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• key conclusion

• Most blockchain games have simple gameplay, single game assets, and lack of resources, which lead to problems such as too many speculators in the game and insufficient currency consumption scenarios.

MMO games are more suitable for adding Web3 elements and concepts because of their rich assets and gameplay.

① MMO games are more likely to attract players who can hold high-value NFTs. High-value game NFT assets can be numerically verified in the game, which determines that it is more capable of resisting the risk of market downturn;

• ② MMO games have more advantages in creating rich asset consumption scenarios.

• MMO games also have an NFT value discovery mechanism, which enables players to become owners of assets and condenses into a community with a high degree of consensus.

MMO games should be the best way to go to the Metaverse.

① In terms of content narrative, MMO has more coherent storytelling and extensibility

③ In terms of player roles, MMO game players are more likely to be converted into holders of different assets

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The entire crypto market has lost more than $2 trillion in value in almost a year and a half. The impact of the war and the Fed’s continuous interest rate hikes have led to the continued cold winter of cryptocurrencies. The latest data from DappRadar shows that in May of this year, the number of daily registered unique active wallets (UAW) of Dapps was 2.22 million, which dropped to the lowest point since September last year. Of these 2.22 million UAWs, 1.15 million were connected to blockchain games, more than 50% of the total UAWs. This trend has given blockchain games the expectation of driving the entire blockchain industry to "break the ice".

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Data source: DappRadar

The popularity of blockchain games is not only reflected in user data. Data from DappRadar shows that Venture Capitals has invested more than $2.5 billion in blockchain games in Q1 of 2022, accounting for one-third of all blockchain industry financing. Web3 games and related metaverse projects have also raised $1.4 billion in funding since May.Some Web2 game teams and Web3 practitioners have turned their strategic goals to the Web3 game track and participated in the production of Web3 games in two ways——Add Web3 elements and concepts to already market-proven Web2 games, or develop native Web3 games.

Continuing from the previous topic, this article will take the product as the starting point and combine the existing problems of current Web3 games to analyze another game type that is most suitable for adding the Web3 concept-MMO.

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The current core problems of blockchain games

Most blockchain games have simple gameplay, single game assets, and lack of resources, which lead to problems such as too many speculators in the game and insufficient currency consumption scenarios.

The development of blockchain games began in 2017, and the emergence of CryptoKitties set off the prelude to the development of blockchain games. After five years of development, the blockchain game track has gone through the stages of GameFi 1.0 and GameFi 2.0, and has now entered the third stage represented by Web3 games. Web3 games are frequently mentioned, and many game developers believe that games with Web3 features such as NFT assets and token economic systems can be collectively referred to as Web3 games.Not so. From an economic point of view, Web3 games are characterized by a complex and in-depth token economic system, which distinguishes them from GameFi 1.0 and GameFi 2.0. So far, the Web3 game field still lacks works with advantages in the economic system. MixMarvel DAO Venture believes there are two reasons. first, someThe Web3 team does not have mature game design experience, the existing blockchain-native games are often too simple in gameplay, with a single type of NFT assets in the game, and lack of in-depth usage scenarios in the game. second,Web2 game developers lack experience in building complex and in-depth token economic systems.

They are more susceptible to the influence of the market when designing the token economy, putting the cart before the horse and focusing on how to make tokens increase in value and gain popularity in the short term.

• Axie Infinity, as a masterpiece of the GameFi 2.0 stage, has a life cycle of two years, and it is considered a leader in the chain game track. However, due to the shortcomings of the economic system such as simple gameplay and single NFT assets, the depth of its token economic system is insufficient, and most of the new users it attracts are speculators. At the beginning of 2022, the price of its in-game token $SLP fell by 90%, and it will not be able to return to the summer of 2021 in the short term.

Too many speculative users

The only pursuit of speculative users in the game is the short-term appreciation of the tokens they hold. Once any fluctuations damage their interests, they will immediately sell their assets. If there are too many speculative users in the game, the game will easily suffer instant selling pressure when the currency price fluctuates, which will affect the life cycle of the game.Recently, Bloomberg reporter Joshua Brustein published an article on Axie Infinity：

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A financial system consisting of everyone wishing to put in $1 and take out $2 can only last if others show up and believe that others will come in with more cash. Once Axie started looking less profitable, its ability to attract new players declined, which made it even less profitable and started a vicious cycle.

"The problem with Axie is that it's always been a speculative vehicle...the developers want it back in the game, and most players didn't see it as a game in the first place. When the revenue stops, the game stops."

