Jcluster

IS WEB3 GAMING DEAD? Investing in a product-focused web3 game is now a meditation on how much punishment one is willing to endure while waiting for a catalyst to save your portfolio. Building a web3 gaming product is a mediation on how much abuse your team can endure from the community of down bad bag holders while still trying to launch a product that the market is ambivalent, uncaring, and often hostile. Welcome to gaming meets crypto folks. Those who lack the tolerance for pain, avoid it and just stay in the memecoin casino. You are statically almost certainly going to get a full portfolio wipe eventually playing that game, but you'll feel the dopamine thrill while falling into the abyss of bankruptcy. When you invest in gaming, it's just a slow and quite frankly, boring death by a thousand portfolio cuts, especially for those who are in for a quick trade or quick sprint to TGE and then flip. Long term holders learn to understand the real meaning of the word 'long term' and flippers turned bagholders often learn what "joining the community" means. Based on the market performance of gaming tokens and a string of recent GameFi TGEs, the speculative gaming narrative is dying, crushed, and cracked by the pressures exerted by the memecoin craze. As someone who has been all in gaming with bags all over there place, I feel the pain here. But despite all the 'gaming is ded' noise that makes for great clickbait, let me posit a thought in support of gaming. Maybe what's dying is the old narrative and maybe a new, more robust narrative is being fashioned in its place. You see web3 gaming has a problem with some absurd expectations right now. The (legit) web3 gaming teams show up to run a marathon, but the spectators cheering in the stands are expecting the race to be a 100-meter dash that takes just seconds, not a 42-kilometer slog that takes hours. And right now, the entire stadium of active participants powering the entire ecosystem called web3 are (now) conditioned to expect lightning-quick sprints to TGE where each participant must seemingly set an instant world record or be labeled as a failure. Under these brutal expectations, teams building products with long development life cycles face galeforce headwinds. And getting the worst of it are those building web3 games, a sector that has to bear the added burden of years of disappointing failures and scams and several bull-to-bust cycles that have NOT yet resulted in any break-out successes. The life cycle of a legitimate game does not match well with the hyper-short timelines expected in web3, where whitepaper idea to product implementation can occur in days or weeks. Gaming, as it is now, cannot compete. It's a different kind of product entirely with a different set of expectations, made clear by the past 4 years. Right now, stripped of any extra speculative hype, gaming does not stack up favorably to the attention-driven memecoin world where massive profits can flow in, and just as quickly, straight back out of projects quicker than you can flip a coin. Where can gaming eke out a win if you can't bust out massive wins right at the start (the TGE)? With the long game. By building something succeeds and acquires real players (duh), and a lot of them. By enduring the long run to the finish line over many months and possibly years, with dozens of iterations to find what works, optimize, and discard what does not. And that long game is making undisputable breach into web2, winning by attracting player scale AND showing revenue numbers. This long game is a slog. It's difficult, it's expensive, it's years in the making, years of watching hot air rise to the top of market caps while projects of substance sink to the bottom. But here the risk and the great reward is that not one game so far has achieved this. It's a new horizon. We don't know what we will see when we push forward. It's a blank slate. But on it, any story can be yet written. New narratives captured. There is an asymmetry to this bet. And all it takes is one trade, one bet gone right, that can change your life. To back something that everyone discards. That's how millionaires are made. My thesis is this and has always been this: The first game that shows player scale outside of web3 while also demonstrating how the gravity of crypto incentives unleashed on gamers completely oblivious to the web3 side dramatically increase UA & in-game spend behaviors... Is going to crash into the greater gaming market like a bull in a china shop. The sound of disruption is going to change things. The question is, what players are going to make it to the end of the race? Which bulls are the ones that crash into the shop and start smashing things and making noise? So no, web3 gaming is not dead. It's not in vogue. It's not making investors (or teams building) rich, yet. But. The teams that can crack this diamond-hard nut and deliver the first game that crushes the numbers is going to change the game for all games. The risks are high, but the rewards for getting this right are even higher. So yes, I'm going to take this bet.