Additionally, games have different player requirements for the game to be “fun”. While it’s easy to play Solitaire with 1,2, 3, or more people playing together (with friends commenting and strategizing together), it’s impossible to play Bridge with fewer than 4.

Go one layer deeper and the introduction of features like matchmaking and competitive multiplayer require the games to have an even higher number of players. A game like chess, in theory, could be played in a world where there are only two players, but in practice, without a large community of players to support the various ELOs**, you’d find the same better, higher-rated player beating down on the worse players over and over again***.

There’s a bare minimum number of players necessary to support matchmaking and competitive environments. Just like in token trading and related financial markets that focus on liquidity to accurately evaluate and guarantee transactions, there’s a minimum player count necessary to play these multiplayer games!

We like to call this concept “player liquidity”.

The player liquidity requirements change from game type to game type. But when designing game loops for the blockchain P2E/web 3 ecosystem^, it’s the most important piece to understand.

For example, “vibe” games^^ built on the Roblox platform work by bringing thousands of active players into specific experiences at the same time. This game style is built exclusively for a platform that boasts ~50M DAU. These “vibe” games that live on Roblox do not necessarily translate well to platforms that have a fraction of the number of players.

So what’s the solution for blockchain gaming? We’ve been talking a lot about the chasm and understanding the importance of knowing where on the curve we currently are.

Written over 30 years ago, Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” discusses the market stages that new products undergo in order to hit the mainstream. As a mental model of technology adoption, it’s proven to be pretty damn good over three technology cycles^^^.

The Curve:

If we’re in the innovator/early adopter phase of the game loop, the player liquidity is low and the targeted demographic ought to be targeted towards avid superfans/early blockchain maximalists.

If we’re in the majority phases, the player liquidity is starting to/has already ramped up – thus the lessons learned from massively multiplayer game ecosystems (systems that rely on matchmaking or multiplayer generative mechanics) start to make sense.

As player liquidity changes on the platforms, the game genres that excel the most will change, and thus the top games change along with them.

The top mobile games of 2011 were all single-player experiences (Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, Infinity Blade II, Tiny Wings) vs. the top mobile games of 2021, which are generally multiplayer experiences (Free Fire, PubG Mobile, Clash of Clans).

As Web3 platforms (on-chain or off) evolve with the number of players they support, what we see as the end goalposts will continue to move.

Even more than the token liquidity earned in P2E ecosystems, we predict that the player liquidity requirements of the game itself will be the biggest indicator of what games excel.

*Or “Virtual” store. “Metaverse” store?

** An approximation of player skill level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

*** Vibe games are some of the coolest examples of platform-specific experiences that have evolved the past few years. They function similarly to SoHo house/nightclubs in real life, where players on Roblox congregate and just chat, meet people, and check out the “vibes” of the room. These vibe games may be the closest thing to the reported “metaverse” we see across gaming.

^Or any game platform ^^This is not a good thing ^^^The population of users is causally linked to platform adoption as well (some may even say player/user population is the definition of adoption rates

Smart contracts (programs stored on the blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met) are the code that power NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs. They’re composable, which means they’re like legos — the contracts are building blocks that can be programmed to interact with each other.

Composability allows anyone in a network to take existing programs and adapt or build on top of them.

Loot is maximum composability — thanks to Dom’s status as a creative god of smart contracts, it captured the community’s imagination, and tens of thousands of people raced to buy and build.

Some people thought this was how the next Dungeons and Dragons would get made.

Others believed that it marked the dawn of the next Middle-earth.

To me, it seemed like If you could only figure out how to unlock the value, writers could have their NFT moment too.

But while the composability of Loot produced an insane burst of initial momentum (including for writers -- there’s a DAO devoted to the lore of the Divine Robes), so far it hasn’t produced any meaningful written stories.

Truly great writing takes time. There’s a long and lonely trudge between a burst of inspiration and the daily work of storytelling. I have no doubt that the Loot community could theoretically produce the next Game of Thrones, but composability doesn’t enable it. A sustained creative effort over a long period of time does.

So is the composability of smart contracts actually useful to writers? Payments and permanence are one thing, but fanfiction already enables innovation for writers in a similar way to how composability enables innovation for blockchain developers. Fanfiction has given birth to expanded universes, the MCU, modern TV adaptations… even Twilight.

The only things that stand in the way of making decentralized fanfiction profitable are copyright and license.

Maybe composability is most interesting when you change the context: not to look at what it’s useful for in terms of solving problems for writers, but instead what happens when you combine it with the act of storytelling.