• Another example of attracting speculative users is StepN. StepN has only one Play to Earn method, that is, players can get $GST rewards by running outdoors. StepN hopes to upgrade the gameplay, such as enhancing player stickiness through the gem upgrade mechanism, but the fundamental purpose of these methods is to enhance the income of players with interest-bearing assets. StepN has also officially released the formula for calculating the cost of return, which has attracted a large number of new speculative users. All their actions revolve around the cycle of calculating the cost of return, rather than generating more content for the game.

Insufficient currency consumption scenarios

Although we do not advocate analyzing any Web3 game with a completely economical perspective, the game economic system does need to follow strict output-consumption economic logic. In economics, consumption is driven by human demand and the types and quantities of goods. Mapped in Web3 games, the consumption of currency is related to the needs of game users and the type and quantity of game NFT. Multi-level user needs and rich NFT types and quantities are the prerequisites for establishing sufficient currency consumption scenarios.

To solve the above-mentioned problems at the root, MixMarvel DAO Venture believes that it is necessary to select games from the perspective of products, and eliminate the problem of single gameplay and assets from the source. MMO games are some of the best options we've screened for that address these issues.

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MMO games are more suitable for adding Web3 elements and concepts because of their rich assets and gameplay

If we classify traditional games from the perspective of products, MMO, MOBA, and IO games are three representative game categories.Therefore, compared to MOBA and IO, MMO games are most suitable for adding Web3 elements and concepts.

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MMO games are easier to attract players who can buy high-value NFTs, effectively counteracting the risk of market downturn

From the perspective of players, MMO games are more likely to attract senior players who pursue a sense of honor and recognition due to their rich NFT assets, and arouse their spiritual resonance. These players are not sensitive to the income of the game, and will not rush to sell assets to reduce losses when the market goes down.

1. According to the level of demand in the game, we roughly divide MMO game players into three categories:

2. Low-level players who pursue short-term gains, that is, the speculative users mentioned above. They usually participate in the game in a simple way of digging, raising and selling;

3. Intermediate players who care more about the fun of the game usually pay to buy props to get an immersive gaming experience, and their willingness to earn benefits in the game is not as urgent and strong as that of low-level players;

Advanced players who do not pursue ROI, they care more about the sense of honor and recognition in the game, and usually collect advanced assets in the game. These assets may not be dominant in quantity, but their value often accounts for the vast majority of the total value of game assets. Similar to the value contribution of big R users in traditional games to the game, they can usually generate 80% or even more than 90% of the revenue of the game.

For the MMO game itself, the high-value NFT assets in the game are more resistant to the risks brought by the market downturn than the general NFT in the industry.

Compared with other NFTs with fewer application scenarios in the industry, high-value game NFT assets can be numerically verified in the game, which determines that it is more capable of resisting the risk of market downturn.

But the difference is that the assets in the game can be verified numerically. This kind of verification is reflected in the fact that its rarity or the value of the equipment itself can bring higher combat power bonuses to players, making players more lethal in game battles, completing game tasks faster and obtaining achievements. The aforementioned "Black Qiraji Combat Tank" mount, in addition to the social show-off attribute, can also increase the player's speed by 100%, even if the market goes down, it will not affect its role in the game. Generally, NFT in industries like BAYC does not have this function. Due to the lack of application scenarios, after entering the bear market, the floor price of BAYC fell again and again, and fell to 67ETH on August 22, and other NFTs in the BAYC ecosystem also encountered this dilemma. Recently, Yuga Labs, the publisher of BAYC, launched the metaverse game Otherside, trying to raise its price by finding application scenarios for BAYC.

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• MMO games have more advantages in creating rich asset consumption scenarios

MMO games have rich gameplay and types of game resources, and can provide diversified asset trading scenarios.

Users with different roles have different requirements for game resources/assets. Players who pursue competition need weapons, equipment and other props to fight monsters and upgrade; investors who pursue income will buy mining machines for mining; players who pursue social interaction may need to use advanced assets to create social scenes.

1. MMO games can provide players with a complete "output-consumption" process, which can meet the diverse needs of players. The original output of the game, player transactions, and re-output of players using basic resources can all be regarded as the way for players to obtain assets in the game; and each output link is accompanied by rich asset consumption scenarios to satisfy different players. multi-level needs.

2. The consumption of basic production materials meets the primary survival needs of players. For example, the tourmaline in "Original God" is a basic production material, which can be used to synthesize thunder essential oil, insulating medicine, etc.

