Jason Brink aka BitBender

@decodejar Valid reasoning.. @BitBenderBrink as you were previously the President of $Gala Games...you open to sharing your current opinion on the #GameFI sector mate 🙂

Thanks to @shanesek1 for asking about this, because I think it is one of those conversations that everyone in the GameFi space sort of circles around, but very few people want to stare at directly for too long. I just cracked myself a fresh White Monster, kids are on their way to a class, and I have a few minutes to write on my own, so here we go. Unfortunately, I think GameFi is mostly dead right now. Not permanently dead, necessarily, and not dead because nobody tried. There have been a ton of heroic efforts from people across the industry to make this work. Builders have built, communities have rallied, founders have thrown years of their lives into the fire, and more than a few teams have tried very sincerely to create something that was not just “a game with a token attached.” But despite our best efforts, I do not think we, as an industry, have really succeeded in creating a blockchain integration or use case that goes meaningfully beyond the basic tech thesis of the space. Ownership is the big one. It has always been the cleanest, easiest, most philosophically satisfying argument...own your items...own your characters...own your progress. Maybe, in some cases, you own a piece of the economy around the game itself like in @staratlas. That all sounds great, and honestly, I still like the idea in theory. The problem is that the broader gaming industry seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Web2 developers are increasingly leery about giving players ownership of the game itself, let alone ownership of individual items inside that game. Look at the Subnautica 2 license. You do not really own the game. With something like an NFT, its even harder because the issuance of an NFT could THEORETICALLY turn into a requirement for a company to keep a game live long past the point of profitability because they sold something for it that people actually own. With small single-game shops, this doesn't matter because if they close the doors its over, but if you are a company like EA or Netmarble or something, there are other revenues you might end up sapping to keep a game alive forever just because you sold someone something once and they sued to keep the game live...that sucks for them and it isn't worth the risk. I do not think that the current lack of ownership automatically a problem, per se. The days of pulling a cherished cartridge down off the shelf, blowing the dust out of it, and playing through The Legend of Zelda for the umpteenth time are mostly gone for a lot of modern gaming. Now I play through a game, hit the end of the content, metaphorically shelve it, and wait until new content shows up. In Subnautica 2, once I unlocked the power plant and reached the end of the available content, that was basically it for me until the next update. The company could just as easily decide to sunset the whole thing later because of legal issues, business issues, or some other internal mess. That is the reality of modern games. Ownership sounds good, but by itself, it is not a strong enough thesis to carry an entire industry. The second massive issue is fragmentation. Web3 as a space is incredibly fragmented. There are cool games out there, and there are cool experiments, and there are teams trying interesting things, but they are buried under a pile of wallets, logins, keys, chains, bridges, launchers, marketplaces, and assorted nonsense that normal people do not want to deal with. @animocabrands, under @ysiu, and @0xferg at @Immutable, are probably some of the best attempts so far. We tried to do that at Gala too, but we were largely unsuccessful for a variety of reasons mostly beyond our control. There is not yet a true “Steam of web3” that actually works. I hope eventually we can help push something like that forward with @ForkedGG, but the market is rough, attention is scattered, and there are a lot of things moving in a lot of directions. The regulatory environment does not help either. As @decodejar has pointed out, once in-game items and currencies start being treated like valuable and taxable assets, the friction goes through the roof. The original idea, as I said in my TEDx talk years ago, was to help players and make better games. By and large, I do not think we have delivered on that promise. Despite working in the space, I would still rather play web2 games most of the time, because there is less friction and I play games for enjoyment, not to stack NFTs or farm tokens. Publishing these games is also brutally hard. Gala has tried with a bunch of stuff, most recently with Shrapnel, but when I tried to play the web2 version, I could not even get it to connect, so I never got to play. I do not think that is necessarily a Gala issue, and I will try again later, but this is the problem with publishing. The publisher ends up held hostage by developer issues, and the community does not usually differentiate between the developer and the publisher. Every hiccup lands publicly on the publisher, whether that is fair or not. I hope GameFi turns around. I really do. But right now, the industry feels like it is languishing from a lack of attention, a lack of product-market fit, and a lack of genuinely compelling reasons for normal players to care. My fear is that unless something changes, GameFi may end up being remembered as a flash in the pan while the broader industry, and the attention economy around it, moves somewhere else.

@jeffpb7 Oi any trades your looking for??? Highly interested. I am a major investor and collector.