Title: Analyzing the Transformation of Game Economic Models with GameFi Land Assets as an Example | Industry Observation

Author: CyborgDoggie

In traditional games, defending one's home and embarking on expeditions to plunder are the most common gameplay mechanics. The epitome of this is the 4X strategy games that emphasize eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. However, in GameFi games, land is not just a scene but also an asset with strong financial attributes, leading project developers to be cautious about incorporating land resources into high-risk games. Consequently, the function of land has gradually evolved from mere display to staking for yield, and the interactive functions relying on land resources have also been strengthened.

Sandbox Games - Placing and Collecting Scenes

Initially, land sales appeared in some sandbox games, such as Sandbox and Decentraland. These games emphasize user-generated content (UGC) and are closely tied to the strong social attributes of the Metaverse. In these games, land serves merely as a place to place assets, where players can build or display collectibles, and the value of land changes based on neighboring locations and zoning. Although land lacks interactivity as a static asset, the strong sense of identity and social interaction among players has led to the emergence of username trading in Decentraland.

However, while UGC-based sandbox games can cultivate a stable user base and promote internal economic circulation, construction gameplay is not a universally accepted form of entertainment, and land is only enjoyed as a production tool by a few players. Additionally, these games aim to create a friendly and harmonious social environment; Sandbox explicitly restricts land connections to limit player collusion. While this encourages individual creators' participation to some extent, it constrains the development of guild economies. Therefore, landowners cannot enjoy more benefits beyond the appreciation of land and token prices. This also leads to a lack of direct incentive mechanisms for such players, preventing them from actively participating in the game.

The Map of Sandbox

MMORPG - Social Trading Scenes

In MMORPGs led by Ember Sword and Mirandus, land resources create simple differentiation in gameplay experience: remote areas randomly spawn monsters, NPCs, and natural resources, while suburban areas allow players to set up small shops and guilds, with the largest trade and guild resources concentrated in town areas; there are even more refined land classifications such as kingdoms, capitals, and castles. This has resulted in significant disparities in land value; for instance, one of the five castles in Mirandus, the Citadel of the Stars, was purchased by Polyient Games for a high price of $16 billion.

In addition to more refined land types, a detailed world view background also gives more meaning to land assets. Players write folklore in the Discord channels of these two games and enthusiastically narrate chronicles, demonstrating that a rich and three-dimensional world can further deepen players' sense of belonging to the land.

In terms of asset disposal, landholders have more freedom; they can actively engage in the game through land management: whether improving infrastructure to collect service fees and tolls or forming guilds to expand their reputation, players become more closely connected to land resources.

However, in such games, land resources primarily serve as social and trading venues, only indirectly guiding player interactions rather than providing direct profit incentives, so player activity largely depends on the development of community ecology.

Referring to the outstanding traditional MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Dream of the Red Chamber, such games require a stable and large player base to activate the secondary market and need centralized means to innovate and retain players. Although MMORPGs in the GameFi space excel in incentive mechanisms and asset ownership compared to traditional games, the smaller player base in cryptocurrency, longer game development cycles leading to player attrition, and the lack of established user habits for long-term gameplay rather than quick experiences mean that the development of MMORPGs in the GameFi space still requires further observation after the games are launched.

LAND Introduction of Ember Sword

In the gameplay described above, landowners can either wait for land appreciation without engaging in production or slightly manage it to gain additional prestige and income; however, the next game to be introduced is designed to refine player roles, promote social gameplay, and encourage players to actively participate in game collaboration.

Adventure Games - Production Scenes

Mines of Dalarnia

Mines of Dalarnia is a light action-adventure game where land (i.e., planets) holders need to stake DAR tokens to maintain the resource density of their planets and enhance their attractiveness, thereby attracting ordinary miner players to extract resources. Correspondingly, miner players entering the planet need to pay mining rent and entry fees, which will become a source of income for the planet holders.

