GameFi = Pass the Parcel?

The impossible triangle of blockchain is already a cliche for players who are always mixed in the crypto world. In fact, the impossible triangle does not only exist in the macro blockchain technology field, but also in many subdivision tracks, such as GameFi.

Essentially, GameFi-type projects can be considered as technology aggregation applications, which integrate many elements such as DeFi, NFT, GAME, Social, and aesthetics together in one application. The project owner often designs the economic model to NFT the in-game assets to drive the application ecology.

In terms of logic, this economic model is actually a kind of pledge mining activity with NFT as its principal. This activity can inject financial attributes into the game and enable the ecological economy to operate through the use of liquidity provisioning mechanisms, and thus its sustainability has gradually become one of the key judgments on GameFi.

In addition, since it is called GameFi means that the gameplay of the application will also become one of the most intuitive evaluation criteria. Add to that the general decentralization of the root. In this way, continuity, gameplay and decentralization form the impossible triangle of GameFi.

From this dimension of the impossible triangle, the biggest problem GameFi is facing now is on paper, namely, it is not fun.

We have to admit that there is a huge difference between the user profile of DeFi and that of traditional games. Most (if not all) GameFi projects today have been divorced from the essence of gaming, in other words, they are not designed to attract gamers. Instead, the NFT liquidity mining model attracts more investors and speculators whose main goal is to make a profit. This means that GameFi attracts users whose focus tends to be on how to make money rather than the emotional satisfaction that traditional games bring, so in this case, the lack of gameplay seems inevitable.

The consequence of the lack of gameplay is not simply that it is not fun.

As we have said above, the fundamental logic of GameFi is still Fi, i.e. finance. It corresponds to the very continuity of the impossible triangle of GameFi, and the fundamental element of whether a financial asset can continue to run or not is liquidity.

For GameFi, the lack of gameplay largely means that its financial attributes will be infinitely magnified, so once a game begins to be unprofitable, people will scramble to exit. GameFi does not have the same user stickiness as traditional games, in GameFi players can almost completely own in-game assets by way of NFT and homogenized tokens, which means that on the basis of no emotional add-on, players' sunk costs will be infinitely smaller and quitting a game will no longer be a difficult decision. The player's exit mechanism is actually a pending order to sell NFT and other assets.

Therefore, once a game no longer has a profitable space, old players will choose to flee wrapped in liquidity, new players will also be reduced, and according to the market supply and demand, the demand for NFT will also be reduced. Thereafter, there will undoubtedly be too much output within the game, and this will eventually lead to a decline in liquidity and a fall in prices. After a series of vicious cycles, the biggest nightmare facing GameFi and DeFi today - the death spiral - will be formed.

With financial attributes dominating today, the death spiral has even become cyclical, meaning that GameFi has almost become a "race to the bottom" - only those who enter early and run fast will survive.

At this point, we can't help but wonder: is this situation really insurmountable? Obviously, of course not, the problem of continuity and decentralization with the iteration of technology will certainly be solved sooner or later. But the problem of gameplay is not just a technical issue, it involves human nature and trade-offs, and to a large extent, it requires a reversal of the thinking of the project side and the whole crypto market. At the same time, the pattern of project owners needs to be further improved, and they need to be more cautious in adding financial elements to the game, so that the scales of GameFi will gradually return to gameplay.

In other words, the emphasis in Play To Earn should be on Play, not Earn, and what a game project brings to people should not only tend to be rational economic value, but also irrational emotional value, which may even be more important.

Some GameFi studios have already started to realize this problem, and they have started to look at a GameFi project more from a game perspective. Today we are going to introduce KARMAVERSE, a blockchain-based metaspace game platform, which is dedicated to bringing games back to their original values in order to break the spell of the death spiral.

KARMAVERSE Basic Introduction

KARMAVERSE is a blockchain-based metaspace game platform that contains multiple game universes produced by Karma Games, each of which has its own unique art style, historical background, narrative, character design, music and maps. In addition, one of KARMAVERSE's major strengths lies in its diverse and experienced team.

KARMAVERS' team is headquartered in Hong Kong and has team members all over the world, including Southeast Asia, UAE, Europe and China. Its game development team has extensive experience in traditional handheld game development, and its products include two of the top 10 best-selling SLGs in handheld game history, "Kings of Avalon" and "Guns of Glory", which have generated $2 billion in revenue and a proud 5 million monthly active users.

At the same time, KARMAVERS has built tools that enable players to build their own worlds within the metaverse space, meaning that anyone can add their own creations and stories to KARMAVERSE, and the world of KARMAVERSE will be made more exciting by the constant influx of creativity.

Founding Keynote and Vision

The KARMAVERS team mentioned in the interview that they hope to bring well-made games that are comparable to the current level of handheld games to the blockchain in order to meet the needs of both traditional gamers and blockchain players.

