By Severin.
TL;DR
Essentially, a Fren Pet can be understood as a mining machine that continuously mines a portion of all players’ expenditures in the game as its revenue.
Compared to friedn.tech, Fren Pet has done more design in terms of product vitality and user retention, but Fren Pet’s wealth creation effect is significantly weaker than friedn.tech, which may become a hidden danger for user growth.
Base and Fren Pet have achieved mutual accomplishments. It is expected that more FrenX projects will become popular on Base in the future.
On November 17th, as soon as Base’s official tweet about Fren Pet came out, it quickly blew up the community, with people rushing into this blockchain-based digital pet game. Thus, the curtain was quietly raised on a mythology regarding the wealth creation effects surrounding this digital pet game.
Introduction to Core Gameplay
In Fren Pet, players first need to spend 100 $FP to Mint a digital pet. Then, players need to spend $FP in the store to buy various kinds of food to reset the pet’s death timer, avoiding the pet’s death and increasing the pet’s points. Each pet gets one free spin on the wheel every day for a chance to obtain items like points, shield, etc. Every 15 minutes, each pet can also bonk other pets; there is a 40% probability to defeat the other pets and obtain 0.5% of their points as a reward. In addition, players can also join a dice game battle between players, taking higher risks for higher point rewards. Finally, the pet’s points will decide the distribution of the ETH reward pool. If a player chooses to claim rewards, the pet’s points will be reset to zero and the game ends.
Fomo Design in Fren Pet
Whether it is gameplay, UI design, player interaction experience, or server quality, Fren Pet is not considered to be a high quality game. It can even be described as a crudely made game. After being reposted by Base’s official Twitter account, Fren Pet even experienced server overload due to the surge in traffic, causing interruptions to the gameplay. At this stage, Fren Pet relies more on its fomo gameplay design to attract new players to join.
source：https://twitter.com/frenpetonbase
Gameplay
Not Free to Play but better than Free to Play: The premise of playing Fren Pet is that players need to spend 100 $FP to Mint a digital pet. However, every time a new player enters and Mints a pet, Fren Pet will refund the 100 $FP Mint cost to the previous player. From a $FP perspective, this is equivalent to Free to Play. But from a USDT perspective, as long as there are continuous players entering and consuming in the game, the price of $FP is expected to rise. Players can actually profit from the Minting behavior, which is equivalent to Give to Play. This increases players’ willingness to participate, stimulates existing players to Mint more pets, and encourages new players to actively join the game. (Minting a pet just costs 10 $FP now, and the $FP from mints will go to a multi sig contract to be distributed to long term active players, encouraging user retention.)
source：DEXTools
Guiding players towards frequent and high spending to expand economic benefits: Food in Fren Pet has two attributes, survival time and point earnings. Generally, the higher the price of food, the greater the point earnings, but the shorter the survival time. This requires players to balance between survival time and point earnings. Moreover, points are linked to player earnings. Therefore, Fren Pet players aiming for maximum ETH rewards need to purchase relatively expensive food with high point earnings. However, such food has a shorter survival time. This prompts players seeking high returns to frequently buy relatively expensive food, contributing significant revenue to the game. In this process, players’ input costs stack up, compelling them to continuously purchase food to avoid cost losses due to pet deaths. The design of food with a maximum survival time of 2–3 days also increases user interaction with the game, enhancing user engagement.
source：https://dune.com/browse/dashboards?q=frenpet
Providing users with low-cost future profit expectations, incentivizing positive social diffusion: Each pet has a daily opportunity to spin a roulette wheel, offering rewards ranging from 1 to 2000 points, including the possibility of special rewards like shields or nothing at all. The free roulette spin gives users a low-cost expectation of future rewards, capitalizing on the psychological appeal of lottery-like experiences, motivating continuous player engagement, and increasing user interaction with the game. Moreover, the free roulette spin encourages positive social diffusion. When users win substantial rewards, they are inclined to share their success on social media, bringing Fren Pet additional new traffic.
source：Fren Pet
Exploiting users’ gambling tendencies enriches gameplay and enhances user retention: Every pet can bonks other pets every 15 minutes, with a 40% chance of successfully stealing rewards. The winner gains 0.5% of the loser’s points. This mechanism encourages players with a gambling inclination to continuously launch attacks, seeking to win point rewards from other players. Simultaneously, more rational players may choose to enhance their pet’s points, adopting a passive defensive stance to passively gain points from the failures of challengers with a higher success rate. Additionally, Fren Pet introduces a more gambling-oriented dice game, where players can use a 100 $FP ticket to potentially win up to 500 $FP in rewards.
source：Fren Pet
Claiming rewards results in a points reset, blocking users’ early withdrawals: The Ponzi model is most vulnerable when early participants rapidly exit the game. In Fren Pet, once a player chooses to claim their reward, the pet’s points are reset to zero. This mechanism encourages players seeking long-term returns to delay claiming rewards as much as possible, keeping players engaged in the game for an extended period. It also, to some extent, hinders players from withdrawing and selling, preventing potential damage to the in-game economy.
