Original author: YBB Capital Researcher Zeke
Preface
This article is just some idle chat in the market's garbage time, which requires a certain degree of understanding of the traditional game market. You can read this article as a diary or a random thought. These are just some of my superficial thoughts on GameFi after playing "Black Myth: Wukong" and my views on the future of this track.
1. The 81 Difficulties of Game Science
In three days, the total sales volume of the entire network exceeded 10 million, the peak number of Steam players online at the same time exceeded 2.35 million, the sales of peripheral products jointly produced by multiple brands exploded, national media interviewed many times, multiple game locations can be entered for free for life with game clearance records, and the 1986 version of "Journey to the West" has been viewed on YouTube for more than 4 million times. The above are several related news about "Black Myth: Wukong" since its launch. If you don't play stand-alone games, it may be difficult to understand the meaning of some related data in these news. Let me give you a simpler example: just from the sales volume and player online data within seven days, this game is almost equivalent to the Chinese national football team playing in the semi-finals of the World Cup, and there is still room for improvement.
Admittedly, this success is also contributed by many factors outside of the game. However, in the final analysis, it is inseparable from the high level of the game itself. From my personal experience, "Black Myth: Wukong" is not absolutely perfect. But in the context of domestic 3A games, it is definitely unprecedented, and its level is enough to compete with the ARPG games of the world's top game manufacturers. Therefore, after playing, what is left is more emotion and reflection. Game Science has experienced far more difficulties and obstacles than game makers in our circle, but why has there been no GameFi game changer since the end of the P2E era?
To understand this, perhaps I can start with my memory of game science. In the summer of 2013, the most popular games in Internet cafes were League of Legends and CF. As a frequent visitor to black Internet cafes near my school, the sounds I heard most often every day were "Welcome to Summoner's Rift" and "Fire In The Hole". Interestingly, one day I vaguely heard some stick and sword hitting sounds mixed with ancient style BGM among these familiar sounds. I asked them what they were playing, and they asked me in return, you don't even know this? "God of War"!
This game was definitely one of the best MMORPG games at the time, and I still remember it vividly. After all, in a black Internet cafe with only two hours of lunch break for schools during the peak business hours, nearly a quarter of the people were playing this kind of game with all kinds of plots, which was rare. However, this trend came and went quickly. After a few months, I rarely heard these beating sounds. I also asked some of them why they didn't play "Douluo Dalu" anymore, and the answers I got were basically the same: it's not fun anymore, and they can't afford to spend so much money. Later, no one mentioned this game again.
Six or seven years later, a monkey that followed the old man's voice and turned into a golden cicada and flew into the Black Wind Mountain appeared, announcing that the domestic single-player game circle was about to change. I began to curiously check which big company would challenge such a thankless task, and the result was shocking. Game Science? A studio of about 30 people? You know, the development of games of the same level has more than 3,000 people ("Red Dead Redemption 2"). The most popular Japanese single-player studio, such as the developer of "Elden Ring" FS, has a scale of nearly 200-300 people, and basically has more than ten to twenty years of single-player game development experience. Looking down, I saw the name that was both unfamiliar and familiar, Feng Ji, the chief planner of "God of War". After understanding the story behind this producer, I suddenly understood how much unwillingness was contained in the last sentence of the first promotional video of "Black Myth: Wukong" "After the bones, go back to the journey to the west" (God of War began to fall after the third chapter of the bones).
In 2009, online games were dominated by RPGs. World of Warcraft, ZT, Legend, Fantasy Westward Journey, and Legend of Mir were all frequent visitors to Internet cafes in that era. Internet-addicted teenagers of the 80s and 90s grew up with these well-known IPs. As the most profitable game type, Tencent, which is now in its heyday, could not even get a share of the pie at that time, so the AGE engine was brought out in a hurry. So who would make the game? Feng Ji, who was less than 30 years old at the time, was entrusted with this important task and served as the main planner of the game. The start of DouZhengShen was invincible. The CG produced by Tencent with great investment and the carefully polished game levels made this game a hit. But Feng Ji and the production team made a fatal mistake in my opinion. He wanted to make it more like a stand-alone game than an online game, and paid too much attention to quality. As an MMORPG, there were only three chapters, which was too little content, and it took too much time to polish it, and it was not commercialized enough. Feng Ji understands games, but he doesn't understand capital. Douqiong was well received but not popular. After all the production content was exhausted, in order to maintain the daily activity of players and withstand Tencent's KPI requirements, a large number of repetitive gameplays of Korean games (running maps, sects, and repetitive copies) were stuffed into the game. Unfortunately, this move not only failed to extend the life of the game, but also caused its reputation to explode. The final ending of Douqiong was that Tencent changed the operation team, implanted a large number of krypton gold systems in the game, affecting the balance of the game, and died in the abuse of players. There was also a very classic saying circulating among the players at the time, which corresponds to the end of the previous paragraph, "After the bones, there is no more Journey to the West."