As a result, miners with lower payment capabilities have high liquidity and freedom, able to mine resources and rare equipment on various planets without being limited to a single employer; while planet holders with higher payment capabilities and less time invested are also more actively participating in token staking due to their competitive relationship. The internal economic cycle of the game is positively reinforced through player interactions.

Gold Fever

A similar design appears in the ARPG game Gold Fever: some players can purchase land mining licenses to become mine owners but cannot directly extract resources, so they need to recruit adventurers to mine. However, corporate players and rainforest tribe players will also join in the competition for wealth. The game attempts to recreate the perilous tropical rainforest environment of the gold rush era, with seven diverse factions making the action gameplay more exciting and rewarding.

Aavegotchi

Additionally, the differentiation of player roles empowering land is also seen in Aavegotchi's Gotchiverse—an open game offering various mini-games. Low-paying players can obtain Lickquidator for free and without limits through airdrops and collect resources on the land. Meanwhile, landholders, besides employing Gotchi for production, must also build defenses on the land and team up to eliminate Lickquidator. This game promotes cooperation between Gotchi and landholder players through a non-balanced competitive mechanism design and attracts new players through the free player influx channel of Lickquidator, creating strong in-game competition.

The three games above all utilize asymmetric competitive design, which divides player roles through mechanisms and correspondingly limits the abilities of different role players, forcing players to cooperate for mutual profit, thereby strengthening community power, activating secondary market transactions, and promoting resource circulation; or reinforcing the opposition between different role players, promoting resource consumption through rich rewards accompanied by battle damage risks, allowing players to truly benefit from strategy and skill in a play-to-earn manner, returning to the competitiveness of the game itself rather than profiting through speculation and gambling psychology.

Application of Land Resources in New Scenarios

Vulcan Forged

The function of land not only increases token output but can also be used to burn tokens, achieving deflation.

This is strongly reflected in the open-world game Vulcan Forged: every time landholders upgrade their land, it increases staking rewards, and the tokens earned from staking will be burned, thus reducing the token circulation. The project team even stated that if more than half of the land exceeds level 7, they will burn 8 million tokens. It is foreseeable that landholders, driven by expectations of token appreciation, will be willing to stake for a long time, actively recruit worker players for resource output, and encourage other landholders to upgrade their land to quickly raise token prices.

This design further increases the participation of landholders through incentive mechanisms, firmly binding them to land assets. However, if the project team does not timely develop new features or update mechanisms to attract new players, it may quickly collapse after a period of euphoria, ending in dismal failure.

Bloktopia

The application scenarios of land are not limited to within the game; for example, Bloktopia, which aims to build a virtual social space, marginalizes and simplifies the game, using it only as an entertainment function in the game hall of the building, while the remaining space is more integrated with social scenes in the real world. This virtual building now accommodates content creators, including Polygon and Avalanche, and on November 2, KuCoin also announced plans to create an office within Bloktopia for chatting and working in a virtual environment.

Conclusion

Thus, it is not difficult to see that land assets in GameFi projects can be roughly divided into construction and placement types and employment and management types, with the latter improving in playability and interactivity, allowing for a closer connection between players and land assets. At the same time, game developers are also refining player roles, enhancing the circulation and interconnection of resources among players, and increasing in-game resource consumption through competitive gameplay to reduce malicious extraction and selling phenomena. This indicates that some game developers are gradually breaking free from the limitations of numerical gambling, enabling deeper designs of game mechanisms to achieve a healthy economic cycle.

This article primarily explores the forms of land application in various GameFi categories from the perspective of land NFT resources, but GameFi is still in a booming development stage, and the utility of game resources will gradually evolve in two directions: playability and financial attributes, both of which have vast exploration space and possibilities.

The countless categories derived from the development of video games can cater to various players, ultimately achieving a balance between fun and profit. The GameFi field thus possesses more possibilities and opportunities for breaking boundaries than ordinary capital flow projects.

We look forward to more sparks igniting between games and cryptocurrencies, and one day, the efforts will not be in vain.