This report compares some basic data of the four Layer 1 games ACE/SAGA/RON/XPLA and also extends certain viewpoints.
Title of this article
Introduction and differences of each project
After comprehensive comparison, which one is more worthy of attention?
Secondary trend performance in the past three months
With empty demand and strong VC bets, where is the moat of gaming infrastructure?
Note 1: The four projects counted in this article are mainly Layer 1 of the game track. In the future, there will most likely be L2+L3 views on the same track.
Note 2: This article is only for sharing opinions and does not have any marketing tendency. If this article is helpful to you, please give it a thumbs up.
1. Project similarities, differences and differentiation
I divided them according to the technical framework they used, and there were exactly 4 projects: 2 belonged to the EVM series and 2 belonged to the COSMOS series.
These two factions are also the two most mainstream infrastructure teams in the market. However, what is different about SAGA is that it also incorporates the concept of modularization.
ACE and RON are basically equivalent to Ethereum sidechains
The characteristics of these two factions are that COSMOS is more personalized and flexible than EVM as a whole, while EVM occupies the main industry developer market (the two are not incompatible).
And the four game chains basically adopt the current mainstream POS consensus mechanism
Even the POA+DPOS consensus adopted by RON is a relatively complex POS design.
The characteristic of this mechanism is that in the early stages of a project, the selection of protocol nodes often depends on the selection of the central entity. Of course, this is consistent with the tone of the game track.
This also means that Layer 1, which adopts this design, is likely to "act as both a player, a goalkeeper, and a referee" in the early stages of development, which means that the early chips will be more inclined towards a certain entity.
(Even in their published token designs, the distribution of the three parties, team/institution/community, seems to be evenly distributed and reasonable)
Among them, $RONIN and $XPLA have been released for a long time. Among them, RON has given birth to a popular gaming ecosystem in the past and has attracted more market attention. Compared with the latter, $XPLA has only begun to show strong vitality this year.
However, what attracted my attention most about $XPLA was that Ubisoft joined as a validator. It was because I paid attention to this first that I wrote this article. However, after taking a look at $XPLA, I found that it was a bit empty in all aspects, especially in terms of technology, so I added a few other targets for comparison.
2. Comparison of market value, circulation and social media data
The chart below shows comparable data on the market value of the four targets and social media (X). If we judge based on the same target market value, then XPLA's return on investment will undoubtedly be higher than other targets.
Because its current circulating market value level is the lowest among the four targets, and the proportion of tokens to be released is the second to last among the four targets.
In terms of social media operations, RON's X account is the most active, but the content quality is not that high, so that its number of fans and the average page views in the past seven days are the lowest. XPLA has the highest ratio of average page views to number of fans because its denominator (number of fans) is small.
To sum up, if we judge the potential of the four Game Layer 1 projects from only two dimensions, then XPLA is undoubtedly more worthy of our attention.
(XPLA is not currently available on the #Binance market)
But the fact that it is not listed does not mean that it has a great possibility of being listed. It just means that it has a larger room for listing compared with other targets.
3. Comparison of market trends in the past three months
Among the four targets listed in the figure below, three have already been launched #Binance  . From the trend fluctuations, it can be seen that the first three actually have obvious liquidity advantages compared to $XPLA.
Letâs compare the first three first: because they are all listed on Binance, and $ACE and $SAGA are both new coins of LaunchPool, the trend of $SAGA is undoubtedly the worst, while $ACE has performed better in terms of high and low fluctuations in the past three months (but if the overall trend is drawn, it may not be the case);
Comparing with three stocks with similar market capitalization (except $RON), they all broke out of the lows of the past three months this month and are currently in a rebound trend. The rebound strength of $XPLA will be relatively stronger, followed by ACE, and SAGA is the weakest.
Therefore, in summary: considering that SAGA has the highest share to be released among the four targets, it is best to avoid choosing $SAGA among the three targets of Binance. Among the similar circulating market value levels, choosing $XPLA will have better future expectations.
4. With empty demand and strong VC bets, where is the moat of gaming infrastructure?
The combination of games and Layer1 cannot yet determine whether the current framework can become a better carrier for Web3 games, but what is certain is that games + Layer1 is also the category with the largest valuation logic in the game track.
However, this type of Layer 1 is narrower than other L1s with broader demands, but wider than some of the more popular application chains.
This situation is between general L1 like Solana and application chain
And in terms of development and maintenance, understanding games and understanding blockchain are likely to be separate at present. With the popularity of the full-chain trend, the difficulty of understanding the most basic level will rise to a higher level.
Therefore, the current underlying framework can be regarded as an action to raise the valuation logic. In fact, there are still 1-2 development teams behind it to lead the current development and operation of a game chain, and there is no external support from serious game manufacturers.
Contrary to this logic, as a gaming infrastructure, the activity and continued development of the chain depends on the ecosystem, but the current known size of the Web3 team does not seem to have the ability and scale to independently support a gaming chain ecosystem.
Therefore, it is necessary to introduce external developers and game manufacturers to develop on the chain (I think the number of teams vertical to Web3 games is not enough to support the valuation of a Layer1 in the long run)
However, the scale of the industry's "original demand" for games is also not attractive enough to traditional game manufacturers.
The current situation is that VCs in the primary market are still betting on the gaming sector, but the actual demand downstream may be far more empty than we imagined (there was a previous statistic that 70% of VC bets in the primary gaming market were in the Web3 sector).
Therefore, I believe that the moat of a gaming infrastructure in the future does not come from how much native gaming ecology the team itself brings to the chain, but from how much [exclusive authorization] it obtains from the traditional gaming market, thereby driving the original market's demand for token economy based on the original gaming experience.
(This moat logic is somewhat similar to CHZ in the sports sector)
It seems easier to get a game enthusiast into Web3 than to get a pure speculator to fall in love with the game.
