Gave some hints to it, but @gabrielleydon concretized the principles in their press release.
FREE-TO-OWN
Has two aspects: (1) The community begins for FREE. (2) The NFTs they get, are OWNED by them. (3) Those NFTs are factories that generate new NFTs (for gameplay, cosmetics).
COMMUNITY STARTS FOR FREE
@DigiDaigaku started as a free, stealth mint. This fulfils two objectives:
(a) No whitelists etc that creates tiers.
(b) No 'revenue' upfront. (actually, taking investment from web3 profit-motivated players)
Finally, starting free avoids scam-like behavior:
SELL, and then fail to deliver. (Incentivizes walking away -- all the revenue is done!)
You transform fans into best advocates for an upcoming game.
Taking NFTs as incentive alignment is reminiscent of @lootproject, except @limitbreak also takes a 10% transaction fee on NFTs, which allows them to generate rev, and invest that into the game development.
To date (21 days), there has been 3.9K ETH in vol. That's 600K revenue.
The second point of course is ownership.
This is a classic argument: players will be more invested when they own their NFTs.
But even better, these NFTs represent some economic utility in the context of the game.
It gives the right incentive alignment, as the team is rewarded in the NFTs and therefore, they're driving ALL the economic relevance to the original NFTs. (see: Metaversus level 8)
Which brings us to the discussion of the 3rd aspect: Factory NFTs.
@gabrielleydon 's question to game designers: how do you design a million-dollar feature?
With crypto, and its ability to unlock >$100 IAP spend, and @limitbreak, it's been discovered.
Scarcity, and production.
Having factory NFTs allows the game economy designer FAR more flexibility in balance from season to season, driving the proceeds of overall economic growth of the game to factory NFT holders.
It becomes an exercise of balancing value flows, rather than plunge protection.
FREE-TO-OWN
Leydon said, “With free-to-play, developers have this long period of making a game in the dark, and they don’t know what people are going to do. They launch it and hope people spend.”
This is precisely what we learnt as first-hand web3 game builders. Ship early and get feedback.
PS: Came up with the Factory NFT model independently beforehand, so you know it's good. You heard it here.
Rise of Kingdoms -- or, what does it feel like to be King?
Analyzing a commercially successfully MMORTS / 4X game (>60M downloads, >1 billion USD revenue) to set the ground for play-and-earn crypto gaming thesis
🧵
We conduct a breakdown of gameplay into economic, spatial, military, social and political gameplay factors
Rise of Kingdoms is an MMORTS 4X game, which simulates politics and the games that come along with that
Competing in RoK is more like Eve Online than Clash of Clans
The core loops: “build up your city, train up troops, advance your research, level up your commanders and craft equipment”.
However, the introduction of a spatial aspect as well as a deeply social MMO aspect with thousands of concurrent players brings it to the next level.
GameFi tokenomics is an interdisciplinary skillset
It involves knowledge of:
Tokenomics [Supply schedules? Utility of a token -- for whom, when and how?]
DeFi primitives
Game Design
Game Economy Design
Game Economics
Behavioral Economics
We will share resources / thoughts here
Tokenomics:
is the study of how to design tokens & their utility, their supply schedules (how and when are they emitted?) and their initial distribution
It has a frontloaded design process, but also includes monitoring over time. Utility can be added or removed from said tokens