Feng Ji then made a self-deprecating short film, and left with a few of his direct members and art planner Yang Qi. In short, the story of making "God of War" is that a group of young people who dreamed of playing games were hit hard by reality. However, the rest of the story is very happy, and everyone knows it, so I won't go into details here. Fourteen years after the release of "God of War", this group of "young people" finally succeeded in obtaining the true scriptures (it also took Tang Monk in "Journey to the West" fourteen years to obtain the scriptures).
2. The extreme pursuit of certain things is also a kind of golden hoop.
Knowing shame and then being brave is a spirit that is extremely lacking in our circle. We always think that GameFi is not successful because the economics are not perfect enough, the form of the game is not right, the chain is too complicated, and the threshold is too high. People are particularly obsessed with things outside the game, but few people pay attention to the game itself.
2.1 The premise of financialization is that players are willing to pay
I have always thought that I know a little bit about games. I have been playing Game Boy since I was seven years old, starting with the black-and-white "Pokemon", "Kirby" and "Zelda" in the 2D era. Later, I have been a part of the rise of e-sports games and the end of the game console era. Basically, I have played all the popular games, and most of them are pretty good. But even so, I rarely talk about GameFi on my own initiative. I always feel that my understanding of GameFi is not as good as any other track in Web3. GameFi is a product that makes me feel puzzled. As a pre-investment investor, I receive at least three or four decks (business plans) of GameFi projects every month. Most decks are 80 to 90 percent about economics, token allocation, how large the scale of the game industry is, and what guarantees blockchain technology can provide. There are very few parts about games, and some don't even have a demo.
They give me the impression that they understand finance, but not much about games. The essence of a successful game is simple and fun. Excessive financialization is an anti-player and anti-project behavior (provided that the game is made seriously). You may tell me how brilliant the blockchain games in the P2E era are, but in my opinion, that is a victory for Ponzi, not a victory for GameFi. Many people in the industry have cheered for the entry-level NFTs of blockchain games such as "Stepn" and "Farmer's World", which cost five or even six figures. But this is actually isolating real game users. More than 95% of online games, even point-card games, have free entry barriers. Traditional players are not incapable of paying, but they only pay for emotions, passion, and a sense of accomplishment. The dragon sniper in "CSGO", the dragon blind in "League of Legends", the cloak in the early "PUBG", and the ghost tiger in "World of Warcraft" are equally expensive, but they cannot change any attributes of the player's character in the game, and some cannot even be resold. In this era, the business logic of top games has always been simple. If you can make players happy and secrete dopamine, players will pay crazily. Most of them don't even have economics. Once the game introduces tokens and NFTs that affect the balance, it will actually become very complicated. Let's talk about the simplest one first. For example, if a project party sincerely wants to develop a large-scale blockchain game, it must at least take care of tokens and NFTs at the same time, which requires the game to be frequently updated and improved. We just talked about the value of the former. Too high a price will eliminate new players, and if the price collapses, the community will collapse. Tokens and NFTs are in conflict with the latter. Game development is much more expensive than we imagined. After the early financing is burned out. Tokens and NFTs will become the only economic support for subsequent version updates. Selling tokens is equivalent to taking the community into a death spiral or giving up the original intention and leaving with a vote. Another option is to make a bunch of new NFTs and then sell them, but the motivation to attract players to buy can only be NFTs that are rarer, more profitable, and have more explosive properties than the early NFTs. So is this disguised increase in issuance a slap in the face of early NFT buyers or even the Web2.5 model? Even if we survive the development period of the new version, how can we make up for the huge pitfalls brought by these NFTs in the future?In the end, falling into death is just an inevitability, and the end of "God of War" is also a microcosm of this situation.
