RMG Studio: Why We Believe Infinite Games Are the Holy Grail of Web3 Gaming

Author: RMG Studio

Limited games aim to win; infinite games aim to keep the game going forever.

-James P. Carse

Infinite games are the holy grail of the entire Web3 gaming space

Web3 gaming has rapidly become the hottest track in the entire Web3 field, especially with Axie Infinity's monthly revenue surpassing $200 million, and the whole industry has high hopes for it. This is because games can complete an important transition from mere speculative behavior to consumption and practicality, and the user base for games is enormous, with users being highly receptive to new technologies. Therefore, we saw that from 2021 to 2022, no less than 1,000 play-to-earn games were released, and in 2022 alone, Web3 gaming financing exceeded $4.49 billion.

However, Axie Infinity is not an infinite game; these explosive games have not escaped the nightmare of the death spiral. As cryptocurrency prices fell, the already limited number of real users further decreased, ultimately turning into a graveyard of bots.

P2E can quickly acquire users in the early stages, but how to make a game run sustainably, or how to create an infinite game in the Web3 space, is the biggest question facing all practitioners.

This is also the core issue this article aims to discuss, as well as the actions we (Real Money Games Studio) plan to take in response to this issue.

The bottleneck of Web3 games is not fun

Unfortunately, among the existing projects in the current market, there is not much innovation, and there is still no clear path to solve this problem.

Beyond P2E, most games simply port mature Web2 games to Web3, with the only difference being that the in-game items can be extracted to the blockchain for circulation as NFTs.

A representative of this is 3A Games, whose viewpoint is that the failure of GameFi represented by Axie is due to poor game quality and lack of playability, merely a speculative Ponzi scheme. Therefore, they are often studios that have already succeeded in the Web2 gaming field, possessing mature experience and industrial production capabilities to create high-quality games. VCs are also willing to buy into this story, with funds like A16Z often betting more than $10 million on a single project.

3A games typically have long production cycles, often exceeding three years, so it is currently difficult to judge whether this path is feasible based on real market feedback. However, let’s conduct a thought experiment: if we were to mint game items that have already proven themselves in the Web2 market as NFTs, would that turn into a successful Web3 game? If feasible, directly acquiring a mature Web2 game for transformation would save three years of time, right?

Most game items are not tradable, but fortunately, there is a well-known game that can support us in this experiment—CSGO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive).

CSGO was born in 2012, with daily active users stabilizing at 35 million, definitely qualifying as a fun game. Moreover, its trading market is very active, with no less than 100 trading platforms besides Steam (which belongs to the same parent company, Valve). After communicating with some founders of trading platforms, it is estimated that the annual trading volume of CSGO game assets is around $50 billion.

So the question arises: if we were to mint CSGO's items as NFTs, would you buy them?

------I wouldn’t, because the appreciation expectation is insufficient. The prices of rare CSGO items are maintaining moderate growth, but an annualized 6% is clearly not attractive to NFT traders. Moreover, there is also the risk of decline.

------If someone were to hype it, then I might. But I probably wouldn’t hold it long-term.

------I wouldn’t, because I’m not a CSGO player. Now let’s assume that if it were a CSGO player, would they buy it? Most likely not, because Web2 trading platforms are even more mature than Web3. The fiat payment and non-custodial accounts that Web3 is trying to establish are already well-established in Web2, so players have no reason to go through Web3 to make purchases.

Although the feedback received is not positive, we still decided to carry out this thought experiment in reality, as CSGO is a true big IP that will attract a group of people regardless.

However, when we actually implemented it, we discovered the most serious problem: all game items in CSGO have no Total Supply. Yes, players have been trading an "NFT" whose total amount is unknown and can be issued at any time by the project team. In Web2, everyone is accustomed to black-box operations and information opacity, but for Web3 users, the lack of clarity on Total Supply is considered crossing the bottom line.

All items in CSGO are obtained from opening loot boxes, which randomly drop in the game. The game items obtained from opening loot boxes are randomly generated, with lower rarity items being combined into higher rarity items, but which specific higher rarity item will be generated is random. And these random numbers can all be centrally controlled and adjusted at any time, and after adjustments, players find it hard to perceive because they originally did not know what the probabilities were.

In this situation, it is hard to believe that CSGO's officials do not manipulate the market to maintain the stability of the economic system.

If all item issuances and all probabilities in the game were on-chain, with Total Supply being public and transparent, assets freely circulating and trading, the official centralized manipulation methods would be rendered useless. Would the trading prices of CSGO still be sustainable?

