, maintain and hunt for hacks. At this point is to choose the best of evils, and only in case there is enough constant investment from BBM.
Investing
This point is crucial, I understand how most users feels right now, many are in lost, all the market is in red, for Binamon the users that bought in ATH are even at 99% loss, Bear market is harsh, and of course, selling at this point is admitting the lost, so the popular vision of current holders was something like “I support the project, I want it to succeed, I won’t sell… but I won’t add a single dollar to it” and I understand it completely, but it means that even if we launch another collection to support funding, it won’t get enough sales to sustain the project, and because of that, to keep the development active we should be selling tokens, but we stopped doing that long ago to avoid hurting the liquidity pool, meanwhile the token price dropped, so at this point we should be selling more tokens than those in existence to pay development costs alone.
We received proposals to sell BMON OTC, and we know they directly sale those tokens, which hurts price and liquidity. We received VCs proposals, with conditions that are like selling the soul to the devil with the addition of them crushing all the other holders when the time come, as you can see in many other projects. And I won’t even mention all the “investors” that offer to buy the entire liquidity to rugpull. We won’t be doing any of those, we have some serious investors proposals, but we will need more long-term investors, only for BBM.
I personally never liked the BMON tokenomics, it was designed by people that didn’t care about a healthy project before my time here, luckily sometime after that, I had the vote to avoid them before Tango chain, although it costed the project.
BBM is my design, to make it fair, where longer holders and early adapters earn more and their benefits come from project performance, funding the team directly, and not through token speculation, at least during development, to avoid the peer-to-peer competence where the fastest win over the loyal; 1000x pumps are not real world based, crypto should evolve from the pump and dump mechanics to really get accepted and reject scams, for this we all should acknowledge that value come from real work progress, speculation help but only if provide value.
Launching BBM without proof of the game model success, and with the community not willing to keep investing, only VCs can do that, and to give away the control of the project, I personally prefer to release the source code to the community that was loyal to the project.
Solutions
Continue from this point following the original plan requires around 10M USD in development and marketing over a 2-year period with BBM funding. In that case I will become CEO; the project will become a DAO and company restructured; investors will need to have an active role to push the project and follow the plan to refactor each part of the old Binamon to be ready for the next stage. Game remake for browser and mobile compatibility is a must here prioritizing adoption/gameplay over visuals.
I would love to hear your proposals; I know there is a lot of thinkers on the community, maybe is the time for you to shine, take control of the project, do your own versions, find the way to make it work, as the best example of a metaverse is the open source community, maybe someone want to give support for the former collections with it, or do something completely new.
Discord will be the channel to discuss solutions, with respect.
