Why developers profit more from web3 game economies
As a game developer looking to move towards web3, how do you make sense of integrating tokenomics into your gameplay, and most importantly, how do you bring the most value to your game and player community through a token?
In the web3 space, tokens are everywhere: The list on CoinMarketCap or CoinGekko is seemingly unending, with tokens for every DeFi project, dApp, and many blockchain-based games. Here we’ll explore the ways game developers and game communities can benefit from a token economy.
A Quick Rundown: Web2 vs. Web3
Web2 is the current world of gaming: centralized games run by game development companies. Web3 presents a new, decentralized model for the game economy to incentivize players, eliminate middle-man entities, and overall enhance the experience for the entire gaming community.
The key to web3 gaming is blockchain technology, which makes digital transactions traceable and secure without relying on a central authority, and a blockchain-based token, which allows ownership of digital goods. The benefits of a blockchain-based gaming economy are manifold, and game developers have much to gain.
Incentivizing Time Spent In-Game
Integrating a token into a game is intuitive if you think about it. You replace ‘fake’ rewards with ‘real’ ones and give your players a bigger stake in their game experience. Rewards bearing real value provide a clear incentive for players to spend more time in-game.
In-Game Purchases
To market in-game items for purchase in web2, players convert real money to use exclusively in the game world. This is not a leap many players are willing to take, even if made attractive through enhanced in-game functionality, player capabilities, and swag. With the introduction of a token-based economy, the gap between the ‘fake’ game world and the ‘real’ world narrows; the real world becomes more “fake”, and the ‘fake’ world more real. his builds the bridge players need to take the extra step and invest in their gameplay.
The Monopoly Effect
Players are familiar with game tokens, which are earned in-game and do not hold real value outside of the game. So when a token of actual worth is introduced, the transition for players is smooth. Blockchain-based tokens hold value outside the game: they can be traded for other currencies and regular fiat on a crypto exchange. So, in order to make purchases in-game, a player will need to buy the native game currency first.
The extra step of converting regular money to tokens creates a reality where game items are only one step removed from conventional money, so players won’t need to say goodbye to any ‘real’ money at the moment of purchase. Once the money is transferred to tokens, it becomes more expendable since the tokens have already been budgeted for use in-game.
Bringing Real Value to the Game World
A properly implemented token economy gives players more real value for their time and efforts spent in-game than in web2 game equivalents. And this value emerges from the fact that the game tokens hold actual worth. A native game token provides value and utility to the holder within the game, and can be easily transferred to a wider-use utility token, cryptocurrency, or even back to fiat currency. But there is only so far you can go with a game-specific token, which by definition is limited to that one game. That’s why Ready Games is building an ecosystem of many games governed by one utility token: to standardize, create collective value, and enable cross-game functionality. This brings far more value to players versus a single-game token.
The Ultimate Token Economy
To give players and developers even more value for invested time and efforts, Ready Games has created an ecosystem-wide token economy based on its native $AURA token. With this carefully crafted tokenomics system in place, players and developers can implement and use the ecosystem’s ‘gold standard’ across games within Ready’s network. $AURA is the key that lets players transfer value from one game to the next across the ecosystem, and ownership of the token translates to shared ecosystem ownership. Holding $AURA manifests as all kinds of utilities, including governance, cross-game capabilities, and NFT minting.
In-Game Items of Real Worth — NFTs
In a web3 token economy, not only do the tokens themselves hold real value but in-game items are actually owned by the purchaser. This means that players can purchase an item in-game and then buy, sell, or trade the items. It also means that game developers can sell NFT items in their games and thereafter earn a share of profits from every sale or trade that happens to the NFT after the initial purchase.
Token-Infused NFTs
Ready Games has taken the ownership of in-game items one step further by “infusing” them with some amount of $AURA tokens. This attributes inherent value to every item in the ecosystem and protects players from the market devaluation of their NFTs by allowing NFT owners to “melt” their NFTs at any time to retrieve the token value stored within. But token infusion does not only give value to players; it also helps game developers profit. Developers who create in-game NFTs with Ready’s tools receive a share of the infused tokens when any one of the NFTs that they originally sold in-game is “melted” or “staked”.
Games in the Ready ecosystem — in this case, free-to-play mobile games — have seen significant increases in player spending for web3 game objects: a 10x increase in players making purchases, and a tripling of the amount spent by each paying player. This represents a meaningful shift in unit economics for game developers, and points towards the potentially universal appeal for players of legally owning the digital assets they purchase in-games.
Ready to build games on Web3?
Increased profits and ownership are just two reasons developers and players are looking to move into the world of web3 gaming. When it comes to web3 token economy and in-game NFTs, Ready’s SDKs, API plugins, supportive ecosystem, and compliant token economy contribute unmatched value to web3 games.