Therefore, at the beginning of KARMAVERS' creation, its team invited senior Crypto Native engineers to design the economic model and project ecology while controlling the game quality. Meanwhile, the operation side is also collaborated by the project experienced team.

In addition, the KARMAVERS team also expressed the hope to create KARMAVERS as a decentralized Steam platform. This will allow players to truly enjoy the game, and while they spend time playing the game, the dynamic economic system in the game will also bring revenue to the players.

Regarding the vision of the project, the KARMAVERS team expressed the hope that with KARMAVERS GameFi and mobile gaming can mutually enhance each other, bringing new experiences and integrating into our lifestyles.

KARMAVERSE product introduction

KARMAVERS' game development team and marketing team have rich project experience, so they understand the importance of user experience, so they always insist on optimizing the overall product from the user's point of view. After the official launch, KARMAVERS has also continued to make small iterations, as well as new features and product launches.

Next, we will give a brief introduction to its core products:

1、NFT Marketplace

As we all know, NFT is one of the most important components and assets of the crypto game, and the reason why KARMAVERS developed its own Marketplace is to facilitate users to trade at any time. Besides, users can also judge the actual situation of the market through the transaction data of this vertical market.

2、In-game DEX/Wallet

This tool lowers the entry barrier for users to a certain extent, and solves the problem of access for game users to play and earn. With the help of this tool, users can store and withdraw tokens at any time in the game without having to transfer to the website, which greatly optimizes the user experience, convenience and security of transactions (simplifies the process).

3、Staking

Staking is an important feature that will go live in late 2022, and includes 3 LP pools and 2 single coin pools in its design. According to the KARMAVERS team, a series of large-scale campaign activities will be organized around the Staking function, including pledge ranking tournaments and lotteries. In addition, the Gem gems produced from pledging will also play an important role in the series of events it will launch afterwards (equivalent to admission tickets to various events).

Dynamic Balance Adjustment System (DBAS)

As a crypto game, KARMAVERS is characterized by its player-friendliness, and has designed game mechanics that largely solve the pain points of traditional GameFi, such as the inflationary economic model and the lack of token in the in-game consumption scenario. These problems can seriously affect the user experience and reduce the actual revenue of players. Therefore, only when these problems are solved can players fly freely in the game universe.

For this reason, KARMAVERS team developed DBAS (Dynamic Balance Adjustment System) to solve the imbalance between token production and consumption in KARMAVERS.

The core of DBAS is that when consumption drops, the system will provide rewards to encourage users to spend tokens, thus increasing their investment in the game. In the process, players get discounts and offers, and the entire game economy becomes more stable and durable. In an abstract sense, DBAS operates like the Gas fee of ETH. When the number of transactions in the whole chain decreases, the Gas fee also decreases, thus reducing the transaction cost for users and encouraging them to make transactions. Therefore, there is a real-time updated (every minute) balance board in KARMAVERS' design that shows the number of tokens needed to upgrade NFT in the next minute, which is calculated by a unique algorithm designed by KARMAVERS.

Of course, DBAS does more than just reduce transaction fees; it also increases the amount earned after a transaction if necessary, so when a player does something that consumes tokens, he gets an extra bonus. For example, if a player consumes tokens and upgrades their NFT holdings, the maximum amount of tokens they can earn that day increases.

In KARMAVERS, all assets are created by players, and each player is both a seller and a buyer, so a dynamically adjusted economy is key to making the game work better. the KARMAVERS team believes these economic balancing mechanisms will allow KARMAVERS to avoid many problems and push the economic model in the right direction. It will also listen to the community's input and continue to iterate.

Representative Games--Karmaverse Zombie

The vision of KARMAVERS is to create a game world that combines "fun" and "play for money". Therefore, it has crafted an interesting strategy game - Karmaverse Zombie, the first game in the Karmaverse metaverse world.

Karmaverse Zombie is a blockchain-based mega SLG triple-play RPG NFT social game with a backstory about a group of survivors fighting zombies and building shelters. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world full of zombies and mutants. Players will gather survivors, fight zombies, build shelters and forge a new future for humanity.

Each player will manage a shelter, and each warrior they control is represented by a unique NFT that players can sell, trade and use in-game. By assembling a strong team of fighters, players will be able to create clubs across the land to defend against zombie hordes and to cooperate or compete with other players.

The NFTs commonly used in Zombie at this stage are props, heroes and zombies. Hero NFTs are divided into 5 stars, the higher the star the more rare they are. Hero NFT can be obtained by purchasing, participating in tournaments, market activities, etc. In addition, players can also capture zombies in the game and purify them to get heroes.