So GameFi feels more like different types of mines to me, each with different rules, but in essence, you buy a shovel, go to the mine every day to work, and then dig until the mine collapses. This situation is still common even now. Speaking of this, let's talk about something a little more complicated. The discussion about GameFi in the circle is still keen on "mine rules", and recently ServerFi is being discussed, but it feels to me like everyone thinks that with ServerFi, it seems to have found some "mine rules" that can keep the mine in balance forever. After entering the 3A era, GameFi has indeed become richer in elements and more playable. Large-scale blockchain games can indeed be more complex in economic design. I also tried to understand the so-called game economics in 23 years, but in fact, any kind of economics needs the support of the player base (without the player base, it is impossible to create a turnover out of thin air, and the economic design can only restrict different participating roles), otherwise it will evolve into a game between players and project parties. Introducing complex economics may not necessarily make the game fun, but in most cases it is the beginning of collapse. If you have some understanding of traditional MMORPG, then it should not be difficult to understand how difficult it is to find a balance between the faucet and the sink. The difficulty of complex game economic design is no easier than governing a small country. After looking through a lot of MMORGP designs about game economy, I actually only found one example that has been successfully maintained for many years - "Fantasy Westward Journey". However, the number of registered players of "Fantasy Westward Journey" exceeds 100 million (close to the total population of Japan). Its game elements and designs are so complex that not only GameFi cannot learn it, but even Web2 has few successful replicas. The currency circle is also a utilitarian world. As long as you can make money, all the rules, designs, and loopholes in the game will be repeatedly studied by people, and collapse is often just a thought away. To maintain balance, you can only keep updating the rules. This behavior of changing orders every day is a slap in the face of decentralization. "Mine rules" have never been the most important. The meaning that blockchain gives to games is also very simple. Making the ownership and economic system of digital assets more fair and transparent can also bring opportunities to bottom-up game developers.But blockchain cannot change the nature of things, nor should it put the cart before the horse.
2.2 AAA Games
After the end of P2E, GameFi was basically divided into two directions, 3A-level chain games with playability as the entry point and On Chain Games with fairness and in line with the spirit of the Autonomous World. Let's talk about the former first. Although I also look forward to a 3A game that breaks out of the circle in GameFi, 3A may not be suitable for this circle. I said this not to completely deny this type of game. I believe that there will be successful 3A masterpieces in GameFi in the future, but at present, it is difficult to do so without breaking out of the circle. From a business perspective, 3A games are a very tasteless game type in Web2, and even more so in Web3.
We must first understand the definition of 3A, a lot of money, a lot of resources, and a lot of time. As for how big this amount is, there has never been an accurate definition. According to my standards, this type of project represents the highest standard in the industry. As long as it fails once, a world-leading game company may be doomed. Blockchain is bottom-up, and the two are essentially incompatible, but the current GameFi development path has an inexplicable obsession with 3A. 3A is equal to grand production and beautiful pictures, but it does not directly equal fun. In the blockchain world, 3A chain games raise funds through pre-sale of NFTs, which is basically a default behavior, but the game basically has no semi-finished products at this time. What will happen in the future depends entirely on gambling and imagination. Once it fails, it is not the project party that pays the bill, but thousands of retail investors and VCs. For a game with a development cost of over 100 million yuan to form a virtuous cycle, it needs at least hundreds of thousands of players to enter, based on the conversion rate of normal online game paying players (low conversion rate: less than 1%, medium conversion rate: 1% to 3%, high conversion rate: 3% to 5%). I think it should not be difficult for you to understand whether this round of 3A chain games can have such performance (the number of Web3 players in 24 years has dropped by 6 times compared with 23 years, and there are only less than 1 million at present). Most of them will fall into some of the situations described above, become mines and eventually collapse. As far as the current situation is concerned, it is basically impossible to form a closed loop in the circle from top to bottom of the entire business logic. Making 3A chain games is more like making money from both VC and retail investors. If someone is really obsessed with this path and wants to be the game changer, then I hope you will not be wiped out by utilitarianism. Games are very concrete entertainment products, and they can never fool real players. I also hope that the story about game science can encourage everyone to obtain the true knowledge in this impetuous circle.
2.3 Full-chain game
On Chain Game can also be called full-chain game, autonomous world, pure Web3 chain game, Islamic game, etc. This is a concept that has existed for a long time, but it became popular only last year. However, it is rarely mentioned today. From the perspective of decentralization, there is nothing wrong with the path of full-chain game. We have also said in the above article that there are various ways for Web 2.5 games to break decentralization. The purest fairness can only be to leave everything to the code. But this concept is full of flaws from other perspectives. For example, is the significance of game playability really less than fairness and permanence? If the rules are completely on the chain, how can the token not collapse if there is a loophole? Every action requires Gas and signature. Can it really be called a game? At this stage, full-chain games can only meet the needs of niche groups. Similar to the earlier SocialFi, would you use a social platform without content? Although there are many solutions to these problems now, most of them are not perfect. The launch of this concept may have to be in the next round.
