What Is The GameFi Problem During the Period 2021-2022?

GameFi is one of the keywords that exploded from mid-2021. However, by the end of 2021, projects in this area began to not bring excitement to the community. Maybe partly due to the gloomy market, no new cash flow, but also part of the reason comes from these games themselves.

So what are the reasons? Below is my personal opinion about the current situation of GameFi, as well as how to make GameFi develop.

THE PROBLEMS GAMEFI IS FACING

Lack Of Decentralization

Decentralization already exists in Traditional Gaming

“Decentralized” is a phrase you have heard a lot when explaining DeFi. However, perhaps many of you do not notice, that decentralization is also applied in the game. One interesting thing is that it has been around for a long time in the traditional Gaming world.

That is, the player can change (custom) something in the game without the approval of the dev team. The most obvious thing is the maps (maps) of games like Warcraft 3, and Dota 2, etc.

Previously, Warcraft 3 was a strategy game, building houses, and raising soldiers, the ultimate goal was to destroy the enemy’s house by controlling the army. But then, IceFrog – an unknown person, created the Dota (Defense of The Ancients) map, laying the foundation for a top game genre for more than 10 years. It’s MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena).

This Custom Map achieved unexpected success. Around 2010 – 2011, when going to any net shop in Vietnam, every machine displayed the interface of Dota. Many tournaments organized by third parties with a total prize pool of several tens of thousands of dollars were born, along with many talented players, and large organizations, in turn, formed teams to compete.

Next, when Dota reached its peak, Valve – a “big hand” of the traditional Gaming village began to produce Dota 2, with more improvements than Dota 1. And while people started to get excited about Dota 2, there was A Custom Map of Dota 2 was born, which is Dota Auto Chess.

Dota Auto Chess is a game “Chess of Dignity”, taking the character of Dota 2 as a flag Players fight and combine generals of the same model to create a stronger version. The reason is called “dignity” because there is a possibility that the player cannot turn out the necessary champion, thereby leading to the loss of the whole match.

Since its launch in February 2019, Dota Auto Chess has drawn more players to Dota 2 itself by more than 30%, since December 2018. This shows that, even as a separate game, Custom Map also accidentally pulls a lot of users for the main game.

Is GameFi really more decentralized than traditional Games? 

Back to GameFi, now more than half a year has passed, from the time Axie Infinity “caused a fever” for helping the community make money in the middle of the epidemic season, but the games still focus on developing completely based on the team.

Some games in the future Roadmap will have a DAO section, which means giving decision power to the community. But DAO here also only means making a Proposal to vote on the game’s parameters, then the dev will be responsible for implementing it, not giving the design tool to the user.

Maybe these games are just out, so tweaking the parameters will be more necessary. But with the oldest game, Axie Infinity, we still only log in every day, holding three animals to fight in turn.

Have you ever thought about players using the Axies in a first-person perspective? Or an Axie Infinity with the gameplay of Lien Quan? Of course, another game can code this easily, but keep in mind they won’t have Axies.

Compared to traditional Gaming, GameFi is probably still far behind in this area, which makes users very bored, even though the dev team tries to innovate through updates.

Lack Of Creativity

How many times have you clicked on a Play to Earn game that looks attractive, but after reading it carefully, it is no different from Axie Infinity (two token mechanisms, turn base gameplay, graphics, etc.), except for the character line, the plot?

Creativity, or Innovation, is something groundbreaking that current products do not have, or do not meet the market. Here are a few examples of innovation in traditional products, from my own perspective.

About 20 years ago, when the world was just getting used to the Internet, Yahoo pioneered in connecting people through Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, etc. To talk about Yahoo’s size, the company was valued at $125B in 2000, while Google was at that time only about $5B.

Next, combining Yahoo’s communication regardless of geography, along with the martial arts style of TVB movies, Vinagame (current VNG) has been extremely successful when bringing back the game Vo Lam Truyen Ky.

Or as in the example above, Dota is also a pioneering game for the MOBA genre, where players must use many individual skills, combined with teamwork, to win. Dota Auto Chess is the first game that combines playing like chess and strategy, with… bad luck.

For GameFi, it is not without Innovation, a good example is Axie Infinity. Many people will say Axie Infinity pioneered in bringing games to Blockchain, but for me, what really brought Axie Infinity to the top was Earn – the first time users can Earn through playing games.

But GameFi is just that, currently, the games do not have too much creativity. They are mainly focused on proving they can give the “Earn” community more than the competition.

The most obvious example is Crabada (CRA) on Avalanche, which has exactly the same gameplay as Axie Infinity, from turn-based to three-character squads. The only difference is that these characters are Crab for Crabada, and Axie for Axie Infinity.

GameFi waves exploded strongly thanks to Axie Infinity, just as the epidemic made many people unemployed. But that wave has been up to the task for the past half year. Now, for GameFi to attract more cash flow, we need a new idea.

Poor Marketing

After all, games in Crypto can also be considered projects. And the Crypto project also has several marketing methods, such as announcing investment funds, introducing IDO, launching NFT Marketplace, AMA, launching Staking, etc.

With simple projects, they also have their own unique features. For example, recently AMMs have started to add support to buy Bond, or some projects are made about Laas (Liquidity as a service), etc. So users will be attracted by these features.

So what are the marketing methods of traditional games? Talking about Dota again, when Dota 1 tournaments, or other game tournaments at that time, were worth only a few tens of thousands of dollars, Dota 2 fired the opening shot with The International (TI) tournament with the first prize up to $1 million (total prize $1.6M), an unthinkable number at the time.

In 2012, Garena brought League of Legends to Vietnam, but to name it Dota 2, I don’t know if this was a mistake or on purpose, but it’s a coincidence that Dota 2 was also released at that time. , and a lot of people downloaded League of Legends to play and thought this was real Dota 2.

I’m not talking about right and wrong, but clearly, this approach has achieved unexpected success, when the number of players after a month of release reached 30,000 concurrent players, as well as ending 2012 with 70,000 players. play.

VERDICT

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