It’s time to examine reality itself, not the abstract ideas behind it. I have set out to write a practical thesis.

Thanks to Lars of Naavik who inspired me to write this piece (unbeknownst to him). On several occasions Lars has been quite adamant about how crypto doesn’t add anything fundamentally new to games— that whatever you can do with crypto, you can easily do without.

Unfortunately, in his conversations with crypto native folk, they always seem to be at a loss for words. They believe in this movement, but struggle to explain what is it exactly that it offers.

On the same note, the vast majority of the crypto gaming thought pieces either deal with abstractions high up in the air, or make many assumptions.

So what actually is crypto’s value offer to studios and to players? I set out to write the thesis myself.

My hope is that by the end of this, you will feel the same as I do; that gaming will inevitably cross the chasm into crypto. The point is to understand why it is bound to happen, not the merit of this path (which deserves a piece in its own).

Here’s what we will not discuss:

We won’t discuss the history of game monetization, the relationship between money<>society<>play, or why an open-source, transparent, neutral and trust-minimized ledger that is socially accepted as a global source of truth for digital ownership attribution is precisely the extension of the internet we were missing to allow for self-contained systems of finance, art and games; a natural next step in our inevitable journey towards the ever increasing relevance of our lives within the digital realm GAASP! i need to be stopped.

Phew. Now with that off my chest, let’s step into the practical as promised. And what better way to so than with a list?! After all, it was not for nothing that a legend once said:

Here’s a list of what we will discuss:

1. Neutral Infrastructure 2. Velocity, Not Extraction 3. The Force 3.5. Quasi Equity 4. Composability 5. Player Spending 6. Funding and Alignment 7. Universal Login 7.5. Universal Identity 8. Crypto-Native Games 9. Extras

Two small notes before we dive in:

Great.

Now hold my hand and let’s go on a 5,892 word journey.

by @karlybierma (thank you karly! yes dats me an old bald man with a kipa and VR set)

The developing studio can leverage open source software for in-game purchases, marketplaces, records of ownership.

Thus:

Studios are freed from the shackles of having to release endless store items or purchasable DLCs, they now have an alternative—they can incorporate resale royalties into game assets—and create an active, healthy economy under their roof.

Constantly releasing newly purchasable content/assets would no longer be the only way to monetize a successful game—collecting royalties from a high velocity economy might just do that. This may end up beneficial for both the studios and the players.

It’s a fundamental shift; from optimizing sunk-cost extraction methods, to optimizing for a player based economy.

An economy can revolve around community mods, or user-generated assets, or exchange of resources or vanity items. Such a large shift tends to open up new and previously unimaginable models, so my short list probably just scratches the surface of what will be created over the next decade.

It’s important to note here that technically, yes, this is possible to create without any crypto integration. Ebay or Steam might be convinced to add creator royalties, or studios can (try to) create their own royalty-enabled marketplaces on conventional financial rails (good luck with that though).

But it’s way, way more straightforward to do using crypto. There is a reason why royalties are already ubiquitous in NFTs (even though they’re not entirely enforceable), but almost never seen within traditional art or games.

Feeling a sense of ownership in the game — players will more often become enthusiastic stewards of a game they love. Having financial stake, just like the founders and employees — inevitably makes the players more aligned with the game’s success.

And no, of course owning NFTs is not nearly the same as owning equity–but the psychological effect in fact is very similar.

All have strong communities/tribes that don’t own a slight bit of equity. And yet…

A sense of ownership supercharges tribes, even if vaguely derivative to actual equity. This is The Force.

The Force is the collective spirit of cooperation to enthusiastically steward what you feel is yours, in the hope of getting recognition and fame within the group, or of getting financial gain. It’s a large part of what drove bitcoin, ethereum, all nfts and coins, and what all significant movements in the past.

Will everyone like this new world of games? No. Will it happen anyway? Yes. Will games that embrace this new reality grow faster than their peers? Probably. Will the world be better for it? I don’t know.

Frankly, incentive alignment between players and the game is nothing new: MTG players are heavily aligned with the game for they have spent so much of their time and money acquiring cards, building decks and improving their strategies; World of Warcraft players are definitely aligned with its success, having paid subscription fees for years and spent hundreds of hours raiding to gear up their characters, complete achievements, acquire friends and earn a reputation for themselves.

Undoubtedly, players have always been aligned with their game’s success. Especially if it’s a multiplayer game. If it fails — their efforts, in both time or money, lose much of their meaning.

