On Market Opportunities And Guilds In Web3 Gaming

Here are some insights from a Twitter Spaces conversation between Tegro’s co-founder Siddharth Menon and Ready Player DAO founder Rich Cabrera.

Ready Player DAO is a new-generation gaming guild that is building a community around Web3 games. The organisation creates content, invests in emerging games in the space and trains players to participate in the Web 3 economy.

The Market Opportunity

A huge market of passionate consumers, a culture of adopting and experimenting with breakthrough technologies, and a lack of regulatory hurdles to dodge. The gaming industry is primed to induce mass consumer adoption of blockchain technology.

The gaming industry has a market cap of $2 trillion.

The recorded revenue of the gaming market in 2021 was over $198 billion.

GameFi has the potential to revolutionise this trillion dollar industry.

⚠️ Issues With Existing Web3 Games

Web3 Gaming is still in its infancy. We have seen innovative projects like Axie Infinity explode last year with a play-to-earn model, only to simmer down as the market turned bearish. Strapping NFTs and tokens to a game might give a project a moment of publicity and hype. But it doesn't ensure the stability and sustainability of its economy.

One of the key issues with the current generation of Web3 games is that their tokenomics incentivize players to cash out and leave the game’s economy.

Most players only engage with existing Web3 games to earn money, which is not wrong in itself, but it does turn games into something they’re not supposed to be – a hustle.

Web3 games are often discredited by traditionalist players from the gaming industry as another trick conjured up by crypto-bros to grab the bags of naive players. This notion was also fueled by the rise of swaths of play-to-earn Web3 games that had terrible gameplay.

Building Better Web3 Games ️

Gaming + Asset Ownership = Web3 Games

The Web3 gaming community should clarify that the core idea of Web3 games is to give players digital property rights for the first time in video game history. However, this should not serve as an excuse for game developers to ignore other elements of a game that make it fun.

Web3 game developers should closely tie in tokens or NFTs into the gameplay. Rich says, "If a player earns some tokens by playing the game, then there should be a mechanism in place that ensures those tokens are burned or used while playing the game." The bottom line is that tokenization in Web3 games should be implemented for the sole purpose of utility. According to writer Nat Eliason, the introduction of tokens to a game can ruin the gameplay if they do not have any functionality.

Developers should try to create gaming experiences that even a crypto noob is familiar with. One example for inspiration: Stardust Web3 Gaming Studio is using custodial wallets in their upcoming games. These are crypto wallets that will be managed by the Stardust team. Players are already familiar with using third-party wallets like the Steam wallet within games. Even a small change like that can make the game more desirable among players. Needless complexity repels people.

Gaming Guilds: Origin, Role, Evolution

The dynamic growth of Web3 games like Axie Infinity and Splinterlands in 2021 led to the formation of Web3 guilds. These organizations essentially recruited gamers and lent them game assets in exchange for a percentage of the player's gaming income.

Web3 Guilds also remove various barriers to entry for players. Coming from the Web2 gaming scene, players can easily get overwhelmed with the complexity of Web3 gaming primitives like wallets, gas fees, ownership, and management of digital assets.

Guilds are an important component for the growth of Web3 gaming because, along with educating the community about the space, they can also provide valuable feedback to game developers.

As Web3 games adopt more sustainable design principles, guilds are likely to move toward a more traditional gaming guild model. Guilds for Web2 games recruit, train, and promote players. While Web3 gaming guilds do many of the same things, their player retention is significantly lower.

A great earning opportunity for people interested in the Web3 gaming space is to create educational and informative content for the community. Web3 gaming has yet to see a blockbuster AAA game. Sure, Axie is great, but it’s not Valorant. The number of content creators that are covering the Web3 gaming space is relatively small. But that just means there’s more room to grow and get noticed. The Web3 gaming space is about to explode in the next couple of years, and early birds are likely to establish themselves as major players as the industry matures.

Fun Fact

Dr. Disrespect is releasing a Web3 game, and we can’t wait for it!

P.S. We host equally insightful Twitter Spaces every week. Follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay in the loop.

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