What Web3 games currently need to solve is sustainable Tokenomics

In fact, looking back, playability is already a mature industrial capability in Web2. If the shortcoming lies here, spending money can definitely solve it quickly. With so much funding and the influx of Web2 talent, this problem should be easily solvable. But clearly, this direction is not right.

After all, the playability aspect has not changed from Web2 to Web3. The main change is in the assets. Yes, we are back to the old discussion of the logic from information internet to value internet.

So, the changed part is 1, meaning assets are 1, and playability is just the 0 behind it. Until the asset issue is formally resolved, any amount of playability is of little significance. Therefore, it is crucial to quickly resolve the Tokenomics issue.

So far, the only two GameFi projects that have truly broken out and attracted the attention of the entire industry are Axie and Stepn. Their success stems from Tokenomics, and their failures are also due to the unsustainability of Tokenomics.

Tokenomics may seem simple, especially for many practitioners who have done game balance design, who may subconsciously think it is not much different from numerical design. However, the immutability of rules, the transparency of global information, and most importantly, the free market for assets have created a significant divergence between game balance designers and Tokenomics designers, leading to reproductive isolation.

Moreover, the design of Tokenomics also needs to match the current blockchain infrastructure. Blockchain can give birth to new species that do not exist in the traditional world, such as flash loans, but due to current performance limitations, it is not suitable for the landing of some existing businesses. For example, AMM was proposed long before the birth of blockchain, but it was not until 2020, thanks to Uniswap, that it became well-known, also because AMM is more suitable for the existing infrastructure of blockchain compared to order books.

Creating a game that only has Tokenomics—Real Money Games

Many Web3 gaming companies have raised funds and then invested a large amount of money in game development and art design, which I personally believe is not worthwhile at this stage. Skins (art design and story background) help ordinary users understand and attract more people, but as mentioned above, they are ultimately the 0 behind the 1; our primary task is to solve the 1 issue.

Therefore, we plan to set aside operational skills, art design, stories, etc., and create a series of games that only focus on Tokenomics, to explore sustainable Tokenomics for Web3 games through real market feedback and continuous iteration. The first game will be a sequel to FOMO3D, called World Boss.

The logic is very simple, so simple that it only has one FT and no NFTs.

1. All players come together to fight the Boss, 1 token = 1 HP.
2. After the Boss is defeated, the level will increase, and the new level's boss health will increase by 9%.
3. The player who defeats the Boss will immediately reclaim 60% of the tokens used in the attack. They will also receive an 8% kill reward, which along with 40% of the tokens used in the attack will be claimable after three rounds.
4. If the Boss is not defeated within the specified time, this round of the game ends, and a new round begins. The last participant of the final level will reclaim 100% of the tokens used in the attack and share the prize pool.

For more detailed rules, you can visit:

Rule

I believe many people will wonder, since we want to create an infinite game, why start with a game that clearly has an end.

Although Axie seems like an infinite game, when the economic system expands and the bubble grows to a certain extent, when new entrants and funds are insufficient, it becomes impossible to turn back. The project team generally lacks sufficient motivation to continue building, carrying a huge "debt" while continuing to develop, and instead, the human choice is to start new projects. So what seems like an infinite game is actually a limited game.

But World Boss appears to be a limited game, with clear boundaries in each round. However, precisely because each round has an endpoint, it allows for the elimination of the accumulated bubble in the system and a fresh start, giving everyone the motivation to start anew.

A limited game with infinite rounds thus becomes an infinite game.

Real Money Games is the first phase of achieving the Infinite Game

World Boss is just the beginning; in the future, we will design more Tokenomics, and you will see more magical combinations of tokens and NFTs. To match the current blockchain infrastructure, we have these requirements for the design of each game:

Fully on-chain

Only by being truly fully on-chain can we eliminate human weaknesses, no rug pulls, no inside information, and achieve complete transparency and fairness;

Anti-bot

This does not mean that bots cannot play the game; on the contrary, we may also develop a series of bots to assist everyone in playing the game. Anti-bot mainly means that from a mechanism design perspective, bots have no advantages over ordinary players, such as no front-running;

Once such Tokenomics practices stabilize, it will be easy to add a racing or card skin to turn it into a game that the public can understand. Each skin game will target different preferences, bringing them into the Web3 world.

I believe that at that time, we will witness a comprehensive explosion of Web3 games. And World Boss is just the beginning; more exciting games are already on the way.

This is also the mission of RMG. LFG!

RMG Studio: A community incubator focused on web3 games. Only incubates fully on-chain games with well-designed in-game economic models. The first game of RMG Studio, World Boss, is scheduled to be released in March 2023.