MixMarvel CSO Mary Ma Introduces the Future of Web3 Games

Quick Takes:

• The future of GameFi lies in Web3 games that are more massive and complex.
• The game-finance balance should be restored in Web3 games for them to remain open to potential players.
• Asset ownership is what Web3 games should be developing further to provide standardized operation and more usage scenarios of assets.
• Future Web3 games should embrace the spirit of collaboration to create, govern, and grow together with their players.

When first proposing GameFi at the Wuzhen World Blockchain Conference in 2019, MixMarvel Chief Strategy Officer Mary Ma passionately envisioned the concept of combining gameplay and financial incentives as the opportunity to reshape the gaming industry by creating new liquidity markets and reforming the factors of production.

With continuous industry-wide attempts and progress in areas of underlying blockchain technology, dApps, co-governance, and co-creation, we have witnessed trending GameFi applications like Axie Infinity carrying forward the Play-to-Earn model to an unprecedented extent.

However, there are many more GameFi projects rising and dying as we speak, most of which, according to the standards of mainstream games, are hardly games rather than entertaining financial applications.

It is fair to say, three years after the birth of GameFi, that the GameFi industry is all set for a revolution to embrace a brighter future. In Mary’s opinion, the future of GameFi lies in Web3 games, which are bound to be more massive and complex, hence the need for some comprehensive and systematic thinking and actions.

Looking into a Future of Web3 Games

To realize the future of Web3 games in a real sense, Mary finds three elements fundamentally essential — openness, asset ownership, and collaborative spirit, which can be well achieved with the help of blockchain technology and spirits.

Openness

According to Mary, one key rule in developing Web3 games is to be open, as the prevailing imbalance between game and finance in most existing GameFi applications is shutting the door on vast potential players.

On the one hand, the over-emphasis on the financial part is setting up a high cognitive threshold for players with less financial knowledge to step over, let alone the traditional gamers who are new to the whole concept of cryptocurrency. On the other hand, the lack of attention to gameplay is inevitably making these games less attractive and causing problems in user retention and new-player attainment, which is especially true with Web2 gamers who are more attracted to the sense of achievement obtained after accomplishing either fun or challenging operations and tasks.

Lessons must be learned for developing Web3 games, with the balance between gameplay and financial incentives to be adequately restored. For one thing, Web3 game developers should work on effectively lowering the entry threshold for users through technical development or integration. For another, there needs to be a substantial improvement in gameplay, whether it’s a better storyline, enhanced graphics, or richer economic models. Only with the game-finance balance redressed like this, Web3 games can achieve true openness to take on more users and have them stay.

Asset Ownership

Asset ownership is what differentiates the read-write-own Web3 from the read-write Web2 and also Web3 games from the traditional games. Being the technical cornerstone of Web3, the decentralized blockchain system can be perceived as a platform for asset issuance to assure users the ownership of their own assets, usually in the form of FT or NFT. Web3 games just have their success tightly associated with the circulation and value appreciation of such FT or NFT assets.

Mary believes that the future of Web3 games must come with a more standardized operation on asset ownership, solving issues like how to allocate asset ownership for collective work while generating more usage scenarios on top of buying and selling, which include but are not limited to NFT rental, loaning, mortgage, or even more.

By actively incorporating DeFi and NFT-related features, Web3 games can well facilitate asset circulation and appreciation while enhancing their gameplay and gaming experience so that Web3 gamers can create value by playing and truly gain ownership of in-game assets while enjoying the gameplay.

Collaborative Spirit

In addition to openness and asset ownership, Mary holds that advanced Web3 games should also embrace the spirit of collaboration to create, govern, and grow together with their players based on the underlying blockchain technology and infrastructure of the games.

Instead of being determined by the algorithm of player behavior in the hands of game developers, in-game assets of Web3 games are distributed based on players’ contribution or are purchasable on exchanges. Many of these assets entitle holders to governance rights. This is where collaborative spirit applies, for with their in-game assets, users could propose or vote for their own wants and needs through discussion in communities and voting, thus owning the game’s future to an extent like never before in traditional games.

Meanwhile, it is also important for the developers of Web3 games to adopt and honor the collaborative spirit for everything to work, primarily by sticking to the core blockchain spirit of transparency and providing users with timely project progress updates. In this way, players can make decisions for the game’s future based on accurate grounds and find their sayings worthwhile.

“P2E will become a mere feature of Web3 games,” states Mary with optimism when talking about the future of Web3 games. “The boundaries of blockchain games will eventually get blurred, and before you know it, you will find yourselves already in the world of Metaverse.”

Let’s look forward to what will happen next.

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.