[Coinlive Talk] Restoring the Purity of Gaming: A Dive into GameFi

• GameFi suffers from a poor user experience and gameplay, but that’s not all
• A wrong focus on tokenomics have contributed to their lack in longevity and sustainability
• The merge may help to rejuvenate the realm by encouraging innovation and lowering barriers to entry

I’m not a fan of GameFi projects. I started out with then-popular Axie Infinity, and realised it quickly became an unpleasant grind, a perpetual clawing back in desperation of trying to break even on my initial investment. More than anything however, it was barely even enjoyable.

A buggy UI, lacklustre graphics, and unengaging combat made for an overall unpleasant user experience. Yet GameFi still has an undeniable place in the blockchain ecosystem, and is still an interesting use case for blockchain technology regardless.

To find out more about GameFi games, I spoke with Stanley Chia, the Co-Founder of Promisphere, an asset deployment platform for GameFi that not only links players up with elites in the gaming scene, but also provides guidance on the leading gaming strategies (meta) to ensure that players have access to an optimised asset-generating competitive team.

“Converting fiat to crypto was already a high barrier of entry back then and probably even now for new players, and bridging your crypto further into game currency was another barrier,” Stanley explains. “People were so overwhelmed with what assets to buy or what strategies to pursue in the game. So, we wanted to streamline the process and make it simpler for the average gamer.”

Stanley, who started raking in four-figure sums of returns when he was 14 just from playing games, posits that gaming was the backbone for his current entrepreneurial ventures. Even now, Promisphere is embarking on a new NFT project, coined “Project Arcana”, that showcases the in-game achievements of players and also serves as an archive for their gaming accomplishments.

Indeed, even while once a target of social stigma, gaming has always advocated for skills such as the honing of reflexes, teamwork, and strategy formulation. Even “modern” concepts such as the metaverse for instance, had always existed in gaming for years, as Stanley explains.

“We were already enjoying a form of it without corporates trying to monetise it, so back then it was fun, everything was very pure,” he says. “Everyone was in it for the fun and because they loved the community.”

GameFi often adopts three distinct characteristics: having a liquid token, being built on a blockchain, having transferrable assets, and having those assets wholly owned by the user. These aspects are also shared with SocialFi to a remarkable extent, where content creators create and own content that can be catered directly towards consumers in the space.

Stanley Chia, Co-Founder of Promisphere

NFTs also play a crucial role in both realms, serving predominantly as access passes and aesthetic commemoratives for users. However, NFTs may potentially serve a greater purpose yet in GameFi, as Stanley tells us.

NFTs in games could also potentially help to serve as cross-chain assets, where inter-game transfers could take place between games in the web3 space and be exchanged between layers. An axie in Axie Infinity for instance, could perhaps appear as a NFT pet in another game in the space.

While exciting, GameFi and SocialFi do retain some fundamental differences, as Stanley explains.

“In SocialFi, how do you ensure that your content is secured? For instance, if big conglomerates right now already have a hard time preventing videos and movies from going up on pirated sites, how are you to regulate this better on a decentralised platform?” Stanley inquires.

Stanley’s specially-curated NFT from Project Arcana

GameFi on the other hand, does not so much focus on a particular tangible product, but rather on the user experience itself.

“You can’t reproduce the game and its community elsewhere,” Stanley clarifies. “The enjoyment and value of the game comes from the experience itself.”

At this, I immediately argue that the majority of GameFi users may not even be gamers themselves, but rather retail investors looking for a quick flip.

Stanley darkens at this. “I don’t like the term GameFi” he tells me sternly. “When you coin it that way, a lot of people think that this is merely another way to generate income. But that’s precisely what’s hurting the industry.”

The problem with GameFi currently, as Stanley tells us, is that the current GameFi platforms on the market have for far too long marketed and sustained themselves solely on the basis of their capacities for profit generation as opposed to the gaming experience itself.

