A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. — James P. Carse

Infinite Game is the Holy Grail of Web3 Games

Web3 games have rapidly become a popular segment in the crypto world, with Axie Infinity generating over $200 million in monthly revenue. With an estimated 3 billion gamers globally, there is great potential for onboarding more web3 users, enabling gaming to shift from pure speculation to utility consumption.

The flow of money and talent into the industry is evident with over 1,000 play-to-earn games released in 2021–2022 and web3 gaming securing $4.49 billion in venture funding in 2022 alone.

However, it’s important to note that even successful games like Axie Infinity are not infinite. Some hot trending games have failed to survive the death spiral; resulting in a drop in prices and the loss of real users, leading to a bot-only playground.

While P2E games can attract users quickly in the early stages, creating a sustainable game or an infinite game in the web3 space remains a significant challenge for all developers.

This is the crux of the article, and we will discuss it while highlighting the steps that RMG Studio will take in response.

The Bottleneck of Web3 Games is not PLAYABILITY

Unfortunately, most existing projects lack innovation, and there is no clear solution to the problem at hand. Most games, except for Play-to-Earn (P2E) games, are merely the migration of Web 2.0 games to Web 3.0, the only distinction is that the games’ assets can be withdrawn as NFTs on public chains.

TripleA games, a popular name in the gaming sector argue that GameFi projects like Axie Infinity failed due to poor quality and playability, and were nothing more than speculative Ponzi schemes. Nevertheless, venture capitalists (VCs) are willing to invest in this story, with the likes of A16Z funds often betting more than $10 million on a single game.

However, 3A games have a long development period, often lasting more than three years. Thus, it is difficult to judge whether this approach is suitable for real-time market feedback.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment: If we mint an already successful Web 2.0 game’s assets into NFTs, will it become a successful Web 3.0 game? If it works, won’t it save three years by directly acquiring a mature Web 2.0 game for migration?

Most Web 2.0 assets are not transferable. Fortunately, there is a famous game that can support this experiment, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO).

Released in 2012, CSGO has over 35 million monthly active users and is undoubtedly a fun, high-quality game. It has a very active trading market, with over 100 trading platforms in addition to Steam, which is owned by Valve Corporation, the parent company of CSGO. After talking to some founders of trading platforms, the annual trading volume of CSGO skins is estimated to be around $50 billion.

the question is; if we mint CSGO skins as NFTs, would you buy them?

If someone hypes it, then I will. But probably not a long-term hold.

If someone hypes it, then I will. But probably not a long-term hold.I wouldn’t, because of the weak capital appreciation expectations. CSGO’s rare skin prices edge up, but 6% APY is clearly not appealing for NFT traders. Not to mention the risk of a loss as well.

I wouldn’t, because I’m not a CSGO player. So let’s say if I were a CSGO player, would I buy it? Probably not, because trading platforms in web2 are much more user-friendly than in web3, and the fiat payments and no-mnemonic-phrase accounts that web3 is trying so hard to achieve are already well established in web2. So, there is no benefit to visiting Dapps to buy skins.

Despite receiving less-than-positive feedback, I have decided to bring this thought experiment to fruition. After all, CSGO is a massive intellectual property (IP) that is sure to attract a significant amount of attention.

During the coding process, I came across a significant challenge — CSGO skins do not have a clear total supply. This means that players have been trading an “NFT collection” without knowledge of the total amount, and the CSGO team can issue more skins at any time. While such non-transparent backroom deals may be common in the web2 world, web3 users are more discerning and demand transparency, making the unknown total supply a serious issue.

CSGO skins are acquired randomly by opening containers in the game, and low-end skins can be upgraded to higher-rarity skins. However, which skins players will get is determined by a random number that is centralized and can be changed at any time, without players being aware of the probability distribution.

Under these circumstances, it is difficult to trust that the CSGO team does not manipulate the market to maintain price stability and profit.

But what if all the skins were on-chain, all the random numbers were on-chain, the total supply was transparent and immutable, and the items were freely traded? In such a scenario, centralized manipulation methods would be unavailable. Would the price of CSGO skins still be stable?

Sustainable Tokenomics is the Key to Web3 Games

In retrospect, it is evident that web2 games have already established their playability. With the influx of capital and web2 talent into the industry, any shortcomings in playability can be resolved with ease. However, this approach fails to recognize the fundamental difference between web2 and web3 games: token economy.

Therefore, we should shift our focus towards this difference and prove its feasibility, as it forms the cornerstone of the entire industry. Even if a game has excellent playability, it means nothing until the tokenomics issue is fully resolved.

So far, only two GameFi projects, Axie and STEPN, have gained significant popularity. Their success can be attributed to tokenomics, but their failure was due to the unsustainability of their tokenomics.

Designing tokenomics may seem simple for experienced web2 game economy designers, as it involves numbers. However, the immutability of the rules, transparency of global information, and the free market for assets create a significant difference between web2 game designers and tokenomics designers. This difference has even led to reproductive isolation.

Furthermore, the design of tokenomics must align with the current blockchain infrastructure. While blockchain can create new species that do not exist in the traditional world, such as Flash Loans, it also has limitations that make it unsuitable for implementing some existing businesses due to current performance constraints. For instance, Automated Market Makers (AMM) existed long before blockchain, but its true potential was only realized in 2020 with the advent of Uniswap, as it is better suited to the current blockchain infrastructure than the order book.

Build A Game that Has Only Tokenomics — Real Money Games

In my opinion, many web3 game projects have allocated too much funding towards game development and art design, which may not be the best use of resources at this stage. While skins, art design, and lore can help lower barriers for common users and attract more players, we should prioritize focusing on the core elements of the game, which do not include skin design.

Therefore, we plan to set aside physical skins, art design, lore, etc. and instead focus on developing a series of games that solely prioritize tokenomics. Through real market feedback, we can continuously iterate and explore sustainable tokenomics for web3 games.

Our first game, World Boss, is a sequel to FOMO3D and has a simple game logic with only one FT and no NFT:

I anticipate that some may question our decision to start with a game that has a clear endpoint, especially if our goal is to develop infinite games.

Even though Axie appears to be an infinite game, it is bound to collapse when the bubble grows too large, and there are not enough new players and funds to sustain it. The team may lose motivation to keep building with such a substantial “debt,” and what appears to be an infinite game is actually a finite game.

On the other hand, World Boss may appear to be a finite game with a defined endpoint, but this endpoint is precisely what will burst the system’s bubble and provide everyone with the motivation to restart.

The finite game with infinite rounds is an infinite game.

RMG is the First Step in the Path to Web3 Infinite Games

The future of RMG looks promising with more exciting tokenomics in the pipeline. We plan to introduce a blend of FTs and NFTs that will create magic in our games.

To align with the current blockchain infrastructure, we have set certain prerequisites for every game design:

Fully on-chain

By being fully on-chain, we can prevent any rug pulls and insider manipulations. It ensures complete fairness and stops centralized people and organizations from committing any fraudulent activities.

Anti-bot

While bots are allowed to play our games, they should not have any unfair advantage over ordinary players. Front-running is not welcomed, and we may develop bots to assist players in playing games.

Once we have tested and stabilized these tokenomics, we can add race cars or card skins to make the game more appealing to different user preferences. Each skin game is designed for a specific audience, and it will help bring more users into the web3 world.

This will inevitably lead to a boom in web3 games. World Boss is just the beginning, and we have more exciting games lined up for the future.

This is the mission of RMG. LFG!!!