Could smart contracts for writers actually just be a new art form?

Of all the creators in crypto, Dom is the one I feel is ten steps ahead of everyone else. Last night I asked a friend of mine to explain Corruption, an under-the-radar project that is as compelling as it is mysterious:

hmm, alright. so corruption... it's basically a chain-mediated ARG run by dom highly technical, constant posting of new contracts in realtimecoded messages sent via an on-chain messaging system that we as a community respond to, build against, and, essentially, operate as improv partners with dom on it's been back and forth with dom and our builders, where we have recently created a contract to mint derivative work to earn money for the dao wallet to collect a full set of specific deviated corruptions to play along with the stuff dom has been posting anyway, we have learned over the course of the game that we are talking to many entities, some of which are daemons, operating in separate universes it's really damn cool definitely first of this that i've seen

Maybe the innovation of composability is that it will allow for the creation of new publishing methods and platforms that reward writers with stronger incentives.

Maybe we’re going to spend thousands of dollars in ETH to experience chapters of new and exciting books.

Or maybe composability will give birth to a new class of writers, who use smart contract-powered building blocks to write for an engaged community of owners: part technical improv gamemaster, part scribe.

Telling great stories together, no longer alone.

In Hollywood, invisible gatekeepers slam invincible doors, while producers squeeze you for free drafts like the last pouch of Capri Sun on a hot day in June.

A self-published author on Amazon can put up six figures’ worth of advertising money and still not make a profit from a year of work.

Writing books is not really a good idea.

What if it was?

Put on your metaverse goggles —  you’re about to ride a cyberpunk train into the near future, where cryptocurrency, Ethereum, and NFTs have created a seismic shift in the way fiction writers can and will make money.

1) Royalties through smart contracts

What if you could pay a writer instantly, every time their story is sold or traded, directly to their wallet?

What if ebooks were no longer locked to Kindles, unable to be resold or traded, but instead could be exchanged by their buyers in a free and open market (with each trade sending payments to the author)?

What if a market existed where you could buy and sell collectible versions of digital books with rare cover art and intricate page design?

Imagine a remix culture that relies less on fair use and 18th-century common law, and instead parcels out micropayments to creators.

Imagine coding a profit-sharing agreement between writer, editor, beta readers, and cover designer into the sale of the work itself. In this vision of the future, where writers are paid in crypto and readers are buying with it, not only are there faster and more transparent payments, there’s a much larger volume of them, and more ways writers can and will get paid.

2) NFTs as funding

Imagine Patreon or Kickstarter, but the rewards tiers have been turned into a supercharged collecting game where the rewards are instant and tradeable. These rewards are NFTs: valued by their owners because they’re collectible, liquid assets. They can also give you access to a community.

Funding like this makes supporting a writer more fun for their community, and more profitable. And because supporting the creator is suddenly more profitable, it helps a huge amount with marketing: your supporters will convince more people to buy in, both because they genuinely believe you’re going to create something great, and because the more people that buy in, the more the value of their assets appreciates.

NFTs can create instant liquidity in the work — a totally novel concept for a writer who wants to make money.

Why should only engineers and artists benefit?

3) Character NFTs as fanfiction licenses

Blitnauts, Bored Apes, and Forgotten Runes’ Wizard Cult give buyers full commercial rights to their NFTs, which allow their owners to monetize their characters in any way they want. Fanfiction is legal and potentially profitable now: even if Magic Machine makes a TV show, Witch Zelda of the Grotto is free to write their own best-selling novel.

Jenkins the Valet is a great example of IP inspired by the initial NFT collection — a novel written by a NYT best-selling author — and their licensing program funds the creators and bootstraps readership. It’s also a royalty-earning game for NFT holders, which creates a speculative economy at the start.

When characters take shape like this — as pieces of art, or even just words, before the soul of a story breathes them to life  — they allow their creators to sell collectible memorabilia to fans and a market of speculators (or hold the collectibles themselves, and earn through writing).

Making money in the earliest stages of creation, in ways never before possible.

4) Credit and Authorship

Community-contributed story ideas can be tracked on chain. I can imagine a new generation of writers whose writing samples are attached to smart contracts. The more blockchain native writing projects there are, the more this type of writing can lead to new (and profitable) opportunities.

5) Payment in tokens

There are already projects paying writers in tokens or NFTs. Why is this interesting? Because you can get paid in a speculative asset, which can be instantly exchanged for cash or held for upside. This is like getting paid in instantly liquid stock.