The death of a multiplayer world is analogous to the death of any movement or group. All acquired reputation and intellectual, material progression within the group is wiped clean —becoming almost meaningless.

Taking it to another analogy:

Anyway… point being that players want their game to live & succeed because they have a lot to lose if it doesn’t. They take a massive risk.

But hey, let’s examine the optimistic scenario. What happens if the game becomes successful? Well, players can continue playing as normal, and their progression is acknowledged by the group. That’s about it. Unlike all other movements of the past, there is very little to gain that can carry over to the outside world, namely monetary gain. Yes, being early to movements has always presented outsized financial opportunities (and often social & political as well).

So players stand to lose if the game fails (often hundreds of dollars and/or thousands of hours), but little to gain if it succeeds. This is especially true for the early players, to whom it’s unclear what the future fate of the game is — whether it’ll be short lived and die off soon — which is the fate of most multiplayer games.

What if games had means to reward players? What if the high risk that players take would have a strong opposite when the game does well? You may argue on whether it’s a rightful moral imperative that all risk takers have access to the upside.

But you cannot argue on the existence of The Force.

The Force is the power of a tribe. It’s the sheer energy of a group of people binding together under a single banner and cause. Its omnipresence in games has been unquestionable for decades, but especially since the advent of social platforms like YT and Reddit.

And yet, the new crypto paradigm allows it to grow even more, to amplify.

Don’t fade the existence of The Force. It might just turn out to be the most effective growth & marketing strategy the gaming world ever saw. In which case our feelings towards it matter little.

Han certainly didn’t want to believe it at first. Yet in the face of reality, he had no choice but to acknowledge existence and power of The Force.

I want to note, as a bonus, that putting quasi-equity at the hands of players becomes possible with crypto. To be fair, It’s hard to say whether game developers would actually want to revenue-share with their player base if they could realistically do so. But given there is such a big emphasis on the importance of listening to players, could it be that giving back to players might also become a thing, a trend?

I’m open to discussion, but I tend to think that yes–given the option to do so, some niche (at first) corners of the gaming world start to lean over to a rev-share model.

It has the benefit of unleashing The Force in a more straightforward, traditional way. And without any ramifications to the actual game design (e.g. doesn’t require enabling the free trade of game assets, or an earnable token).

Ben Kenobi understands the power of The Force

The concept of rev-sharing isn’t completely unprecedented; Dota 2 has been distributing a % of its revenues for almost a decade now–into its championship prize pools–making them absurdly big. It serves as a fantastic marketing strategy and is conducive to a warmer relationship between Valve and its community of players.

But I want to examine the possibility of direct revenue sharing. I speculate that it hasn’t happened yet for two main reasons:

Let’s look closer at these two barriers.

1) Legal and compliance issues; good luck distributing a form of dividend to random unidentified persons while not even being under proper securities regulation.

> Does crypto solve this?

Well, it doesn’t really. But it might. Revenue share can happen automatically through a series of autonomous contract interactions, akin to many Defi protocols today who distribute protocol fees to token holders (some even have teams based in western jurisdictions, e.g. Synthetix). Game developers can copy this approach, or even ditch the tradable token model and instead opt for a different score-based system that is recorded on-chain but isn’t immediately financialized.

Alternatively, a percentage of the game-generated revenue can be automatically routed to a stand-alone treasury that is governed by player token holders (again, the token can be made non-tradable, or just an internal game-score calculated by arbitrary metrics). The treasury would have a completely unstated purpose, but in practice can be used as a distribution form that isn’t directly controlled by the game developers. It would be quite easy to nudge the player-base towards that direction.

Admittedly this is all a grey legal area and mere speculation on my part.

Although if nothing else, at least crypto opens up the previously untenable option of anon teams monetizing their creations. Crypto abstracts away the real-world layer of borders and draws us into a universe that is more digital, more neutral by nature. Creators have always had to rely on archaic financial infrastructure that is deeply concerned about their real world identity and physical country of residence. But this can finally change–which also brings me to my next point.

2) Payment rails limitations; requires collecting financially identifying details of a massive amount of players, safeguarding the data securely, paying annoyingly high fees, and then the strawberry on top would be doing this on a global scale, throughout many jurisdictions and banking systems. Needless to say, it would be a hellish nightmare. A non-starter, really.

> Does crypto solve this?

