sophia.ron

this is a very common take that SOUNDS CORRECT at a glance, but is the #1 reason almost all games in this industry have failed so far. 99% of crypto games failed because they weren’t financialized enough or honest enough about where the product-market fit is. as a new game, you need to have one big twist or innovation that makes people actually come check you out, when they could be playing one of the thousands of EXTREMELY good games out there in the market. no, ingame items / skins / products onchain is NOT ENOUGH of a twist for people to care. the benefits of onchain do NOT matter enough to 99% of people to swing repeated behavior. they can only improve what’s already working with the core game loop especially one designed with RMT and onchain assets from the ground up. in web2, a shitty game can be somewhat of a success. with crypto games, with the amount of money that has been put into it at the outset, it needs to absolutely COOK as a crypto business or fails by default, regardless of whether or not its fun. this is the fundamental business model disconnect that has resulted in the -$XXB loss that crypto gaming is in. because of this massive, fundamental flaw in the investment thesis - the teams / investors / founders that were earliest to launch tokens into the gaming narrative while it was still alive are the only winners (so far), cashing in before there was enough time for evidence disproving the “crypto gaming thesis” to accumulate. if you aren’t in the target audience for degen games, you will never understand how to build these games. why would I care about a crypto game that’s not financialized? hell, I don’t even play the best web2 games anymore, even though i grew up spending most of my early life playing games. how could these “just make a fun crypto game” titles ever compete for my attention? what works is niche, but imo will grow extremely rapidly - degen / risk-to-earn gaming as part of financialized entertainment vertical (perps, memes, prediction markets). there’s a thrill in risking assets that is just net new entertainment especially suited to this generation of terminally online people. the challenge for crypto games here is you need to win at two things at once, it needs to be a fun and ADDICTING enough game (very very hard) that has the intagible cool that gets people to care about the game (emotional investment) AND you need to have the ability to run MASSIVE stakes at scale while avoiding the million pitfalls that will completely sink the game. along with #2 is being able to CONSISTENTLY attract both ATTENTION and LIQUIDITY to the game - this is a bar that web2 games do not have to clear. its not impossible or the holy grail even to do all of this. just look at web2 - I’d say the gacha games (Genshin, Honkai Starrail) have been able to not only build geniuely fun games, but also kill it with a winning business model (gacha spins for characters). done correctly, the two feed into each other and its a beautiful thing to witness. all of this said, i think the OP is still correct in that the “game needs to be good” - there needs to be a very strong central core to the game that people care about that you can stack the financialization on top. e.g. prediction markets latch on to stuff people care about - big news events, sports, etc. - and get this core for free. perps latch on to the price action of crypto and other assets for the “””trading””” that happens on top. the key is the content core needs to consistently keep attention, and be 24/7 emergent and ever-evolving where it can never be “solved.” e.g. hyperliquid needs to launch more things to bet on (silver, web2 stocks) to grow. I also don’t think you need to make a game good enough to be GOTY standalone to have a financialized game that works and makes money. think about EVONY back in the day, those shitty games that get advertised constantly, most of them just latch onto a winning business model for a game (gacha) and spend a shit ton to get as many people to churn through the money making machine as possible. you can do that in crypto too. its the same arbitrage where someone might get bored of playing a triple-A, massive budget game and instead spend the same money and time playing fking vampire survivors because it makes their brain feel good. but a game with massive amounts of crypto volume flowing through it, or better yet a complex / high-depth economy with crypto assets (economy worth billions) would absolutely become the biggest gaming company ever, by an order of magnitude. a game taking volume-based fees aligns incentives with players in ways that potentially could solve the fundamental misalignment of games monetization that even gacha / microtx / mobile could never achieve. crypto games have massive LTV / ARPU potential as well because of the pyschological effect that people have when buying something they can sell later - they are willing to pay 10x+ more. two indicators i think to watch when tracking the next breakout crypto game: 1) how much do people care about the core thing (IP / wahtever u wanna call it)? you can look at how much the cosmetics are going for, a lot of other intangibles. this is the only edge that games specifically have against perps / memecoins / casinos, where people will never care deeply about anything except the buzz of winning money. 2) how controversial the game is getting? I 100% believe that thsi is the only way for crypto gaming specifically to scale a consistent pipeline of attention and liquidity. the more people are absolutely railing against the game (especially web2 gamers), the stronger the signal. if you're building a crypto game - my advice is don’t start with trying to put everything on chain or launching a token. get people to care first (up to you on how), and find a way to create an experience that creates enough $ flow through the game, it doesn’t even have to be sustainable at the start. last thought - consumer apps is ultimately just about finding new ways to elicit the most powerful emotions possible from people. if you can consistently put people in the “zone” (think grandma fucking locked in on a slot machien for 12 hours) or elicit new emotions from your consumer experience that are not common in modern life, people will remember you forever, and you gain LONG TERM equity - people will come back to try every new release. its the same reason people remember their first kiss or sexual experience forever. not enough teams are systemically optimizing their experiences to maximize this.