3. The process of synthesizing production materials and game tokens and reproducing FT and NFT assets enables players to obtain game assets that can be used for cash, meeting the needs of players who want to pursue return on investment. For reference, players above level 40 in "MIR4" can obtain $DRACO that can be directly converted into USDT by mining black iron ore.

4. And by consuming these FT and NFT assets to increase the level in the game or obtain combat power bonuses, it meets the needs of players who want to obtain an immersive game experience. In the aforementioned "Original God", the use of thunder essential oil can increase the thunder element damage of all characters by 25% and last for 300 seconds; players can also consume black iron ore dug in "MIR4" to manufacture and strengthen equipment , exchange for other materials, etc., so as to obtain more black iron ore with higher efficiency.

Of course, by consuming game governance tokens and low- and mid-level NFT assets to obtain rare NFT assets in the game, whether it is to show off as assets or to upgrade to a higher game level, players can satisfy their spiritual sense of honor and recognition, and can even pass In this way, social skills are strengthened. In "MIR4", characters with a level of more than 60 and a combat power of 100,000 can cast the character itself as an NFT character. All character growth records will be recorded in the NFT, and the NFT can also be used for trading.

• In addition to the scenes related to gameplay and economic strength mentioned above, from another dimension, MMO games are full of countless scenes. In addition to the game experience brought by the gameplay, there are also leisure, entertainment, and social interactions. , business, finance and other diverse scenarios with the same nature as the real world.

MMO games have unique social attributes, provide players with a variety of surreal scenes, and enhance users' stickiness to the game.

Because players have virtual identities in the game, it can break the social barriers built up in real life due to different occupations, identities, and statuses, and can even activate players' social needs. The social scene in the virtual world of the game also transcends the limitations of cognition, belief, region, race and other factors in the real world, allowing players to experience social life in the game that is impossible in real life. Players' social needs are constantly being met, and the game's user stickiness is also increasing. As described in the movie "Ready Player One", in order to escape the chaotic reality, people spend most of their time in the virtual reality game world "Oasis" (OASIS), where they work, play and find easter eggs.

MMO games also have an NFT value discovery mechanism, enabling players to establish an emotional connection with the game

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FT Value Discovery Formula

MixMarvel DAO Venture believes that NFT should have triple value, and has a value discovery formula that can be widely applied:

Basic value: the time cost + capital cost for players to acquire the asset (this capital cost is usually determined by its market performance in Web2)

Worldview Premium: How recognized and popular an asset is in the market

How MMO games reflect the value of NFT assets

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In Web2 MMO games, game officials will continue to create new asset consumption scenarios in the game in a centralized manner. Then, market-oriented and high-value-added assets are screened out through players' continuous capital investment and asset consumption, and they are often cast as the basic NFT assets in Web3 games.

We substituted the NFT value discovery formula into MMO games, and extracted the value source of NFT assets in Web3 games transformed from MMO games:

The first is the source of fundamental value. When new characters and new weapons appear in the game, players need to evaluate the cost and attributes of weapons through learning data curves, and try to study game strategies through different combinations of characters and weapons. This is the time cost of players and is an NFT asset. One of the sources of basic value; the second source is that if these materials and weapons have a wide demand market in Web2 and are the objects that players are scrambling to chase, they will become very rare and expensive, and they will often become the first choice to enter Web3. core assets. These assets usually have strong financial attributes and functionality, and need to be priced by the market, rather than game developers arbitrarily specifying their costs and prices.

Second is functional value. In the second source of basic value, assets that have passed the market test are usually used by multiple players in different game scenarios and traded several times, and these usage and transaction records are stored in the metadata of NFT. The more times it is used and traded, the higher the functional value of the asset.

Therefore, compared to BAYC and other NFTs that currently reflect more premium attributes of the world view, NFT assets from MMO games have a more valuable discovery mechanism. This is beneficial to making the NFT value assessment in Web3 games more scientific, avoiding the danger of inflated asset prices and hype, resisting price declines caused by market downturns, and more conducive to the sustainable operation of the entire in-game production chain .

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MO games enable players to become owners of assets and form a community with a high degree of consensus

In addition to thinking about production value, MixMarvel DAO Venture believes that NFT assets are also an important manifestation of player emotions.

Whether the player is for the fun of the game or for the purpose of making money, the NFT assets in the game are the real needs of the players. They all carry the time spent, energy invested, and emotion injected by the player. In the end, these NFTs become assets that players themselves truly own. This whole process of investing costs and obtaining results is pleasant, and players have injected their own emotional connections into it.

