TL;DR: The numbers simply do not add up.
I have played video games for over two decades now, and whilst the genre and development budget varies greatly, pretty much all games I tried have one thing in common: Their economy sucks in the long run. Earlier games were not really concerned with this. Most games that even had economies were single player and story line driven, so you just put it away when the story was finished, and bought a new one. I call this economic hotfixes by reset. From Pokemon and Skyrim to Cities: Skylines, most single player games still rely on this.
Then, with the internet came multiplayer games with persistent servers. These games have an incentive to build an economy that encourages the players to keep playing, because the playerbase itself is a valuable part of the game content. However, many of them do not even try. I spent a fair portion of my childhood in World of Warcraft(WoW), and through 4 expansions and countless content patches I realized that WoW actually relied on the same economic hotfixes by reset that single player games do. What they did try was to implement money sinks, but these were in the form of overpriced fluff items that you only need to buy once. I mean, only once per character. Inevitably this did not solve the underlying issues with their game economy, it only extended our walk towards the cliff a little. The result is an endgame where nobody needs anything because they have everything, and we jump around the mailbox while waiting for new content.
There is one game that at least tries, and it’s called EVE Online. Sci-fi and half automatic gameplay is not my cup of tea, but I spent some time in the game just because it plays the economic aspect of their world so much better than other games. EVE is hardcore because if your spaceship blows up it is gone, even in PvP. This means you have to buy or make a new one. This does in turn help fuel a long lasting economy where both resource gatherers and crafters play an important role. I will admit, even EVE has severe inflation because they print massive amounts of currency through quests and the like, but they get points for effort, at least they do not resort to periodic resets.
Finally, the most recent development is crypto games. Crypto games, especially those that market themselves as Play to Earn have very strong incentives to get their economy right. If you market yourself as Play to Earn but the players cannot profit, you are basically a scam. And we do not want to be scams, right? Right?… Games are naturally unable to create physical value, they can only extract value from the value chain. This value first and foremost comes from the pockets of players who are looking for leisure. However, if you cannot offer more than a reskinned dice roll simulator that can only be played for about 5 minutes a day, then it is hard to claim that you are delivering in this aspect. This brings us to today’s protagonist, CryptoBlades. It is only with a stretch that I allow myself to call this a game in the first place, but that is a topic for another day. Today I want to talk about why I think CryptoBlades cannot last, at least not without tweaks. By the way, did I mention their token is called SKILL, that is some quality irony for a dice roll simulator.
So, what challenges do crypto games need to deal with? First and foremost they need a plan to combat inflation. If your in-game currency is a crypto token the value loss from massive inflation will hurt your promise of earnings. CryptoBlades seems to simply implement a supply limit for this purpose. This might solve the problem or inflation, but it complicates the next point: They need to ensure payouts to the players. Most games just print in-game currency when they want to reward it, but CryptoBlades promises not to do this. Instead, they have a wallet address that holds the funds a player can receive as reward. It becomes obvious that this address needs to get funding from somewhere, or else it will run out of SKILL. From what I can tell this funding comes from 2 sources. First, the character minting costs SKILL, and the SKILL paid is returned to the reward fund address, but you can only have 4 characters per account, so this is a rather minor contribution. Second, weapon minting and reforging works the same as character minting, and because of the way weapons work this will be the major contributor to keeping the reward fund address topped up. However, even weapon minting does not last forever. Just because you can own as many weapons as you want, that does not mean you want to. In fact, you only need a single weapon per account. Surely, farming for that perfect weapon takes a lot of dice rolls, but once you have it you are pretty much done. This basically means that CryptoBlades is entirely dependent on new accounts being started, and new weapons being farmed continuously. In other words, they need to up their endgame.
A critique is not complete without a suggested solution, so I will share my thoughts about what I think CryptoBlades could do to alleviate their endgame issue. The flaw in their money sink stems from weapons being eternal. I suggest changing the durability mechanic on the top tier weapons to not replenish automatically like it does now, but rather require a “repair” that costs SKILL. Another idea is to implement an aging mechanic on the characters so that at a certain level they start growing weaker, eventually becoming useless so they are forced to retire. That said, my assumption is that implementing both of the above ideas probably would not be enough. Their economy is bound to fail unless they change their approach entirely, because they are essentially trying to make a perpetual motion machine. I predict that one day we will simply be unable to harvest our SKILL rewards, because the reward fund address ran out of SKILL.
This post was written based on information from the CryptoBlades wiki and my experience with the game, please let me know if I have erred. Even for such a simple subject I was not able to cover everything in a single post, but I tried to include the most relevant points to provide context for my thoughts. I don't really want to spread FUD or anything, but can anyone explain to me how this could actually last?
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