Find Crypto Gaming Projects Early — Evaluate Its Gameplay Before The Game is Live
Disclaimer: None of the following should be considered investment advice. Do your own research. More info is located beneath the article.
Chatter around the gaming space has been consistently growing in the past year. Tons of people are realizing the potential matrimony of crypto and gaming. Now more talent, money, and ideas are rushing into the space.
At Quantum Works, we are experiencing that surge firsthand. There’s excitement for play-to-earn games everywhere, and there are insane gains to be had in this space.
As one of the first AAA games being made in the space, our goal is to set the right standards. This means supplying gamers with the tools they need to maximize their fun and their earning potential within the crypto gaming space.
To that end, this is the second of our 4-part series on The Ultimate Guide To Evaluating A Gaming Project. In this post, we’ll go over the game design factors that you can use to evaluate a crypto project’s gameplay before it’s even released.
Let’s get it.
What makes a good play-to-earn game?
At the end of the day, in play-to-earn games, crypto is only one small aspect of it. If the game can’t get players coming back for more…it’s going to be short-lived. If the game requires too much investment to start playing, it won’t ever take off.
So let’s talk about the things a game has to do to make sustainable growth. These being, transparent development, network effects, game mechanics, and removing crypto barriers.
Transparent Development
Before we get into the secret ingredients for fun, we have to weed out the BS.
Questions To Ask Yourself (#1)
How frequently does the team give development updates?
Hate to say it but…there’s a lot of scams where people will buy cheap game assets off of a marketplace, and that’s enough to get the buy-in from a lot of investors. It shouldn’t be enough to get your buy-in.
We want to see a project that is updating its community on every development possible.
- Regular AMAs
- Gameplay photos & videos ASAP
- Feature discussion
- Development docs
Go anywhere the project produces content, and their development updates shouldn’t be hard to find.
We maintain an #updates channel on Discord here, we post weekly dev docs on our Medium here, and our CEO, Fraser Gordon is frequently doing AMAs in our Telegram & YouTube.
Covering this base early will weed out any shady projects who are just in it to cut and run with your bag the first chance they get. From there, we can start digging into the meat and potatoes of the gameplay.
Ingrained Network Effect
Questions To Ask Yourself (#2)
What kind of features does the game have that incentivize the invitation of new players?
There is an early litmus test for potential virality that businesses have long been trying to harness. It’s called the network effect.
Anytime something gains more value based on the number of users, that’s considered a network effect. The more people, the better for all. It’s what creates the incentive for users to share with more users.
Tammy wanted to post photos of her kids on Facebook, so her kids joined. Her kids wanted to chat with their friend group at school, so they all joined. Keep that chain going and eventually, everyone and their mothers are on Facebook.
Crypto intrinsically has these network effects. The more people who invest in your project, the more the price goes up, and the bigger return for the holders. So the potential for virality is already there.
The company has to make sure they’re using that potential to the fullest.
Is the game jam-packed with features that incentivize sharing the game? As we go over the ingredients developers can use to craft the fun-cocktail of their game, pay attention to how it affects the social framework of the game.
The social framework/community of a game is crucial, so we’ll go over that more in the guide to evaluating a crypto project’s community.
Fun Mechanics (Fun’s secret ingredient)
Questions To Ask Yourself (#3)
Does the game have a promising mix of fun mechanics?
The next bit of information I throw at you is going to be the key to breaking down a game’s gameplay before it is released. I’m calling these the fun ingredients.
Our brains are wired to find patterns in everything.
“A fun game is just a set of tasty patterns for your brain to chow on.”
- Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design
Our goal is to use these ingredients to make the tastiest set of patterns possible.
Have a look:
- Crossword Puzzles — Letter patterns
- Chess — Piece Movement Patterns
- Football — Position patterns, body movement patterns, etc.
The MDA framework — The Science of Fun In Games
There’s a great and short paper by the folks at Northwestern University who describe the main components of a game as Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics (MDA) as it relates to game design.
It’s widely recognized across the field and was among the first to put these components to a science. I recommend you read it, but I’ll give you the spark notes here.
Knowing these components will get you much further than most when evaluating if a game will be fun. Let’s jump in.
Mechanics: Are the various actions, behaviors, and control mechanisms players have within a game context. They pair with the game’s content (levels, NPCs, assets, etc.) to create the game’s dynamics.
Dynamics: Describe the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each other’s outputs over time. These work to create aesthetic experiences.
Aesthetics: Describe the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when he/she interacts with the game system.
Each of these links to each other causally. The mechanics make the dynamics which make the aesthetics.
There are 8 different types of “fun” that games can use, based on which Aesthetic is being used:
- Sensation — Game as sense-pleasure
- Fantasy — Game as make-believe
- Narrative — Game as drama
- Challenge — Game as obstacle course
- Fellowship — Game as social framework
- Discovery — Game as uncharted territory
- Expression — Game as self-discovery
- Submission — Game as pastime
Now that you know these different types of fun, you can start imagining which aesthetics top games are using.
- League of Legends uses fellowship, fantasy, and challenge (and maybe submission depending on if the player is as degen as me).
- World of Warcraft uses pretty much all of them.
- Call of Duty and most FPS use challenge, sensation, fantasy, and fellowship
Dissecting a Game’s Ingredients
Game designers create their unique fun-cocktail by basing their mechanics around different dynamics around different aesthetics.