“Maybe you can try and market it to investors as well, but they can’t be your sole target demographic, because there is no longevity there,” Stanley says. “The follow-up shouldn’t be about how do I make this game more profitable, but rather how do I make this game more fun. The metric of investment should come from a sense of joy rather than an evaluation on monetary return.”

Stanley is probably spot on here from the mindset of developers. Investors looking for a quick flip or get-rich-quick ideas through GameFi are probably the last people that developers ought to be prioritising in trying to build a thriving game.

“No matter how much developers play around with the economics, the game will not be sustainable if you don’t have a good product to begin with,” Stanley laments. “The fundamental fact is that you did not fix what gamers came to you for. You fixed what investors came to you for. And that’s not sustainable.”

Yet correcting the mindset of developers barely covers the extent of challenges faced by GameFi, as I soon learn.

The decentralised aspect of GameFi poses its own set of problems too. True to the ethos of decentralisation that mandates that the game go by the will of the mases and players, many gamers are often too suddenly tasked with the responsibility of deciding future developments and patches to these games.

This breeds the problem of power consolidation, wherein wealthy and more resource-rich players are able to control a larger portion of decisions, leading to the decentralisation dilemma: If decentralisation were to pride itself on aggregating power and authority across a wider playerbase, then surely this consolidation cannot predominantly be under the purview of only the most wealthy and powerful players, for that would only be yet another form of centralisation anyway.

Coinlive’s Interview with Stanley Chia

The decentralised nature of GameFi could also be directly hazardous for certain players, I add on. Without a centralised authority, ethical and moral issues may become more apparent. Hate speech, bullying, and racism for instance, could very easily run rampant through these communities, even with the presence of a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

“While I agree that this can be dangerous for players, this is the ethos that you (players) stand for by playing that game and you have to abide by it,” Stanley asserts.

“As harsh as it may sound, people consent to the decentralised nature of the game and are aware of it. They wouldn’t be playing this game in the first place if not for its decentralised nature.”

Even then however, the growth of GameFi is also saddled by an unforgiving wider community.

The unfortunate truth for GameFi is that the expectations on the space are very high, and very fast. These were the expectations levied on the crypto space generally because of its novelty and branding as the new frontier.

“Sadly, some of these trickled down into the game development space. A game isn’t built overnight, and even though I can empathise with the consumer’s standpoint that a lot of these games are launched too prematurely or have the wrong focus in mind, the market can be ruthless”

Despite this myriad of obstacles, Stanley does offer a compelling case for a silver lining in the distance. The games that the market has often criticized, myself included, are only problematic because they exist right now.

They may have bugs aplenty, poor gameplay and atrocious tokenomics, but largely in part due to the fact that they were the pioneers in the space.

"Someone had to be the pioneer to start this wave. The really good games are still a work in progress behind the scenes, but they are building on this first wave,” Stanley affirms. “Things will get better.”

And better it may potentially be, with the Ethereum merge looming just around the corner. With the merge touted to lower gas fees significantly, there may potentially be room for a further boom in GameFi innovation.

“My hope is that when the merge happens, it will be cheaper to try out,” Stanley says. “There will be a lower barrier of entry not just for gamers, but also for game developers to innovate and experiment on new things.”

Indeed, the necessity of Ethereum Layer 2 (“L2”) scaleups such as Arbitrum for instance, have been thrown into question. Initially these L2s were used simply because they were much cheaper to build upon than Ethereum.

If the merge were to successfully take place however, it could potentially see a lot more developers building on the now-cheaper main Layer 1 Ethereum chain, which in turn may attract more gamers to come on board due to Ethereum’s established name.

While I personally may not be fully convinced of the merits of GameFi at the end of the day, I still do hold on to a glimmer of hope that better games are still on the horizon. GameFi projects that are able to do what’s right not just for gamers themselves, but also for the greater crypto community.

“Stop trying to fix your marketplace and your tokenomics, and instead focus on fixing your game,” Stanley concludes.

“Let’s bring the purity back into gaming.”

This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Readers should take the utmost precaution before making decisions in the crypto market. Coinlive is not responsible or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the article or for any damage or loss to be caused by and in connection to it.