Yes it does. It’s incredibly easy to massively distribute coins to a set of players (addresses). No need to add much here–just look at the hundreds of projects who already did so–whether it’s their own token they distributed or ETH-denominated revenue. Would have been practically without crypto primitives.

note: following some confusion, I want to emphasize that ‘composability’ does *not* equal item cross-overs (using one game’s item in another). Definitely not.

A shared open ledger to track ownership is a powerful tool. Digital assets become more like items in the physical world; they can be pawned, lent out, used as collateral, traded, stored at home or stored in a bank, each one has a history, and a clear owner.

Digital game objects have practically none of these properties. I want to say “NFTs solve this” but I think almost nobody views this as a problem currently. Fucked up status-quo situations tend to look normal when you live through them. They begin to look absurd only in hindsight, after an alternative has taken solid ground.

Venturing into abstraction for a brief moment; physical objects are native to the physical world–ie not limited in how they can interact with it.

Conversely, at present, digital objects exist almost entirely within closed systems/DB — not at all native to the wider cyberspace. That’s our status-quo. It may seem to you like there’s no actual issue to solve here. And yet I dare to say:

They better–because our lives are increasingly moving over to the digital world.

In a crypto gaming paradigm, games are much more likely to have many of their game items as NFTs and therefore tradable on secondary markets. Leaving the fundamental discussion aside for a minute, this paradigm will have a material effect on player spending–they will spend more. WAY more. For 2 reasons:

(a) The typical investments into a game are no longer sunk resources for players. Time, money; all have the potential to be reclaimed in part or in full down the road. Playing a game for years and then making a switch to another one will be much easier and more palatable. People hate getting a feeling of “everything I’ve acquired and accomplished in all those years is now worthless”.

Yes, theoretically, the only thing that matters are the hours of entertainment they got from it. But not really. As human apes, knowing we can later resell the items we spent money or time to acquire, we are naturally inclined to spend a lot more. Resources are no longer sunk. (/a)

(b) The market for ultra premium items really opens up. Imagine a LoL player that mains Garen (random example, couldn’t be me…heh…). He owns every Garen skin available on the store–he bought all 12 of them for 5–20 bucks each. He’s a high earner and plays a lot of League, so he doesn’t mind the $150 he spent in total. If he wants to really distinguish himself from other Garen players, he’s out of luck–because everyone can get these skins quite readily too. Completely trivial.

Now imagine all skins are NFTs. Suddenly, a few options open up for him that were previously not available: he can buy a rare skin that is no longer available in the store, perhaps one that was gifted or sold to players long ago, mind you that he can verify exactly how many of these exist today; he can also find a skin token with a unique provenance; like one that was minted in the very first weeks of the game’s history, or one that was used by a world championship winner in the finals. All of these options are only possible in this new paradigm. You can imagine our Garen main will definitely aspire to have one of these, and likely be willing to spend hundreds of dollars to acquire it–tripling or quadrupling his spending. Not to mention the seller–who will probably want to spend some of these dollars back in the game.

This is how NFT-based game economies are going to make current game economies look like lemonade stands in retrospect.

Mind you, this happened before: Spectral Tiger mount in World of Warcraft, houses in Ultima Online, ships in EVE Online, Karambit knives in CS:GO, rare hats in Team Fortress 2 and Rocket League.

Ultima Online house // Swift Spectral Tiger; obtained from a rare WoW TCG card

They all traded for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Same principle, albeit lacking verifiable scarcity, provenance, ownership rights, composability (ability for anybody’s marketplace/programs to interact with the assets) and royalties.

Note: I’m a big fan of premium items that are obtainable in a unique way, or in limited quantity/limited time for a standard store price, or by completing a challenge, or by rare random chance–anything other than premium items sold for premium prices straight out of the shelf. It’s certainly tempting if you’re a studio, but ultimately tarnishes the appeal, the backstory, and hinders your progress toward a growing a great economy that is attractive for players. (/b)

The most coveted Rocket League item (~$8k); awarded to security vulnerability reporters

Fwiw, I don’t expect existing big games will ever go the route of optimizing economic growth and value capture through velocity. They just have too much to lose, they won’t risk the revenue and reputation loss. The big studios will hop on the bandwagon once a model is proven to work well on a large scale–something they can replicate with high quality execution. We’re probably still a good few years from that moment. They will come.

Ambitious games are notoriously difficult to make and require many years and many millions. Studios currently have 4 options in order to get to the finish line:

It often ends up being a mix of those. But it’s always a struggle.

Using crypto primitives—gaming studios have an larger tool-belt of fundraising options; selling NFTs, be it vanity items, battle passes, land (although I have something to say about that), concept art, or whatever else they find right; doing a token sale is an option too, either for a psuedo-governance or a “utility” token.

