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 with no real utility.
Speaking 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 said many blockchain games have similar token incentives. However, he claimed that “we were not able to provide the service at a sufficient speed.” About the utility of in-game tokens and NFTs.
“The players lost patience and turned a blind eye,” he said. “Only a very small number of projects with real gameplay and real utility survive the bear market,” Borghetto added, adding that the current wave of Web3 games “are more likely to attract players for the tokens.” Instead, we’re giving players access to the core gameplay right from the jump.” ”
He added that the tokens act as a reward mechanism for engagement “once you get hooked on the gameplay itself, rather than the tokenomics.”
Larsen, founder of Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), said the industry has “corrected too far” away from promoting the principle of in-game tokens and toward the idea that “games just have to be fun.” ” he claimed. He said, “It’s easy to say, but it doesn’t really mean anything. Of course, all games should be fun.”
Larsen called on the industry to return to its core message of digital ownership and “the economic incentives that game developers can create to acquire new users.” Therefore, there is no need to use traditional platforms.
He praised Axie Infinity, which saw demand surge in 2021, as “a stroke of genius in the sense that it unlocked something completely new for the industry,” but acknowledged that “there were a lot of things that could have been improved.” Ta”
He expects to iterate that incentive model “hundreds, maybe thousands of times” and that “that’s going to lead to the sustainability that we need in this industry. And it’s going to be very token-driven.” Probably.”
Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot) CEO Gharegozlou noted that the tokens can be used to “transfer ownership of the actual experience to the user,” but this has not yet been rolled out in the market.
“People are investing so much time and energy into these digital worlds that they often have little or no basic knowledge, and the token economy could be a way to give that back to customers,” he said. .
Gharegozlou added that he expects to see developers pre-building games with Dapper Labs. flow Build the blockchain and transfer ownership to the player community.
He also predicted that the token could become part of an ecosystem that exists on the game, beyond the various lending protocols and services. DeFi. Players are “gaining an identity, a reputation, an asset that can also be used in other types of, perhaps non-gaming, protocols that have their own tokens,” he said.
Animoca Brands CEO Yung suggested that an “intermediate stage” could emerge before the long-anticipated interoperable metaverse with digital objects that can be moved between worlds becomes a reality. did.
“One way to think about transferring your stuff from game to game is to transfer the value that you have, so that you actually unlock value from one game through fungible tokens. , you can carry that value into another game,” he explained. He acknowledged that this was an “intermediate solution” but argued that it was a way to “promote some level of interoperability.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
