Cryptogaming: A Brief Adventure

I had the Ethereum. I had Bitcoins and Doge Coin and even Bounce for awhile, but I had the Ethereum to play a few cryptogames. This is what I found.

It’s my feeling the largest barrier to cryptogaming is having to shell out a substantial amount of money before you even know if you like the game. The games I’ve seen are fairly simple and not really innovative, aside from using the blockchain in some way.

They all have the same general flow. The game initially distributes a bunch of unique digital assets to early adopters for a token fee. The players then use these digital assets as either growth assets, that they keep, or use them in some way to mint further digital assets that they can sell to new players. The game has some popularity as new players attempt to purchase assets that they believe will increase in value, and then the game plateaus, and there are not enough new players coming in to increase the value of the digital assets the other players hold. If they cannot be sold, then the asset has no value.

So these games, whether they are about breeding kitties or dragons or conquering territory or what have you, are actually about timing the market. Get in, ride the wave, and get back out while new players are still assigning value to the digital assets that you are holding.

I was watching on Coinbase, my exchange of choice for now, when the Shiba Inu coin-craze hit. I myself own 124,000 SHIBA — that’s worth about $9. There is no reason for this coin to exist; it was a pump-and-dump scam where very few would see any return. But it was the exact same experience as playing Cryptokitties or Dragonereum when they were new.

You can buy the Cryptokitty at the left there for about $21, not including the gas fees. The amount of extra money you need to spend to ensure your $21 purchase goes through can be as little as $0.25, or as much as $7,000, depending on how busy the blockchain is, and how soon you want the transaction to be recorded.

Once purchased, you can then purchase a second Cryptokitty, so that you can breed them. You’re trying to breed cats that will look interesting enough so that someone else will buy them. This particular kitty is four years old and isn’t particularly special.

There are browser games that let you buy, sell and breed kitties for no money down, as there are for dragon games (I’m playing Flight Rising right now, come visit my lair!) But, they don’t offer the lure of fantastic, unearned wealth.

This kitty hasn’t sold in four years. The dragons at the top of the post haven’t sold in the couple of weeks I have been watching them on the Dragonereum front page. I’m never making money off the SHIBA I own, unless a million more dumb bastards decide to pour money into it. Then I can sell it and take their money and be a winner. All it has to do is hit $1… shit, I better put a hundred more dollars in, because then I would have, like, OVER A MILLION DOLLARS.

What I would like to see in Cryptogaming

So, how could this really work?

• Free to Play — players should be given free of whatever digital asset there is (cats, dogs, dragons, townships — whatever). These can be poor quality, but enough to play the game and actually build some desire. Not having free-to-play means these games are just cash grabs.
• Transferrable — all digital assets can be transferred through whatever mechanism two players like, and they should not be required to go through the game to do it.
• Not tied to the game — the digital assets should have some use even if the game shuts down. Even if it’s just a picture and a history of changes and transactions to that asset. It should be something the player can own forever and see on the blockchain. So, basically a NFT.

EverQuest used to have a big side business in buying and selling accounts. You could go to eBay and take your pick — max level shadowknight with epic? Sure! Raid-geared cleric? Here you go. Anyone could make a character for no more than the subscription fee. If you have a raid guild, you could get the new character geared up and ready for sale in a few days. This was a real business for a lot of guilds, and business was booming. SOE even helped it along by making a new special rules server that allowed free transfer into and out of the server for characters, along with all their items. It was a fantastically stupid idea for Sony, but a fantastically great happening for the secondary market.

Even our own very much non-uber-guild had some characters that had been bought like this as members.

Now, let’s say EQ becomes a blockchain game. People could play the normal way, or buy characters whose value would fall and rise with demand on the blockchain. They could do the epic quest, or pay for one — that cleric epic would be pretty valuable. The uberguilds left EQ when they stopped being able to make real life money from the game, and they went to WoW and started their whole operation up again from scratch. (This is something I have personal experience with). I’ve read many articles about how Old School Runescape is using this gray market to keep their game busy.

The reason the top MMOs are the top MMOs is because people believe the digital assets in those games have value. Make it official — put it in the blockchain — and you have a game that lets people play for free, buy better stuff if they want to go that route, and the company running the game gets a piece of the action. Everyone is happy.

Except the players, right? Nobody likes playing in a game with farmers farming stuff for sale? And this would legitimize it? Seriously? It’s endemic in all the MMOs I have ever played. Every single one.

I saw someone write on Twitter that they would never play a non-crypto game again. Sure. Why play a game where you weren’t making money? Just seems like a waste of time, doesn’t it.

When you’re done playing a game, you sell your character, cash out the gear, move on to the next. Just make sure you get out before you lose your stake. (Axie Infinity requires you to buy THREE of their little Axies to start playing! I guess that’s why they’re valued at $3,000,000,000.)

The new generation of gaming. You no longer play a game, you add value to your non-fungible digital assets.

So, what was your brief adventure in Cryptogaming?

Oh, that. My brief adventure was tracking the price of the dragons in Dragonereum and the kitties in Cryptokitties and not seeing how those digital assets would increase sufficiently in value to be worth my time. I’m not playing any of those games without a clearly profitable exit strategy. How much is that $600,000 Entropia Universe space station worth now? I don’t want a game where I’m left holding a worthless Cryptokitty or Dragonereum.