nith619.eth

Some thoughts on @crittersquest and the future of crypto gaming: I've been a crypto gaming bull since I first got into NFTs back in early 2021. My first exposure to the space was Zed Run (great times). To me, crypto gaming just makes so much sense as a use case. Why? The mobile gaming market does $100bn worth of in game sales per year. And all of that revenue is one-way (user to app). Web3 gaming fixes a number of issues with the current mobile gaming market: It's a gigantic market but lacks ownership, provenance and any real ability to monetize your skills or cosmetic items you've paid to acquire. Enter web3 gaming, where you can potentially earn in game, sell all of your items and playable characters, and have real on-chain provenance. So why hasn't it taken off yet? Web3 gaming did have a brief run up in 2021. It was a violent explosion of capital into the space and every "game" and "gaming token" did massive numbers. There were big inherent issues though: Most games tended to have tokenomics that were just giga inflationary and a race to zero once the music stopped. Even beyond the tokenomics, the games themselves were just aiming at the wrong market. Many web3 games have attempted to style themselves as AAA games. Look at Otherside, Illuvium etc. Yes they've raised giant sums of money by web3 standards, but their raises are a drop in the bucket vs what the mega gaming companies like Blizzard, Ubisoft etc. can deploy. Additionally, the potential player base in web3 at the moment does not at all line up with the user-base of AAA games. While these large scale AAA web3 attempts were noble, they were destined for failure. The AAA dream may happen eventually, but it won't happen before there's a large base of web3 gamers. So how does web3 gaming finally take off? To me the answer is fairly obvious: You need games tailored to web3 native players. And what is web3 all about? PVP and risk. The biggest issue web3 gaming has faced to date is inflation: Every game, even those that did style themselves risk-based, ultimately wound up as PVE games whose token dropped 99% the minute new capital stopped entering the ecosystem. The only game I've seen effectively deploy a real risk protocol was early Wolf Game. And the results speak for themselves: Everything mooned, and the best players crushed. Unfortunately WG made some of the same mistakes as its predecessors and eventually inflation swallowed it's economy (though I'm moderately hopeful for it to bounce back this year). I believe this paradigm is on the cusp of permanently changing. In particular @crittersquest and @enparadice seem poised to deploy a risk protocol that fixes most of the past mistakes of web3 gaming. The game features are beyond unique: -Tokens are bound to the playable assets. -While the supply is high on the tokens, the only actual way to get them off the Main Edition Critters and into tradeable form is to risk them in combat. -Main Edition critters effectively act as the liquidity providers of the entire economy. They can mint up to 15 editions at any time and attach their tokens directly to those editions. They also receive 50% royalties on all secondary sales of their minted editions. -Even cooler perhaps is that editions may die in combat, allowing Main Editions to re-mint their editions and re-equip them with tokens. It's a lot to follow, but there's actually large incentives for Main Edition holders to buy liquid $QUEST, mint editions, and attach the tokens to them. The beautiful thing is every time an ME buys $QUEST and attaches it to an edition, a portion of the liquid supply is locked back up; keeping balance in the total supply of $QUEST. In my opinion this setup makes for a perfect circular economy with PVP at the center of it. In addition to these novel mechanics, the game is inherently crypto native: Staking-based, low time commitment, game theory-intensive. It's the ideal profile for a game that wishes to attract crypto native players. I am hopeful that one day AAA will be a thing in web3. But first we need a player base. And i believe Critter's Quest is well positioned to kick-off the next real web3 gaming meta.