MixMarvel Believes the Future of GameFi Lies in Leveraging Web3 Attributes

Quick Takes:

• Despite the overall growing momentum, most GameFi projects are facing the problem of unsustainable development for their lack of richness in gameplay and economic models.
• The future success of GameFi is highly dependent on the restoration of game-finance balance, with gameplay to be designed in rich Web3 gaming attributes.
• By leveraging experience from the Web2 gaming industry, GameFi can attract more users including those from the Web2 world and continue to thrive in the future.

The Evolving GameFi

As a combination of gameplay and financial incentives, GameFi provides a virtual gaming environment where players can earn financial rewards by participating in the Play-to-Earn (P2E) blockchain games. And what makes GameFi so different from the traditional non-blockchain gaming is that it is deemed to allow players true ownership, or we say property rights, of their in-game assets along with the freedom of pricing and trading outside the game on crypto exchanges or NFT marketplaces.

Since first being proposed by the founder of MixMarvel in 2019, GameFi has evolved from an innovative concept framed upon cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and blockchain technology into a thriving industry generating $10 billion in earnings. Even in the current bearish market where prices of digital assets are falling, GameFi still shows strong resilience with total capital investments exceeding $4.1billion as of the end of Q2 2022 and has attracted leading gaming companies like Ubisoft and Square Enix to join the field.

However, coming along with such popularity are some commonly shared problems among most of the existing GameFi applications, including but not limited to rather simple gameplay and monotonous economic models, which, if neglected, can no longer satisfy existing players or attract newcomers, thus compromising the chance of GameFi to weather through the next winter of the crypto market. Indeed, an industry solely relying on profit-driven user growth is likely to be subjected to an unstable user base and unsustainable growth.

Where is the future of GameFi? This is an eternal question that all GameFi practitioners should be seeking the answer for.

MixMarvel: GameFi Bellwether

MixMarvel was vigorously practicing its vision of GameFi even before bringing up the concept to the world and has been leading the industry by publishing world-renowned IPs with innovative design and technology.

• MixMarvel released HyperDragons with the world’s first NFT stake-mining pool in 2018, merging NFT and DeFi for the first time in the industry. As a digital asset game, HyperDragons proved that the virtual economy can give digital assets an appreciation logic.
• In 2019, MixMarvel launched HyperSnakes as the first real-time MMO blockchain game, which is a financial innovation allowing users to create value by playing games. Through HyperSnakes, MixMarvel actively promoted mass adoption of blockchain games.
• MixMarvel incubated and published the BNB Chain-based GameFi application DeHero in 2021 and went on developing and testing DeHeroGame in 2022 on the Rangers Protocol network with integration of the non-custodial wallet UniPass to lower the entering threshold for Web2 users with traditional email registration and login service.

The Future of GameFi

Always visionary, MixMarvel has never ceased exploring the future direction for GameFi’s development and firmly believes that the future success of GameFi is highly dependent on demonstrating Web3 gaming attributes and leveraging Web2 game developing strategies.

Restoring the Game-Finance Balance

By uniting gaming and decentralized finance, GameFi opens a whole new world for vast players, allowing them to make financial profits while enjoying playing games. Yet still in the early years of development, existing GameFi applications often emphasize too much on finance but lack engaging asset-centered gameplay. Even for world trending games like Axie Infinity, a business model driven by short-term profit and almost fully dependent on new gamers coming in with fresh money would eventually lead to poor player engagement and low new-player attainment, and we could only foresee slow and even stagnant development.

The sustainable success of GameFi needs to be achieved through a restored balance of game and finance, with more efforts into gameplay development and a better demonstration of asset ownership to reach a larger audience. With comprehensive gameplay demonstrating asset ownership and in-game features encouraging financial earnings from asset ownership practices such as lending, rental, cross-chain trading, etc., future GameFi can restore the balance of game and finance and thus attain a better economic system.

Also, with blockchain being a technical means to achieve openness and transparency, the fundamental designs and mechanisms of GameFi applications are also expected to embrace the same attributes, whether it is for asset issuance, assets custody, or else. Such Web3 attributes and their successful implementation will enhance the fairness, playability, gaming experience, and economic sustainability of GameFi. Ultimately, well-designed gameplay with Web3 attributes and strong in-game economies are likely to help GameFi resist future rounds of depressed market conditions and continue to grow with a steady flow of users joining the game.

Leveraging Web2 Game Developing Strategies

In addition to refining the design of GameFi applications with some Web3 thinking, there are also more inspirations to borrow from the more mature traditional gaming industry. Web2 game genres, for instance, provide a great reference for GameFi application practitioners to decide on the most attractive genres to develop in order to attract more actual gamers and the approaches to improve the gaming experience and player retention.

With the Web2-inspired features and solutions, future GameFi can lower the knowledge and technology threshold for its gamers while embracing the blue ocean of experience-driven Web2 gamers, who make a much larger audience group compared to Web3 reward-driven players.

Taking the MixMarvel-published DeHeroGame as an example, as a role-playing game (RPG) with all in-game hero cards and skills as well as activities being NFT assets and on-chain, DeHeroGame emphasizes greatly on NFT assets. Also, the integration with the non-custodial wallet UniPass has successfully helped lower the GameFi threshold for Web2 users and attained over 50% retention during the recent technical testing, reflecting a great practice of P2E games.

As competitions in the GameFi track have become fierce, GameFi projects are losing intrinsic advantages of being innovative. By actively adapting to the market trend and user needs and by adopting Web3 attributes and learning the best from Web2 games, GameFi can still thrive in the future.

About MixMarvel

MixMarvel is the world’s leading blockchain content-incubation platform and creators community. By in-depth exploring the open world and integrating world-renowned IP with high-quality content, MixMarvel connects investors and mass users through asset distribution, content publication, DeFi tools, infrastructure, community co-creation, and other diversified scenarios in a new ecosystem of dapps. Its ecosystem comprises a broad portfolio of FT/NFT assets, including the MIX, RPG, and HEROES tokens; blockchain content including the GameFi application DeHero; and infrastructures including Rangers Protocol and MixMarvel SDK. For more information, visit https://linktr.ee/MIXMARVEL.