Doing these is a form of crowdfunding, but with one major difference from Kickstarter (who btw take an 8% fee)—backers get to participate in the upside. They are taking risk in an early stage business endeavor… should the upside be reserved only for those with an official ‘investor’ title? Hard to answer ‘yes’ on that.

Two reservations to note before I continue to hammer in the point:

Ok, back to the main point.

https://twitter.com/aradtski/status/1535212142726631431

Well, don’t you?

It’s not too different from an arts patron discovering an unknown artist and carrying him to fame over years by being an enthusiast collector. You’d get to brag about your foresight and own his valuable work at ridiculous cost (ofc, it was very risky at the beginning).

In fact NFTs are just the same, except unknown artists normally get their ‘enthusiastic patron’ early collectors through social media discovery. Like in traditional art circles, those early collectors can be stand proud, brag and participate in the upside if the artist rises to fame.

Who has a better chance to become known?

(1) the artist who posts his art on twitter and does commissions, freelancing;

or

(2) the artist who posts his art on twitter and mints them as NFTs?

I would argue that the 2nd artist has a much higher chance to grow a fan base of collectors who advocate for his work—he opens up the door for them to participate in his journey—and by doing that, lays out a path for himself. The first step to becoming a known artist to getting that core group of advocates by your side.

Guess what. games are about to go down that path as well. You may not like it. You may try to reject it. But it’s practically inevitable—people absolutely love speculating on the success of games and they love forming online tribes around those games.

They love fighting over them, too.

Now throw money into the mix, and you get an explosive mixture of super engaging and novel speculation combined with passionate tribes. It is going to be a strong force. A new growth tactic, if you will.

Ultimately though, discussion of merit aside: if it can be used to fund game development — it will be.

Universal login credentials have always been a golden goose—users hate to juggle between different accounts on different services, often with different credentials that ought to be carefully managed or remembered. But actually pulling it off is insanely hard — requiring ultra wide penetration of a single authentication method. Only mega-corporations, mainly Facebook and Google, have managed to come close.

But the real golden goose—has to be universal login using Public-key cryptography—such authentication standard, if adopted, would be extremely neutral, open, simple, and not reliant on centralized registries or APIs provided by a single corporation. Overall a perfect fit for an internet-wide standard.

But alas, life is rough; no Public-key authentication standard ever reached escape velocity. Not even close. That is… until Ethereum and dApps came along. Suddenly arose a set of web applications that all used the same standard. They had to—to let users sign & submit transactions, wallets had to adhere to the Public-key signature scheme as specified by Ethereum.

So nowadays, this standardized authentication method is built into every self respecting crypto (dare i say web3) wallet. Despite originally being intended to use strictly for crypto transactions, it’s now best positioned to become that golden goose. It’s starting to reach escape velocity. And it brings with it other benefits that were previously unimaginable for a universal authentication method—it comes integrated with an entire network of financial infrastructure along with it! allow the gust of enthusiasm breeze through your skin

fyi: account abstraction is a game changer

Universal login comes with universal identity as well. Privacy conscious users may choose to split their activity over different addresses, but given that the majority won’t — some very neat and unique options open up for game developers:

All of these take advantage of persistent identity and the open nature of the chain, and are therefore completely novel to crypto games.

Crypto-native games take the core primitives offered to us by using a public blockchain to build something fundamentally new. They’re the antithesis of slapping a token onto a traditional game model and calling it a web3 game.

Often, the game state is entirely on-chain and most interactions with it are done through transactions. The game is a protocol, and the protocol is the game. Players can then take the protocol’s interface and extend or interact with it in endless different ways.

My favourite analogy is chess. Chess is a protocol — an immutable set of rules. Chess players use that set of rules to create their own interfaces and play the game; however, whenever, with whoever they want, over thousands of years. Granted the analogy isn’t perfect because there’s no real-time state recorded publicly, but the core idea is similar.

On-chain games have been relatively front of mind for the past two years, mostly since dark forest first grew in popularity. And indeed df is the prime example; in-fact, it’s the only good example. Crypto-native games are so hard to make that nobody has built anything nearly as engaging and complex as df yet. No-one came even close.

We could talk plenty about dark forest, but not today. If you’re interested in a a simple and comprehensive overview of df, this video does it.

dark forest dramatic moment before a round’s ending

Crypto is not to be seen a “complete package”. It can be integrated in a modular way–at the fringes of the user experience, or deep into the mechanism design.

