August 8, 2022 – Singapore – On August 3rd, 2022, a web3 industry panel hosted by ArchLoot, gathered talents from GameFi pioneers that included Karmaverse, Swords and Dungeons, and metaENGINE. “The breaking point of web3 gaming: NFTs, VR, web2 users, or else” has been brought to the table.
Gavin, the COO of ArchLoot, was the host.
Guests included Jonathan, CEO of ArchLoot; Dirk, CMO of ArchLoot; Alex, Co-founder/Co-CEO of MetaEngine; Chris, Community Manager of Swords & Dungeons, and Wendy, Operation manager at Karmaverse, which is a recently announced new partnership of ArchLoot.
We’ve captured the full learnings and takeaways from their words below:
Question: We’ve got gamers and developers debating on the issues of web3 gaming in terms of its game design, genre, user base, economics and marketing scheme. There’s also a paradox of fundraising fever and X-To-Earn bottlenecks within the industry. What are your opinions about it?
Dirk
In the bear market, GameFi is resilient. $201 M was invested in Web3 games in July. web3 games witnessed a surge of almost $78.3 m in investment. According to Footprint Data, on average 75% of the total investment has been poured into Web3 games since April. There are also rummers spinning that AAA titles are joining the space.
The trends can be seen: A sharp rise in significant studio acquisitions across the traditional gaming space (like Microsoft’s $69B takeover of Activision Blizzard);
Game guilds are transforming into more functional apps with diverse offerings.
Alex
As an infrastructure provider, we spoke to about 650 projects in Gamefi & Metaverse. And what we realize is actually, there is a lot of fun, but very little game in many of these projects.
I do not know if you guys have heard the most recent debate of Illuvium vs. Star Atlas. But it was kind of eye-opening to hear from Star Atlas CEO. And I’m not talking about the total number of developers, but in general, out of the whole 237 employees that they have, only 4 people are unreal developers. 4. That’s like 1.5 %. But they have about 30 engineers that are doing Solana development.
So it’s a total disbalance. What is the core offering of a game? It’s the content. It’s the entertainment value of it.
Q: Statistics show that they’re around 1.2 million active gamers. In your opinion, what makes a gamer web3, and what might contribute to the growth of the web3 gaming user base?
Wendy
I think the web3 players are the individual investors. They bring the cash flow to web3 and look for the returns on investment, the incentives and earning in-game rewards.
In order to grow the user base, we need to work on the ecosystem to make it more sustainable. Another big thing we can work or I already see people working on that is to make things easier – make them easier to enter.
Many people already working on the solutions, for example, Magic Eden. Nowadays, people can buy Magic Eden with their credit cards. That’s a big improvement. And I think the projects need to continually work and build the community, especially in the bear market.
Chris
I say the definition of web3 gamers is not as clear for now. Let’s face it, they’re not actually gamers, they’re mostly investors and speculators at the moment. Developers need to focus on both the economic system and the playability so that a game won’t be too boring, and economic systems like good enough to attract those investors to put their money in it, and keep the project running.
1.2 million players is not exactly a large number when compared to the players in the traditional game industry. But I do believe that the web3 game has infinite potential waiting to be brought out by quality projects which are kind of rare at the moment still.
Jonathan
In the traditional game industry, we have user profiles. Currently, in web3, there are actually not enough analytics to actually know who are those web3 gamers.
I’d say we should really mainly focus on the gameplay style. We should focus on what’s already existed in the traditional gaming industry. For example, one of the weaknesses of the traditional gaming industry is that the game will control its own finance. So how to actually take those players is to actually try to let them know that they can actually do that legally in GameFi.
Q: Given what you’ve seen in the industry, including trends like VR, metaverse, and the convergence of web2/web3 gaming advertising, which element has the greatest potential to break the bottleneck of web3 game development? Is technology the key, or the people?
Dirk
In current games, what we see is that the tradings happen in a dashboard or on a web in an h5 page. But in the future, if we can incorporate those transfers of assets, those tradings inside the game, then I think that’s one that might be the point where we can break the bottleneck.
And currently, we’re seeing the collaboration of games and guilds. Guilds are currently more involved in upper-stream game activities such as investment, operations and user acquisitions. So we think that guilds will definitely also be one of the more important corner cornerstones of future web3 games.
Alex
I think it is actually both. We need to make some of these experiences like wallet management and other stuff, much, much less intrusive and totally you know transparent as far as the play is concerned.
Because of that, I remember there was a study on metamask adoption, but 90% of people do not pass through the first log-in stream. When you want to make it a kind of Amazon, one-click type of approach, you go into the game experience. Whatever happens in the background players don’t care. What they care about is really all about the experience that you have.
The other thing is, there is, I believe that you know people today, as we mentioned before, there are still not enough developers that come from web2 with great interest, ideas and experiences that have joined web3. If you were to look at it from that point of view, your focus really should be on the content development and blockchain becomes then secondary that just supports a number of features that you can provide, like asset interoperability, ownership secure transactions, and so on.
Q4: Are NFTs nightmares or blessings to the gaming industry? What unique value does NFT bring to the gaming industry?
Wendy
NFTs are great tools for gameplay because they are unique, rare and visible. Besides when a traditional online game shuts down, users lose all of their in-game purchases. However, NFTs exist independently of a specific gaming platform and live on the blockchain itself. In-game purchases can be bought and sold, regardless of what happens to the game. The most exciting part is the new game can be designed to plug into an existing blockchain contract. Overall, it is a revolution and he will bring more possibilities to the gaming industry.
Alex
NFTs, in my view, are more of a blessing to the gaming industry, because they provide an opportunity to fund gaming projects ahead of actual development. Funding gaming in general, on web2, is extremely difficult. It takes years to develop something, and a lot of developers actually suffer.
NFTs actually provide that opportunity for getting some early funding and then building those experiences. So I would say, kind of a kick-starter idea. But instead of just only access to the game, you actually own assets in the game that has their own value. Because in web2, you can’t really resell what you have invested in.
Q: Do you have any ideas that you want to share about how NFTs fit into different game genres? Is there any particular type, such as SLG, RTS, and Casual, that has natural advantages in integrating an NFT system?
Jonathan
It actually depends on the game’s needs and the user base. For example, there’s a game that I know is similar to Football Manager. And they actually use similar mechanics that you can find in football management. And those cards are actually collectables. In that aspect, static NFT jpegs work.
But if it’s a motion RPG, jpeg NFT is not enough. Here in ArchLoot, we provide interactive NFTs, which fully enable on-chain implementation of upgradeable characters/props NFTs and unleashes their potential for playability. We think different genres should require different technical details to suit the needs.
About the Panel
ArchLoot GameFi Panel has invited projects that included Tap Fantasy, Sythesis One, MetaDerby, Karmaverse, Swords and Dungeons, and metaENGINE, aiming to curate meaningful insights that benefits industry players alike.
ArchLoot is a UGC NFT game on BNB Chain with loot-style composability and playability. It provides the first interactive gameplay in the industry, which fully enables on-chain implementation of upgradeable characters/props NFTs.
Official website: www.archloot.com
News contact: contact@archloot.com
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