Players need to get 3 NFT heroes to start play and earn mode, but when entering the game, players can get free heroes to experience. The heroes and zombies in the game have their own attributes, such as skills, stars, talents, levels, speed, etc. In addition to this since, there are also multi-layered combat and strategy modes within the game, which has a very rich playability.

Karmaverse Zombie's main game modes include battle and shelter building. The battle mode is essentially a triple-play RPG, and the larger SLG that follows will share the same world setting as Zombie. Through combat, players can upgrade their shelters by collecting materials and rewards.

Token Economy

Knot is the main utility token with core value in the Karmaverse. token economics in the Karmaverse is designed around three aspects: output, holding and consumption. It is designed with a dual token system of governing token Knot and sub-tokens.

In the game, Knot must be consumed for key scenarios such as healing zombies and hero advancement, and players can only acquire Knot through special events, PVP, or by purchasing it from the secondary market.

Serum is a sub-token of the Zombie game and is produced daily in the game when certain levels are reached. In the battle, PVE and PVP output part is Serum, Serum in the game has many roles, including upgrading heroes, buying equipment and so on.

1、Token distribution

Knot is the main utility token of Karmaverse, with core value, the total amount of which is 210,000,000 pieces. The specific allocation ratio is as follows:

Except for early investors, the terms of other allocations may be adjusted based on the growth of the community and the development of the game. Even if these allocations are unlocked, these tokens will not be issued until the game enters its expected growth phase.

2. Token Use Cases

1) Knot has a key role in each game world, for example by consuming Knot to mint a new NFT.

2) Knot will be the settlement currency of Karma Marketplace.

3) Knot will be used to start a new game world (user created world).

4) Knot will be used for administration and voting.

5) Knot will be used for liquidity mining.

6) Knot will be integrated into the game's P2E mechanics.

In the future Karmaverse roadmap, Knot will be implicitly included in the Defi system. For example, users can borrow money with Knot.

Project advancement and planning

According to the project, as of now, the Karmaverse team has reached market-side cooperation with 40+ top projects in the industry.

Meanwhile, it has held two large campaign events in 2022, respectively on Halloween and Christmas, both of which have increased Twitter followers by more than 1W, 232,000 exposures and 20,000+ interactions.

In addition, Karmaverse organizes weekly conversations and live streams through Twitter, Coin Live or Discord, and invites different project parties to share on the topic. Its Twitter Space peaks at 800+ people online, and the average viewership of a single session of Coin Live is around 3,000-4,000.

According to the project side, Zombie will launch SLG function this year. In order to ensure the game experience, the development team upgraded the previously planned 2D mode to 3D as a whole, and is ready to expand the world map, so SLG will be online in the second half of this year's Alpha test. In addition, it also plans to gradually put some casual mini-games online to the Karmaverse game ecology.

Back to the basics may be the ultimate solution for GameFi

In the Karmaverse team's understanding, the value and purpose of NFTs should be clarified first and foremost. They believe that many current GameFi projects still lack a clear vision and understanding of NFTs. And as a result, they fail to properly integrate NFTs into their games in a way that creates value for players or digs deeper into the potential of NFTs.

To this end, Karmaverse has been designed to excel in the following areas:

1. Rich gameplay

In the view of the Karmaverse team, many current blockchain-based games are nothing more than NFT mining simulators with some packaging and finishing touches. Rather than creating games with gameplay and interactivity, they are trying to gamify mining.

Karmaverse, on the other hand, has made exciting combat and building and running a base camp the two core game modes of the game. And in a proven gameplay cycle that has attracted mobile gamers for years, each mode generates resources for the other, showing how GameFi and mobile gaming can mutually enhance each other and bring new life to the game.

2. Sustainable in-game economy

The Karmaverse team has designed a sustainable economy that works in concert with the above game modes to avoid a runaway economy that creates short-term benefits but raises barriers for new players in the future. This would prevent players from being tied to the economy and allow late joiners to be able to participate and see financial rewards, rather than only rewarding early adopters.

Also, the Karmaverse team notes that Karmaverse's economic model is based on years of experience with mobile SLG games and crypto asset trading. As such, its sustainability does not come at the cost of increased risk, as the existing tools and systems are well tested and understood.

Funding Status

Karmaverse closed around $8 million in seed and private placement rounds behind a team of investors that includes top global investment houses such as A&T Capital, YGG SEA, Polygon Studio, oresight, OKEX and others.

According to its team, there are now plans to raise more money this year as new projects are launched. However, the specific information is not easy to disclose yet.

Conclusion

We have already made a brief introduction to Karmaverse, whose biggest feature is not in the game format or economic model, but in the restraint of financial attributes.

In the Karmaverse game, the officials hope to reinvent user stickiness with the fun of the game itself. But whether this model can always be implemented is still unknown, and the next GameFi also needs to continue to refine towards the direction of gameplay before it can further land in the wider Web2 world and open up new horizons.