Crypto + Gaming, Disaster in the Making or the Future of Web3?
Lots of people like Crypto, Lots of people like Gaming, but Crypto Gaming has disappointed so far…
The reality is that it has been a scam thus far, a ploy to raise millions in funds to build an unplayable game with either high gas fees, broken gameplay, an unsustainable economy, or a non-existent community.
Don´t get me wrong, I am confident it can blow up into a trillion-dollar industry. For that to happen the current status must be shifted completely and we must keep true to the original principles: giving gamers “true” property rights to their in-game assets & rewarding users for playing (P2E).
In this article, I provide an analysis of different problems I have identified within Crypto Gaming.
1. Unsustainable NFT Ecosystem
It is extremely hard to build an economically sound game and a happy community when you start with 10,000 NFTs worth thousands of dollars. You’ll need to bring the price of NFTs down considerably to make the game attractive to the number of players you need to onboard. And by starting with high-value assets, you’ll attract more speculators than players, exactly the opposite of who you want to populate your early game community.
2. Unsustainable Token Ecosystem
The first wave of crypto games are essentially a combination of NFTs and DeFi. We took the ponzi schemes that exist in DeFi (buy our token, stake it for more of the token, sell the tokens you earn, and hope you make an ROI before it all collapses!) and just added extra steps. The breeding loops that exist in many NFT games are the same as yield farming, there are just colorful characters attached to them.
3. Capital > Time
Power in the games is instantly accessible to those with large amounts of capital. They can buy tons of resources, run the economic loops faster, and quickly gain control of the market.
This upsets the true players of the game, those who put time and energy into it. Over time, they will stop playing leaving the ecosystem with a group of whales that spend no time whatsoever actually on the platform, unsustainable.
The highest earning potential should accrue to the people putting the most time and energy into the game, and there should be limits on how close to that you can get by deploying large amounts of capital.
4. Inflation
An anti-inflation mechanism is usually put into place so that as users earn rewards they spend it within the ecosystem to avoid potential huge sell-offs of tokens. The problem is that most games allow users to spend earnings to increase their future earnings, forming a never-ending cycle that is bound to collapse eventually. This is the main criticism of one of the most popular and well-built games, STEPN.