3. The wind starts from the tip of the green duckweed, and the waves form from the ripples.
Blockchain is not only for running games, and the financialization of games does not necessarily have to be online blockchain games. In addition to Web3, there are actually many bottom-up game makers. They may be university students, self-taught enthusiasts, or middle-aged game developers who have just been laid off from large companies. They may not be able to create miracles like "Black Myth: Wukong", but there are thousands of types, carriers, and gameplay of games, and independent games are often the direction they choose. The amount of funds they lack is actually very small, and the blockchain itself is a very good crowdfunding platform. It has always been an idea of mine to build an economic system for independent games around this group of people. The circle is too eager for quick success, and there is a group of people outside the circle who keep their passion. If you are interested in this idea, you can go and watch some documentaries, such as "Walking Alone" by Modian and "More Than Games" by Sena Films. This is a positive thing with the opportunity to make money.
The specific implementation process may not be so rigorous, so I will briefly explain my thoughts. Although there are many Launchpad platforms for games in the cryptocurrency circle, most of them are still centered around online games, and most of the crowdfunding methods are still through NFT sales. In the end, even if the game is successful, the players can still get very little income. Independent stand-alone games have the advantages of fast production and low cost. Crowdfunding can be carried out by putting demos of some levels on the shelves, so that an exclusive community can be obtained before the game is released. Enthusiasts and stakeholders can contribute their own strength to make the details of the game better. Crowdfunded NFTs can be divided into many categories. For example, the lowest-end NFT can be the buyout of the future game play rights, and the higher-end ones can be the dividends of part of the future income of the game. The way to release crowdfunding funds is through voting by NFT holders. For example, when subsequent production funds are needed, the previous production situation, related demos, and videos are released first, and the funds are released after the community reviews the complete quality. If a game's demo performs well, the corresponding high-level NFT price will also rise. After this logic matures, the platform can also try to launch some larger-scale game crowdfunding. Here is another story. The funding for the birth of "Black Myth: Wukong" actually came from the independent mobile game led by Feng Ji. The greatest things in blockchain are not born in dark corners, and independent games can also be very successful.
4. Level the bumps and make a road, fight through the difficulties and set off again
Finally, I would like to share here Feng Ji’s thoughts two months before the launch of Black Myth: Wukong.
“During the development of Black Myth: Wukong, most of the decisions I made can be simplified into three words: ‘Give it a try’.
Try something that someone else did perfectly ten years ago, but we still can't get right.
Try to chat with everyone excitedly, but the actual quality of the game is extremely awkward.
Try bragging about a demo in a promotional video, but when it comes to real performance it turns out to be poor or the gameplay is quite boring.
Try everything that looks beautiful, but because of overconfidence or a whim, you invest a lot of time in trial and error, but end up hitting a wall and bleeding.
The Black Monkey may be too lucky. It has been full of challenges since its launch, and naturally there are also regrets of its shortcomings.
When I finished writing the script for the first trailer, I had no idea how to make the video into a playable level.
When I finished the first level that could be tested internally, I had no idea how much it would cost to turn the entire story into a level like this.
Even though I already have a seemingly complete story, I still don't know what it means to make it stable, smooth, adapt to different hardware and software platforms and a dozen languages, and then release it in physical form and on CD.
It’s better not to know.
Since you have chosen to go clubbing in an uninhabited area, you should calmly embrace the fear and anxiety brought by uncertainty. Because behind the fear and anxiety, there is also the surprise of satisfying curiosity and the pleasure of recognizing yourself.
In this unknown fog, our only guide is to ask ourselves and everyone in the team more questions: Are we doing what we understand, recognize, and love as users?
Has anyone else in the world done the challenge we are facing? Even if no one has done it, can we do it?
If the answer is yes to all of the above, then it is certainly worth a try.
Just like in the tenth year of Game Science, we decided to publish the game ourselves for the first time, set the price for the first time, put it on consoles for the first time, make a physical version for the first time, and promote it globally for the first time... It was also based on the same self-questions and answers.
Just try it, you won’t die.”