With regards to crypto-native games, I believe we’re walking into a dark tunnel— the constraints and design space are so fundamentally different than anything else, that we have no idea what’s on the other end of that tunnel — the only way to find out is to walk the distance.

For a more detailed discussion on crypto-native games I recommend gubsheep’s cornerstone post; The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis.

Extras that didn’t make it into the main list; they get their own list! Yay lists.

Not all games will want to have a tradable token (not to mention 2 of them). In fact, some will even reject the idea of having tradable items altogether, NFTs included. Some will only pick a few crypto primitives to use, and many won’t at all. And some will experiment with being crypto native in every way possible.

I do not want to give you an illusion that I know what games need or what they want. I merely present what they are being offered.

There’s a strong point to be made against openly inviting real world money commerce into games; as it breaks the player’s immersion — psychologically pulling him out of the fun & imaginary — and into our sorry reality in the real world. To which I’d respond that yes, I agree and recognize the concern. But there are two things to be said:

First, that game items trading for real world value is not at all a new concept. It’s almost 3 decades old. My favorite example is Ultima Online (released in 1997), the most successful MMO at the time, had no in-game shop with micro-transactions but it had an incredibly active secondary market for gold, houses and items on Ebay that was trading many millions of dollars annually despite all the risks of being scammed by Paypal payment detractors or merchants not fulfilling orders. Everybody in UO knew how integrated the US-dollar was with the economy, including the developers. It felt natural.

Second, that the current crop of crypto games probably do it all wrong. They reward you tokens for simply playing, and you immediately can tell the dollar value of these tokens, and therefore of your time in the game. You’re thrown into the ‘financial pit’ from the first moment, with an in-your-face display of your financial output.

Taking the UO example — new players normally did not know that the gold they’re earning at level 10 has real value, frankly it didn’t have in the amounts they were earning. Nor were their items. These new players got a chance to get immersed in the game with absolutely zero context of real financial value. At some point at max level, they would find that one of their rare items might actually be worth something, or that a house they want is on Ebay for sale.

Compare that to many crypto games today that often reward you tokens (that you knows the value of) right from the first day. This approach will work for a small portion of games, but I suspect is not the way to go for most.

Instead, I encourage game developers to think about how they can best abstract away or gently hide the financial layer from (especially) new players.

To give an example; one approach would be to have a non-transferable token that is earned in-game, and used to buy in-game items (some of which are NFTs), perhaps with other requirements like achievements. This abstracts away some of the financial layer, making instant calculations of “how much am i making per hour” not as realistic, or much more nuance, increasing the game immersion by adding an intermediate layer between your time spent and the items of value.

But again, I just wanted to demonstrate the idea with a single example. Developers will need to tackle this question with some deep thinking into what makes sense for their game. In time, I believe we’ll see novel designs.

One last thing — open your mind. It’s is a new paradigm opening up, and we haven’t even begun to scratch its surface. We must stay humble, for we have no idea what it will breed. History teaches us that we don’t have the required imagination.

If you tune your ears closely, you might hear voices—the voices of incumbents and of bureaucracy luddites, screeching in the background. Tune your ears even closer and you may what they’re saying; often it’s the good ol’ “crypto is a ponzi/scam”. The slightly more sophisticated ones repeat the same exact arguments made on BitcoinTalk threads back in 2011; explaining why our p2p internet coins will not, or cannot, work.

But they did work, and more than a decade later still do; slowly chipping away at the archaic institutions of money and commerce.

Nevertheless, the campaign against crypto lives on.

Then came NFTs. So simple, so elegant, yet so misunderstood. I will spare us the discussion here. For a foundational revisit of NFTs, I refer you to these great cornerstones; on crypto art and NFTs (Matt DesLauriers) / You’re Sleeping on Crypto Art (Derek Edws)

Nothing seemed to rile up the populace more so than NFTs.

Until…

We have awoken the beast…

The children of the internet…

…the gamers.

A new saga of war is upon us, one for the ages.

And yet we shall not fight in this war. The fighting comes from their side—we don’t have the privilege. As throughout all of crypto’s short history, all we ought to do is wait until they start seeing it for themselves. But in the meantime, let us at least keep our head high and stand proud.

If you found the piece interesting in any way, I’d appreciate some interaction with the twitter thread so others may see it too :)

Also, happy to discuss in the comments or in DMs! Thread: https://twitter.com/aradtski/status/1560650229854048257