These are the things you will have to keep your eye on as a game investor.
Before you get the chance to play a game, you’ll be able to dissect this fun-cocktail into its ingredients and compare it against what has worked in the past.
- Will time constraints or opponents create challenges?
- Will team dynamics create fellowship?
For instance, a rough rundown of our game Project Quantum:
Mechanics
There are tons of mechanics in any game. Here are just a few of the key ones.
- High-stakes, battle-royale style PVP
- Team gamemode
- Ability to find & equip new gear
- NPCs
- Dynamic FPS player movement
- Rich, story-driven world
Dynamics
- Opponent play
- Teamwork
- Player Customization
- Exploration
- Narrative Tension
- Character responsiveness
- Futuristic Setting
Aesthetics
- Challenge/Competition
- Fellowship
- Expression
- Discovery
- Narrative
- Sensation
- Fantasy
For some, looking at these components will be second nature. For others who haven’t played games their whole life, it’ll take some more work to find games based on the kind of fun you think the market would be a fan of.
But at least now you can!
Thanks. Now I can break apart a game into its parts…who cares though?
Compare That To Market Statistics for Video Games
The power in this dissection is that you can compare the fun-cocktails in pay-to-earn crypto games to games in the traditional market.
You can get a feel for how many people want to play them and how long they will last. All this can get you to a pretty good feeling for how the game will perform.
Some Best Seller‘s Recipes
To save you some time, I broke down some of the top 10 best selling games of 2021 (according to this article by Screenrant) by their recipe:
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — 12 Million Copies Sold in First 2 Months
Valhalla creates the gamer’s experience using:
- Narrative
- Discovery
- Challenge
- Fantasy
- Sensation
Minecraft — Eclipsed Over 140 Million Users in 2021
Minecraft creates the gamer’s experience using:
- Fellowship
- Discovery
- Expression
- Fantasy
- Submission
Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War — 5.7 Million Copies Sold In The First Month
Cold War creates the gamer’s experience using:
- Fellowship
- Challenge
- Sensation
- Narrative
- Submission
Ask your gamer friends
It doesn’t hurt to get a second opinion either. What we consider fun is subjective, but the market is what ultimately gets to decide. So run it by your friends. “Does this seem like a game that would be fun?”.
There’s a good chance you have a winner if their face lights up as you tell them the game’s concept.
We love watching that happen when we share, “Project Quantum is a looter-shooter treasure hunt to the death set within a battle-royal esque format where in-game items can be crafted and traded using our own real-world currency”.
Not a zero-sum game
Regardless, the gaming world is not a zero-sum game. Some days I’ll play League, some days I’ll play a small indie game, and some days I’ll play party games. So will the market. Investing in games that have different types of fun (or are within different genres) is a smart way to hedge bets.
Safety Check:
As with each other section of the guide — there are some linchpins for the “Game” section that need to be addressed.
Does it remove non-crypto-native barriers?
Questions To Ask Yourself (#4)
Does it remove non-crypto-native barriers?
We’re essentially asking, could the average gamer pick it up and play it? For every extra step that they have to take, there will be fewer and fewer people playing the game. Remember that since there are often network effects to these games, losing even one player is a huge deal. This could ultimately mean losing 10+ people whom they would’ve invited over their time playing the game.
One of our biggest hurdles was creating an easy way to purchase the QBIT currency. It’s not an uncommon problem — it’s a highly technical space we’re in. Our real reckoning was when we had executive staff who weren’t even able to buy the coin.
We knew we had to do something about it.
So we built another company entirely by the name of Onboard. With Onboard’s technology, users can buy their crypto via credit card in a matter of seconds.
The onboarding process for crypto is one of the biggest barriers to mainstream adoption. That’s why we simplified it. So be on the lookout for barriers like this in whatever project you’re evaluating.
Beware of things like:
- High entry costs
- Player incentive structures that could contribute too much to a pay-to-win structure
- An overly technical onboarding process
- Unmoderated or scammy communities
- Unsecure blockchain principles
Consistent Development Updates?
Next up we’d have to verify that the team is actually making the money moves they claim to be. Every project will be different in how you can verify it, here are a few things you can check:
- GitHub Commits
- Job Board Listings
- Dedicated Discord Channel (You can check out our updates there at https://discord.gg/projectquantum)
- Dev Diaries (You can read ours on this blog)
Conclusion
Putting these lessons to action will put you leaps and bounds above the next person when looking into any crypto game’s gameplay. Remember that good games take a long while to develop (ours is still multiple years out). If you can analyze the fun ingredients of a game well before others, you’ll be better equipped to make some record gains.
This is only the second piece of the puzzle. If you’d like to know how to measure the strength of a crypto video game’s community or if you’d like to explore all the other things you should check for in a crypto gaming project, you follow our Medium! The rest of the guide is on the way.
Who are we?
To gamers who are excited about crypto, Quantum Works is the first AAA gaming company that empowers players to earn real money while playing. It is powered by blockchain, investor-backed, with an award-winning art, game development, and executive team.
If you’d like to learn more about our project, you can check out our website here!
Legal Stuff: Neither the author nor the Quantum Works company is an investment advisor. All opinions are of the author alone. There are risks involved in investing in cryptocurrencies (or anything). None of the information presented here is intended to form a basis for any offer or recommendation or have any regard to the investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of any specific person. Everything here is for informational entertainment purposes only.