The idea that a writer could get equity in a paid project is about as strange as the idea that writers could be valued by a capitalist society, but here we are.

The world likes to shit on writers, but the great ones have taught us that the only lasting truth is change.

We can imagine new ways of seeing reality.

Maybe there really is no spoon.

An underrated and important leap in game development that occurred with the ubiquity and spread of free-to-play/freemium games was the shift away from paying upfront for a game’s content.

This fundamental shift allowed people to play the game FIRST. Then, if players enjoyed the game, built-in game mechanics rewarded the game creators and the game itself through the mechanism of freemium.

The past decade of game design has been built on the concept of a massive top-of-funnel to the games themselves. This allowed millions of players to play and only monetized the sliver of them that wanted to become paying customers. Those who truly enjoyed the game and the super-spenders (whales) subsidized the gameplay. New companies and top publishers emerged via this form of game design: current game publishing giants such as Supercell, King, and Zynga.

One of the strangest facets of blockchain gaming is the return to old-school arcade mechanisms: before you can even see if you enjoy the game, you must pay to play the game.

But it doesn’t stop there. Most blockchain games aren’t just “pay to play”; they require you to buy the underlying asset.

This is like telling someone who lived in a rural part of America in the 1980s and wanted to play Pac-Man, that you don’t just need the quarters, you need to buy the cabinet itself too. And you need to pre-order it, without ever seeing if the game is any fun.

To take the analogy further, the cost basis and style of gameplay we currently understand would be the equivalent of a new arcade opening up in your hometown, but in order to get inside, you need to fund the cabinets that store the games you want to play.

As with most forms of new/disruptive platforms/entrants into the games ecosystem, this style of high-cost-of-entry has been accepted as part of blockchain gaming’s table stakes.

Companies like Yield Guild Games provide scholarships to further create a liquidity layer, allowing people to play games that may have a barrier of entry in the thousands of USD*. This system appears to be working for early adopters into blockchain gaming.

However, are these high barriers to entry, “charge the top of funnel”, blockchain games a new wave of game development? Or is this a hard problem that must be solved to allow for a more accessible top-of-funnel program, from which games will emerge and disrupt**?

Should blockchain gaming be soccer, or should it be Formula 1?

This question seems as straightforward as whether or not we’re buying the quarters or the cabinet.

*Worth noting from a cognitive science perspective that blockchain native users may view the price statically as a number of ETH, thus may view the cost on a basis of what ETH price was when they got in vs. what it currently trades at.

**Fun reference point: The initial wave of mobile games were not free-to-play. The F2P movement gained steam further downstream in the mobile game lifecycle.

Was the choice good, or was it bad? Did you generate value, or punt it away? EV is a useful framework for web 3: NFTs, DAOs, blockchain, crypto.  

Because we are building the Internet into the biggest casino in human history.

Owning a Bored Ape or investing in $OHM gives you better comps than Bellagio. Everywhere you look there are waifus and unicorns. But just like slot machines, NFTs are not for everyone. Casinos pump oxygen to keep you refreshed, awake, and gambling constantly, just like liquidity mining programs hit you with greater and greater yields. They are windowless — you cannot see the outside world. There is nothing more and nothing less than the casino. 

You can’t escape the sound of the chips clacking.

I think if you’re building in crypto — the new gold rush — and you genuinely want to build something valuable and lasting, you have an obligation to acknowledge that WAGMI is the anthem of a new generation of gamblers who are betting on an Internet that’s like a casino.

If you’re selling the picks and shovels, you have an obligation to teach your users how to dig.

Yes, there is tremendous financial opportunity here—there is a world of freedom and possibility in working for DAOs, in a pseudonymous space where you cannot be canceled by the mob.

But there are also scams and charlatans at every corner, looking to pick your pockets and sell you fool’s gold.

I’m personally excited by crypto. Not only are NFTs reigniting my brother’s love of collectibles — making me nostalgic for the days when we combed Long Island with our father for rare Star Wars toys — but they’ve made the Internet fun and gamelike in a way it hasn’t been since the online poker boom. Composability and community ownership enable novel ways of capturing value, and we can now build incentive structures for creative people to earn a better living — or, at the minimum, have more fun doing what they love.

But it’s not all upside, even if that’s what the casino wants you to think. 

There are people who find themselves in casinos ready to lose the money they brought. There are also those who come looking to test their mental mettle against a room designed to extract their money from their wallets. 

Knowing where you stand is half the battle. 

WAGMI