Gamers don’t care about tokenomics anymore.
I am kidding. They never did.
I have been in the crypto space very actively for almost a year now. By active I mean working on a startup 24/7. We started a gaming community in Turkey in the first month and went on to create a NFT rental protocol.
Hence, I had the chance to see a lot of web3 game pitches.
One thing that bored me to death while pushing me away mentally was always tokenomics.
If there is one other thing that was worse, it was tokenomics experts¹. Whatever that means.
Tokenization
You will hear the pitch go many more times:
And $XXX is the token that fuels this economy into a self sustaining one.
Economy is not an engine that gets fueled. It is a balanced scale that can get bigger in size.
The question must be asked: Why do we use blockchain technology for in-game items or in-game currencies? Why not an off-chain database?
Transferability. It all comes down to this. It is not because blockchain is cool or anything. It is because people buy digital items in web2 but have no way of transferring it to someone else, in a convenient manner.
- Steam restricts selling items for a period of 7 days
- A lot of games sell digital items with subscriptions
- Hence you spend money into a blackhole for the privilege
- Characters we play with and develop for years either gets deleted or are forgotten.
NFTs solve this. They embody an asset, like a toy or a tshirt, in the digital world.
Web2 Games
In game tokens and currencies have been around forever though, no? So why am I suggesting that we should get rid of them?
This is the in-game currency purchase screen from the legendary mobile game Jetpack Joyride.
Now, the question begs: Where can you trade Jetpack tokens?
⇒ You can’t.
These tokens:
- exclusively work in Jetpack Joyride
- serve you to buy more digital in-game items
- cannot be traded with someone else on in the open market
- do not have a tokenomics.
They do not have a tokenomics plan because if they did, it would have more hyper inflation Weimar Republic.
Bottomline
For web3 games, it is not a good thing that trading is an inherent use case for your ERC-20 token:
- It gets unnecessary speculative usage,
- does not contribute to the gameplay,
- does not attract any gamers but only traders
You are better off creating an off chain token to facilitate more engagement from players inside the game. This token can easily be accessible with fiat currency and credit card payments. In exchange, you can buy NFTs.
Appendix
Experts
These guys are mostly either influencers, traders, or trader-influencers. They have been trading stuff on crypto for years now and most of them earned good money thanks to the volatility.
So long and thanks for the fish