Therefore, compared with users buying various altcoins in the market for speculative purposes, or buying NFT avatars with only hype value with the fomo sentiment, these assets from games have more community consensus , It is also more able to form an emotional connection with players.

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MMO games should be the best path to the Metaverse

MMO has more storytelling in content, more inheritance in game iteration, and more flexibility in game characters. Therefore, we believe that MMO can form the best fit with Metaverse, and it is also the best way to go to Metaverse.

Throughout the development history of MMO games, it can be roughly divided into three generations:

The first generation of MMO games was represented by "Ultimate Online" and "Lineage", with a high degree of freedom in the game, players felt the fun and surreal feeling brought by online games for the first time, and its mode also established a standard for subsequent iterations;

The second-generation MMO games are represented by "World of Warcraft" and "The Tower of Eternity". Compared with the first-generation MMOs, they tend to be more game-like in terms of gameplay and vision, and the game rules and functions are also more complete;

The third generation of MMO games began to come up with innovative ideas. In the first two generations of MMOs, players passively accepted game content and rules, while the third generation of MMOs allowed players to create game content and gameplay by themselves, giving players more autonomy and decision-making power. This generation of MMO games is represented by South Korea's "Arche Age".

• The iteration of MMO games has told us that its model has gradually approached the Metaverse and Web3 games proposed now.

In terms of content narrative, MMO is more coherent and extensible

• MMO games usually design gameplay and rules with a coherent story line to create a complete virtual society, such as creating combat scenes and life scenes for players to attract players to achieve surreal achievements in the game. So far, MMO games have extended more content on the basis of gameplay, such as expanding more business scenarios and other non-game content, to meet the diverse needs of different players. For example, the newly added concert scene in the "Fortnite" game is a good practice for content extension. This extension is also in line with the spirit of infinite extension of content in Web3 games.

In terms of game iteration, MMO is more inheritance

• The first generation of MMO games has established the standard and framework for the entire MMO genre, and its business model is constantly iterating on this basis. Therefore, different games usually use the technical products of the same batch of suppliers, or use the same set of open source codes for product development, which is called the reuse of technical products. Compared with rebuilding the technical framework and rewriting the code, this method is less costly, and has been verified by multiple games, and has a higher probability of obtaining large-scale benefits.

MMO game players form different levels of needs through different game experiences, so they are more easily converted into holders of different assets

In the process of game assets flowing from Web2 to Web3, the division of labor and roles in MMO games are more likely to change. It is more obvious that the role of Game Owner will gradually be replaced by Guilds. In Web3, Guilds also represent the official identity to a certain extent.

In Web3, there is a role called Retailer Investors, which has a similar function to Whale Players in Web2, both of which provide financial resources for the game. The difference is that Whale Players is more about delivering benefits to the in-game ecology or Game Owner; while Retailer Investors is more about providing liquidity for the game in the secondary market outside the game, and providing greater help for the outer loop of the game.

1. There are also very obvious stages in the transformation of game players in Web3 MMO games.

2. Beginner players who have just entered the game will hold more assets such as FT (in-game tokens or points), and the proportion of NFT assets held is very small.

3. As the level in the game continues to increase and more and more PVE gameplays are experienced, players will use the FT in their hands to purchase more NFT assets. As a result, the gap between FT and NFT holding ratios will gradually narrow, players will advance to intermediate players, and their total assets will also continue to increase.

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In terms of game design, Web3 games at this stage still have the problems of insufficient gameplay and single types of assets in the game. These two factors lead to the lack of use scenarios for in-game assets, which also makes it difficult to create multi-level demands for Web3 games. When there are too many speculators in the game and insufficient currency consumption scenarios, the Web3 game itself cannot establish a good supply and demand relationship to counter the market downturn. Therefore, we believe that in addition to increasing the coefficient of friction in the game to prevent the loss of assets in the game, Web3 games need to solve the problems of lack of assets and single gameplay from the root of the game.

In the conclusion of the previous report, we took the market as the starting point and mentioned that the game content for Midcore Gamers is more suitable to join the Web3 concept. In this report, we take the product as the starting point and believe that MMO games are also suitable for adding Web3 elements and concepts. Because MMO games naturally have complex strategies, deep content, and rich asset types, they have considerable advantages in creating multi-level requirements.

MixMarvel DAO Venture has already prepared the basic layout for Web3 games in terms of investment. At the same time, we are also constantly launching a series of knowledge systems in order to continuously enhance the confidence of users in the downturn market environment.

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About MixMarvel DAO Venture