Binance’s latest IEO project Axie Infinity (AXS) has recently dominated the blockchain game list. On the other side, LOOM and MANA are also booming. What all these three have in common is that they all belong to the blockchain games. Under the uptrend of Bitcoin, the sudden outbreak of the game board indicates that hot money has started to flow back into the altcoins market after hyping BTC, and the game board has become the first stop of hot money hyping, so the recent game board deserves close attention.
Everyone has played LOL(League of Legends), but most people’s impression of a blockchain game is just a token letter, so here’s the key: What is a blockchain game? What is the future potential of blockchain games? What is the investment logic of the game?
What is a blockchain game?
On the surface, blockchain games are no different from existing games, but the current blockchain games are still at a low level, and the quality is very poor. However, these seemingly elementary forms of games are different from the blessing of blockchain. The basic features of blockchain games are as follows:
1. The developer shall write the game rules into smart contracts, and the developer shall not tamper with the game rules and data.
2. The player has absolute private control over the game assets (items and game tokens).
3. Free trading of game assets.
4. You can make money through games
Different development stages of blockchain games:
1. Cryptokitties
Cryptokitties is the first popular application in the history of blockchain, which once crashed the Ethereum network. Cryptokitties is a simple card collection game. However, in our view, it’s not even a game, but the significance is that it opens up the imagination of the blockchain — — blockchain is not just about issuing tokens.
2. Ponzi games
In 2018, the most popular DAPP was Ponzi games, such as FOMO3D. The combination of transparency of blockchain and Ponzi mechanism created a unique charm, but the extremely short cycle of this kind of game and the nature of Ponzi was not of great elegance. But such games will always be around because they cater to humanity, such as this year’s TRONex, which went viral.
3. Playable games
Experienced brutal production in 2017 and 2018, the real blockchain game prototype slowly emerged, and games with complex mechanisms and diverse gameplay began to appear on the market. For example, the recent outbreak is AXS token. AXS is the governance token of Axie Infinity game, a pet competitive game in which players battle, cultivate, and trade the lovely creatures Axies, each with its own unique genetic data stored on the Ethereum chain. Axie Infinity can be simply understood as a Cryptokitties that joined the battle system, breeding system, and land system.
From the early stage, blockchain games have been played in a single and speculative way, but gradually, blockchain games with playability have been incubated. From the perspective of market heat and the number of players, the spring of such playable games may have arrived.
The potential of blockchain + games
When it comes to the potential of blockchain + games, it can be divided into two parts. One is the defects of external traditional games, the huge changes brought by blockchain; The second is the natural fit between games and blockchain.
The conundrum for traditional gamers:
1. Conflict of interests with game developers
As for early CS, for example, its gameplay and balance are normal, but the game developers constantly pursuit profit, and introduce a variety of game props, with which paying players can get a more competitive advantage. Thus, in the end, the game balance was broken, and players chose to abandon the game. Finally, this game was abandoned by the market.
Once the game is on-chain, it would be completely transparent, and the developer cannot launch paid game items indefinitely. In this way, it will maintain a balanced game ecology. More importantly, players are not only players but also have the right to know and their voices in the ecology, which meets the needs of players to realize their self-worth.
2. Lack of ownership
My father once played “Paradise Island”, a management game on Tencent game. This game has become the spiritual home of my father in his spare time, building high-rise buildings on the land and constantly upgrading. Then one day, the game failed because of monetization problems, which meant that everything you had created in the virtual space became nothing.
This is one of the drawbacks of traditional games, where the property in the game belongs to the developer and has nothing to do with the player. However, if the game is on-chain, through the ERC721 and other NFT protocols, the player’s virtual assets can be stored in the personal address, and it will confirm the right of the privatization of digital assets.
At the same time, when users have ownership, the game assets can be freely circulated for cash, in other words, to play the game is the same as to work in the real world. In reality, you get real money through hard work, in the game you can also make money by playing the game. By trading on exchanges, game assets can become money without hindrance.
The natural fit of blockchain and games
The most suitable application scenario of blockchain is the native digital field, not the field that has a great connection with reality. Video games have such natural characteristics, so games and blockchain naturally fit, whether token systems or community self-governance, they are both consistent with the world ecology of blockchain.
In addition, currently, the combination of game and DeFi is becoming a trend. Besides, the aforementioned cooperation between Axie Infinity and AAVE is an important case where virtual assets (NFT) in the game can be mortgaged and lend currencies such as USDT on AAVE.
Consensus on game assets:
What makes a game asset valuable? This may be a question many people may ask, but if you look at the consensus of players of traditional games on virtual items, it’s beyond our understanding. When I was in college, there was an old gamer. He told me that he had invested more than 200,000 yuan in Fantasy Westward Journey, and he had found a seller ready to sell his account.
Personally, I play games like LOL and DNF, but I rarely pay for them, so it’s hard to understand those paying players. It’s just like the outside world that can’t understand bitcoin mining, it’s a waste of power and useless, and there are a bunch of idiots willing to pay a high price for it. But this lack of understanding doesn’t prevent these players from investing a lot of real money, which is a powerful consensus that we can’t understand.
Investment logic of games
AXS, LOOM and MANA have been outstanding recently. The game sector has attracted the attention of blockchain folks again. So how to layout this sector? The following will discuss the categories one by one.
Indie Game:
For example, AXS and MANA are all tokens for indie game products. However, these tokens are not suitable for most players to invest in, and the simple reason is that such games require players to be a game lover and go deep into the game system. As far as I am concerned, I have played games like Axie Infinity, Decentraland, and NeoWorld, but I am not really interested in them as I am not a game buff.
Therefore, tokens for these indie games are suitable for game lovers, and only love can give you a deep understanding of the essence of the game system.
Underlying infrastructure:
Due to the current ETH network congestion, it is not suitable for game development, so there are sidechain solutions focusing on the game sectors, such as LOOM and MATIC. ENJ, which focuses on building a distributed chain of cross-game prop trading platform, allows players to trade assets across the game through Enjin Wallet, or to melt props into ENJ tokens. The infrastructure of blockchain games is relatively more valuable to invest in because the potential value of the underlying system is much higher than that of individual applications.
Conclusion
At present, blockchain game also has many problems, such as public chain performance bottleneck, high participation threshold and poor operation experience. This dilemma is very close to the mobile game industry in 2000 when it was faced with poor mobile phone hardware performance, 2.5G network could not meet the operation, poor game product quality and other problems. But as we now see, the mobile game is now the game of the day.
Today’s blockchain game is just repeating the past of mobile games. With the continuous improvement of the underlying infrastructure, a batch of popular blockchain games will surely emerge. At that time, it will become the largest flow entrance of the blockchain industry, and it will also become the “golden sector” of the crypto world.
Article from CoinVoice
Translated by Yang(Mengyan Finance)