Tokenomics
Invite cashback incentivizes players for self-promotion: Similar to exchange cashback programs, in the game, 10% of the $FP used by players is automatically sent to their referrer. This incentivizes players to actively promote and share their Fren Pet referral codes, creating a continuous source of income from new player spending.
Token burning creates future deflation expectations: The total supply of $FP is fixed, and 90% of the tokens used by players in the game are directly burned. This creates an expectation of token deflation, encouraging players to hold and purchase $FP tokens earlier.
Token reward reinvestment for players creates future profit expectations: Whenever a user buys or sells $FP tokens on BaseSwap, a 5% tax is imposed. When the smart contract accumulates 1000 $FP tokens from taxes, it will automatically convert $FP into ETH, with 2% proportionally distributed to leaderboard players, 2% to developers, and the remaining 1% replenishing the $FP liquidity pool. The 2% reward reinvestment serves as players’ future profit expectations, motivating continuous player engagement in the game.
source：https://dune.com/whale_hunter/fren-pet
The fomo game mechanics and token economic design have attracted an increasing number of players to Fren Pet. However, this game is not expected to last because the motivation for players to continue paying is not derived from the game’s playability but rather from their expectations of future profits. In essence, Fren Pet’s pets can be understood as mining machines, continuously extracting a portion of all players’ expenditures as income. When players’ expectations of returns decrease, rational players will begin to exit Fren Pet, leading to player attrition, reduced $FP trading activities, decreased reward reinvestment, declining profit expectations, and a vicious cycle of further player loss. If the game cannot sustain player payments through its playability or introduce positive external economic benefits, Fren Pet may face an inglorious conclusion.
Comparison to Friedn.tech
Fren Pet and friend.tech share quite a few similarities, including a strikingly similar name. Essentially, both Fren Pet and friend.tech rely on users’ expectations of future profits, leveraging social virality to guide players in self-promotion, creating community FOMO, and attracting a significant influx of new players. Early adopters, relatively speaking, can capitalize on lower initial costs to gain increasing future returns as more players join, thereby enticing user retention.
However, Fren Pet distinguishes itself by incorporating unique design elements within the gaming scenario to enhance the product’s vitality and user retention. For instance, the pet feeding mechanism encourages sustained user spending, ensuring a lasting revenue stream for the application. Features like the roulette draw and the ability to initiate pet attacks every 15 minutes guide users toward higher-frequency interactions, strengthening their inclination to stay engaged. Additionally, the design of reward claiming leading to point resets can also help delay early player exits.
However, Fren Pet’s pet development model somewhat restricts the ‘get-rich-quick’ effect compared to friend.tech. Unlike friend.tech’s Bonding Curve, which reflects significant price fluctuations through simple Keys trading, Fren Pet’s pet points growth and the accumulation of rewards take time. Consequently, users may find it challenging to accumulate substantial wealth gains in the short term. This could potentially result in Fren Pet’s narrative lacking attractiveness, posing a growth challenge by not being as enticing to users. So we anticipate that Fren Pet won’t attract a large number of users quickly in the early stages, as friend.tech did through an exaggerated wealth effect. It also won’t experience rapid user loss or collapse due to designs like the Bonding Curve. Fren Pet is more likely to remain in a lukewarm state over the long term.
Base needs more projects like Fren Pet
The skyrocketing success of Fren Pet is undoubtedly attributed to the retweets from Base. In fact, Base and Fren Pet mutually contribute to each other’s success. Fren Pet relies on Base for increased exposure to a larger audience, triggering users’ FOMO psychology. At the same time, Base also needs more projects like Fren Pet to bring in additional funds, traffic, real users, and revenue to the Base chain.
Similar to friend.tech, both Fren Pet and friend.tech, in their respective gaming and social scenarios, rely on users’ expectations of future profits to guide them in high-frequency interactions and trading operations. This contributes to a more vibrant on-chain user ecosystem for Base and accelerates the expansion of on-chain gas revenue. At its peak, friend.tech, single-handedly, contributed to nearly half of Base’s daily gas expenditures. In comparison to friend.tech’s simple buying and selling of Keys, Fren Pet incorporates more high-frequency interaction scenarios within the game, such as feeding and bonking. While users engage in frequent operations, they also incur more gas fees, contributing to Base’s actual revenue.
source：https://dune.com/whale_hunter/fren-pet
In the increasingly homogeneous landscape of Layer 2 solutions, Base has differentiated itself by channeling massive user traffic through popular applications, carving out a distinctive path from other Layer 2 platforms. It is anticipated that in the future, more FrenX applications with FOMO attributes and high-frequency interaction scenarios will emerge on Base, consistently injecting fresh vitality into the Base ecosystem. While FrenX applications may not necessarily bring users enormous wealth effects, Base indeed stands out as the ultimate winner reaping tangible rewards behind the scenes.
Reference：
https://docs.frenpet.xyz/category/overview
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/47536
https://www.techflowpost.com/article/detail_14596.html
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