How to Develop Solid In-Game Tokenomics?

The blockchain gaming sector certainly showed its resilience when FTX struck the blockchain industry with its sudden collapse and undermined people’s faith in the crypto market. According to DappRadar, blockchain games accounted for nearly half of all blockchain activity in 2022, with over $500 million of funds raised in Q4 still. Yet, the harsh reality is that not many blockchain gaming projects are sustainable enough to even keep themselves alive, let alone make it through this crypto winter.

Why is there such polarization? One key contributing factor is the varied proficiency of in-game tokenomics which defines a project’s economic and value systems and directly influences players’ income with description on issues like the correlation between in-game NFTs and the native token, the overall token supply, the encouragement system, etc. So, how can we build a sound and solid tokenomics for our blockchain gaming projects? Let’s find it out together.

Keep All Stakeholders in Mind

A gaming project certainly cannot succeed without the gamers it aims to serve, who, as the key stakeholders, need to be motivated as much as possible to keep the project running sustainably. Yet, unlike traditional games, it is not just the players whose motivation ought to be considered in blockchain games.

Before we set about to design the in-game tokenomics for a blockchain-based gaming project, we should think on three groups of participants that are to be involved in the game’s ecosystem: players, developers, and investors.

What do they value most? How can they be motivated? Once having these questions answered, we will be more competent in developing solid tokenomics that can bring them closer together and help the project succeed.

Players

Traditionally, players are motivated to join a game purely for the fun and joy they would gather in the gaming process, which is not entirely the case with blockchain games. In the world of blockchain gaming, players can be motivated by leisure for sure, which is Play-for-Fun (P4F). Also, they can be primarily incentivized by rewards in tokens as they spend time in playing and winning the game, which is Play-to-Earn (P2E).

While P4F gamers are mostly attracted to the game content such as the gameplay, game logic, game visuals etc., P2E players are having their interests tied with the success of the game itself and thus become dependent on the former to make the game more popular. Therefore, we can see the two groups of players standing aligned in their motivation.

Developers

As an indispensable group in the making of a blockchain game, developers are mostly motivated in further developing, maintaining, and improving the game to make it more appealing to players and investors.

What we should be looking at are both the internal developers and their external counterparts. Internal developers, who are directly involved in the development of the game through employment, are expected to be rewarded for the success of the project.

External developers, though not officially involved in the process, can still be motivated by special rewards or community recognition. Despite the fact that external developers are relatively harder to motivate, they surely play a crucial part in the game’s development because of their contribution in improving the decentralization of the game.

Investors

Investors are also important to consider for their overlapping constitution, which might include players and developers who are optimistic about the game and wish for more profits from it through raising capital.

There are some frequently seen investors to think on, including seed investors who come to support the game at an early stage, portfolio investors who make investments based on projects’ performance and potential to diversify their own portfolio, and governors who wish to have a say in the project’s development and distribution through investment.

Meanwhile, there are also crypto traders who place more of their interests on the value of in-game tokens rather than the game itself. While being more embracing in choosing projects, they tend to do their own research before making investment decisions. Yet, there are inevitably speculators as well, who only buy assets for their known scarcity and assumption of value growth, without adequate investment analysis in place.

Run Things Through Project’s Preferences

With all the thinking on what participants are involved and how they are motivated in blockchain gaming, we are now more confident in taking things further with tokenomics design by answering a few more questions based on preferences of our own projects.

The first question to answer would be: who will the game serve and how? We need to have in mind all participants that are to join the game’s ecosystem. Do we need to involve external developers? What kind of investors do we prefer to attract? Once the target groups are settled, we will need to come up with a plan on keeping them engaged based on our knowledge of their respective motivation. Only to notice, the motivation of different groups of participants is better to be addressed in a balanced way.

Next, we get to think about what the core game mechanics should be like to help the game stand out among all the competing projects out there. How should we maintain and even adapt the game when necessary? As the community develops and expands, are there better ways to take on new players while serving the growing needs of higher-level players? Gameplay is the first basis of blockchain games that are looking for sustainability and long-term prosperity anyhow.

It will then be the time to choose a suitable tokenomics model for the game. Will there be governance tokens in addition to utility ones? Should we set a limit for total token supply? In what ways should the tokens be distributed? Make sure to give these some careful thoughts while also putting efforts in facilitating the token dynamics. A wide range of token supplying and consuming scenarios are necessary for safeguarding not only the value of the token but also the benefit of the community.

There are more complex issues to be discussed when designing solid tokenomics for a blockchain game. With the points mentioned above, we surely are standing on the right way towards it.

About MixMarvel

MixMarvel is the world’s leading blockchain content-incubation platform and creators community. By in-depth exploring the open world and integrating world-renowned IP with high-quality content, MixMarvel connects investors and mass users through asset distribution, content publication, DeFi tools, infrastructure, community co-creation, and other diversified scenarios in a new ecosystem of dapps. Its ecosystem comprises a broad portfolio of FT/NFT assets, including the MIX, RPG, and HEROES tokens; blockchain content including the GameFi application DeHero; and infrastructures including Rangers Protocol and MixMarvel SDK. For more information, visit https://linktr.ee/MIXMARVEL.