Sandbox founder Sébastien Borget claimed at last week’s NFT Paris conference that Web3 gamers have “lost patience” with games that deploy token incentive models without any real utility.
During a panel discussion with Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung, Sky Mavis founder Aleksander Larsen, and Dapper Labs co-founder and CEO Roham Gharegozlou, Borget argued that many blockchain games have deployed similar token incentive mechanisms, but “they haven’t been delivered fast enough.” ” Describes in-game tokens and NFT utility.
“The players lost patience and looked the other way,” he said. “Only a very small number of projects with real gameplay and real utility have withstood the bear market,” Borget said. Additionally, the current wave of Web3 games allows players to “access the core gameplay from the jump, rather than just pulling them in for tokens.” “We are allowing it,” he added.
He added that the tokens act as a reward mechanism for participation “if you are attracted to the gameplay itself and not the token economics.”
Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity) founder Larsen argued that the industry had “corrected too far” from promoting the principle of in-game tokens to the idea that “games just have to be fun.” “It’s easy to say, but in reality it means nothing, because of course all games should be fun,” he said.
Larsen urged the industry to pivot to its core message of digital ownership and “the economic incentives that game developers can create to acquire new users so they don’t even have to use existing platforms.”
He praised Axie Infinity’s surge in demand in 2021 as “a stroke of genius in that it opens up something new for the industry,” but acknowledged that “there was a lot of room for improvement.” .”
He expected the incentive model to be iterated “hundreds, maybe thousands” of times, which he said “will lead to the sustainability we need in this industry, and that will be token-centric.”
Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot) CEO Gharegozlou pointed out that tokens could be used to “transfer ownership of the real-world experience back to the user,” something that hasn’t yet been implemented in the market.
“People are investing so much time and energy in these digital worlds that they often have little or no way to really ground themselves. The token economy can be a way to give this back to customers,” he said.
Gharegozlou added that he expects to see developers pre-creating games at Dapper Labs. flow Launch the blockchain and then transfer ownership to the player community.
He also predicted that the token could become part of an ecosystem that exists across lending protocols and games. DeFi. Players are “gaining an identity and reputation and assets that can be used in other types of protocols, including non-gaming protocols where they have their own tokens,” he said.
Animoca Brands CEO Yung suggested that an “intermediate phase” could emerge before the long-awaited interoperable metaverse emerges, with digital objects capable of migrating between worlds.
“One way to think about transferring things from game to game is to transfer the value you have. Then you can actually unlock value in one game and bring that value to another game through fungible tokens,” he explained. He acknowledged that this is an “intermediate solution” but argued that it represents a way to “promote some level of interoperability.”
Editor: Andrew Hayward
