NFT Review 2024 - 3: What makes a game Web3?
NFT Review 2024 - 3: What makes a game Web3?
How much should we betray web3 ideals to find product market fit?
NFT Review is a weekly newsletter covering NFTs in the Web3 ecosystem. The newsletter is put together by Bruno Škvorc.
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Dear NFT enthusiast,
web3 gaming is still an area many attempt to bring to life. And yet, the fact remains that web3 teams are extremely bad at designing game economies (who knew that designing for short term ponzinomics doesn’t translate to long term user retention 🤡) and equally bad at designing FUN. It’s almost like web3 gaming brought in the worst of both worlds.
It’s a problematic space to say the least:
On rare occasions, a team will manage to catch lightning in a bottle, and a gem like Dark Forest will be born: decentralized, using ZK tech, and both strategic and fun. But more often than not, teams will just attempt to grab the current popular formula, wrap it in web3 buzzwords, and hope for the best until Game7 or Animoca invest, dump, and move on.
I recently started dogfooding more Web3 games (will post those videos on Youtube and X) to really make sure I’m not missing something or talking out of my ass, so I tried Mighty Action Heroes.
The game is a typical battle royale on an X-com like map seen from above, with some powerups and weapons. The gameplay is easy and straightforward and works in the browser, loads fast, performs really well. It was intuitive to figure out the controls.
The whole game is fully centralized. The UI runs on a centralized server, the gameplay is passing through a fleet of servers, the accounts are on a server. There is nothing web3 about the core of this game.
The main menu offers some gamification in the form of quests to do on a regular basis and collect points, and there are web3-like purchases that allow you to customize your character or buy a season pass, but ultimately this is as web3 as, for example, Decentraland or Sandbox - not decentralized at all, and using NFTs and fungible tokens just as a currency or a log-in method.
It doesn’t use modular NFTs to make cross collection compatible equippables a thing, it does not use conditional rendering to show character stats and themes, it does not use the ERC 7590 attributes to track levels and XP, and more.
There’s nothing wrong with this per-se, it’s using crypto only as a payment method, but it is definitely not the web3 vision.
For me, the game turned out to be as bland as its name, but maybe I’m not the target audience. I’m also not sure who is. Web3 people won’t care much about this, as it doesn’t really USE web3. Gamers won’t care because, well, to me it’s not a fun game, and it’s not unique in any way.
The UI feels polished and the gameplay is smooth but honestly, that’s not enough. Without a significant USP, this is just another “cookie clicker of the month” to be forgotten when the next one rolls around.
Fun: ★★☆☆☆
Web3: ★☆☆☆☆
Economy: ★★★☆☆
Thank you for reading and have a great week.
— NFT Review
🖼 crypto-native
Magic Eden launches multi-chain wallet for Solana, Bitcoin, Polygon and Ethereum.
One of the most art-unique and degen-native things to launch in recent times, SMOL Dollar launched. Smol Dollar is a collection featuring onchain procedurally generated ASCII drawings of dollar notes. The collection employs smart contract-based mechanisms to establish a sovereign corridor for price development.
Fungify pools is now live, allowing you to pool your NFTs and generate USDC yield, while allowing others to borrow and short your NFTs. This turns NFTs into a yield generating class, not just dormant capital.
An ERC proposal for sovereign bridges NFTs. Cannot work with advanced NFTs, but for static media might work well.
ERC404 takes center stage in crypto world, but what is it? In short, it’s a non-standard non-draft, completely invented way of minting NFTs that also mints fungible tokens alongside them which follow every transfer. The code is so bad it actually literally breaks MetaMask. All projects launched with this are guaranteed to rug and disappear, and this is guaranteed to be forgotten in 3 months tops. Exercise caution.
Metaversal’s primer of Farcaster Frames. FramesJS is a helper toolkit for developing those.
Our Network’s comprehensive review of popular NFT marketplaces.
Animoca founder on NFTs being the pillar of digital capitalism.
Flow capitulates and also goes EVM. This is the 57th new EVM environment for us to build in this year. The number of various non-discernible EVMs now firmly exceeds the number of useful web3 apps by an order of magnitude.
Rich wardrobe and equip-testing functionality now added to Singular.
POAP badly copies nestable NFTs introduced to them by RMRK.
🕹️ games
A “well-duh” post from Shiti Mangani in which they argue that we should make web3 games fun first, monetized second. Here’s why this can’t work: web3 devs are incredibly horrible at designing game economics, and by and large aren’t gamers so they suck at games too. To get good web3 games, we need to pay game devs, not web3 devs, to build them, and constrain their tech stack.
'Anichess' NFT Game Launches With Backing From World Chess Champ Magnus Carlsen. “Anichess is a new chess game with a unique spin, and a partner of Chess.com. Through Anichess’ partnership with Chess.com, several chess players and influencers are helping to promote this new take on chess that aims to bring new fans to the game. As part of this, Magnus’ involvement is as an ambassador of the Anichess game, helping to spread the word about Anichess and in the future there may be some cosmetic items in the game around Magnus’ brand.” says Henrik C. from Mr. Carlsen’s team.
Shardbound, a zkEVM’s Immutable game, limited playtest coming up with 2000 slots up for grabs. Come one come all, airdrop hunters!
Disney invests 1.5 billion in Epic Games in a bid to influence metaverse-like gaming and entertainment. Uh oh.
DED launches the DED mining game, a breakout clone with roguelike perks and NFTs minted on Unique Network.
Stardust Integrates with Sui, Simplifying the Onboarding Experience for Game Developers Building on Sui.
🌎 global adoption
Pudgy Penguins goes into chapter 2 of their real world IP licensing saga. Sign up to potentially have your penguin as a plushie.
‘Overwatch’ Esports League Bans Crypto, NFT, and AI Sponsors
The Rise and Fall of Gamestop’s NFT Marketplace - a timeline breakdown. I still maintain it got shuttered because there was no audience, not regulatory uncertainty.
Impending NFT Apocalypse: Jason Dailey’s post on the lack of NFT metadata permanence due to developer laziness. Avoid it by backing up your metadata inside your NFTs themselves.
Superrare releases lazy minting. “Welcome to the club”, says Mintaur.
Mastercard’s UEFA Champions League game lets cardholders win tickets via NFT Pass and Moonpay
In a bout of absolute hilarity and boomer buffoonery, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is worried that metaverse and similar concepts and industries need regulation and a strong public policy framework. Keep clowning, boomers.
Sothesby’s, a once legitimate auction house, auctioned off an Ether Rock. Kill me now.
ENS and GoDaddy partner, but for how long?
Foundation introduces Exhibitions, to sell art better when surrounded by context.
Magic Eden’s “mint to earn” points for minting program explained.
🧐 interesting
The ArtBlocks project has acquired the Sansa NFT marketplace. I know, I’ve never heard of Sansa either.
Exploring the Auntieverse: a unique fusion of art and AI
Call for submissions for ABS Digital Art Prize is now open.
Jeff Koon’s moon phases sculptures on route to literal moon. Corresponding NFTs can be purchased.
📖 reading
Le Random: Christiane Paul on Curating Cohen’s AARON. Christiane Paul's curation of the Whitney's Harold Cohen: AARON informs a conversation with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony), where they discuss Cohen's persistent impact to this day while reflecting on the nature of digital expression.
Where next for digital art? With Web3 in flux, Danielle King and Jason Bailey discuss what 2024 holds in store with Alex Estorick.
That’s all for this week, see you in the next edition! Got some links to share with us, artists to feature, NFTs to sell, jobs to promote, or events to popularize? Get in touch with Bruno and don’t forget to follow us!