Delphi Digital's long report: The future of encrypted games is PlayFi

Author: Delphi Digital Team

Source: Delphi Digital

The Delphi team released a long report on the field of encrypted games, summarizing the reasons why people like games, the profit history of games, the impact of blockchain technology on games, analyzing the current status of encrypted games, and proposing to utilize encryption through PlayFi Currency generates income for the game.

The following are the core contents of the report:

Most mainstream players scoffed at the idea of bringing cryptocurrency into the game. For example, Ubisoft Quartz and more recently Dr DisRespect's Midnight Society have faced backlash from mainstream players. As a team of gamers and one of the earliest supporters of blockchain games, Delphi was caught off guard by this. Delphi believes that these criticisms are justified, but hopes to conduct a more in-depth discussion, not only on encrypted games, but also analyze the evolution of core profit practices in the game industry and explore the future of encrypted games.

Why do people like games?

First of all, let's talk about why people are attracted to games. Johan Huizinga first proposed the concept of a "magic circle" in his 1938 book "Homo Ludens", followed by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in their 2003 book "Rules of Play: Fundamentals of Game Design". Extend this into the context of the game.

The magic circle refers to the imaginary boundary between the real world and the game. Reality is often an unfortunate baggage and constraint that many seek to escape. The magic circle of the game can provide them with this safe haven. In the magic circle, seemingly mundane actions can take on extraordinary forms due to the extraordinary nature of the human imagination. For example, the simple act of kicking a ball into a goal can be completely transformed. Maybe that ball into the net actually represented the winning goal in the World Cup final. Suddenly, billions of people care about this issue, and this moment carries great and lasting significance. The difference here is that it takes place within a magic circle, a shared illusion that is valued by society.

Back in the magic circle, it often results in a flow state⁠—a widely studied psychological phenomenon that extends far beyond games or sports. This is the state that arises in situations of high challenge and high skill. If you successfully create an attractive magic circle, then the player should focus on the game experience and ignore other needs. The outside world should gradually fade into the background. Chances are you've experienced that feeling of "getting in the groove." That's why many people love video games - that's what playing games is really about.

At this point, video games are starting to have problems these days. In many cases, playing a game is not free from outside distractions. In fact, it has been disturbed by the fact that people are already deeply disturbed by the factor in reality-money. We believe this is a big reason why mainstream players hate cryptocurrencies. Parts of the traditional gaming industry favor aggressive monetization practices, which can sometimes hurt the player experience. Therefore, when players think that they need to buy NFTs to play early crypto games, or when large publishers announce plans to build games in this space, they will think that this is a trick for game manufacturers to collect money and avoid them.

The problems described above are most pronounced in competitive multiplayer games, where certain players can pay for performance enhancements to beat others, which erodes the real fun of competition. These games are often labeled "Pay to Win" and rightfully boycotted. With the advent of cryptocurrencies, and the ability to tokenize and trade in-game assets, many critics worry that blockchain gaming will always be headed in that direction. While this point of view has some truth, it is too one-sided and ignores the huge opportunity that cryptocurrencies bring to optimize the gaming experience.

To summarize some of the key points we mentioned:

• People play games to escape reality; flow states and true immersion enhance this

• Skill-based competition is an important driver of what makes games meaningful

• While money affects the core gameplay, it also breaks the above

We believe that much of the criticism in the games industry of cryptocurrencies and traditional games stems from the way games are monetized. In an ideal world, one might think that to create the most immersive gaming experience, money must be limited to the core gameplay. That's not to say that all monetization methods are bad, but that we should look for monetization methods that don't compromise core gameplay or true competitive gameplay. Therefore, this is not to say that games where krypton gold touches the core gameplay are not allowed, because such games must have users. In fact, many Delphi team members enjoy such games. It is worth noting that these different models exist in different profit ranges and can be achieved in various ways. As ever, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in game design, and there will always be nuance in the infinite game design space.

History of Gaming Monetization

Before we explore the current incarnation of cryptocurrency in gaming, it’s worth taking a look back at how the industry has evolved in the above context. The video game industry has come a long way as a mainstream phenomenon since the late 1970s, when arcade games ushered in gaming's first golden age (1978-1982). These early games ooze soul, and the arcade's public spectacle unlocks a deep level of competitive power for the first time. The quest for a high score and the glory that comes with it is contagious, as it can be shown off to friends and foes alike. These games are tricky, fun, and follow the old adage that a good game is easy to learn but hard to master. Given the seemingly ubiquitous nature of modern video games, it seems counterintuitive that early gains could match recent gains. In 1981, the video game industry had $20 billion in revenue. Adjusted for inflation, the figure was $64 billion. In addition, the global game revenue in 2021 will be 180 billion US dollars. Novelty aside, what was the magic behind these early games?

When talking about NOR, Brooks Brown emphasized the concept of "fair play and the thrill of adventure". The core idea is that, early on, the game offers real risk. After getting to the front of the line at the arcade, your coins can buy you one life and three lives. If you die, you're out. Better players get more value because they live longer. The best players have the highest level of rewards, high scores, and their achievements can be immortalized - everyone understands how difficult it is to get a place on the scoreboard. This incentive structure drives players to want to get better with more practice, which can only be achieved by spending more money. There is even a skill inflection point beyond which mastery of the game becomes more cost-effective. Importantly, the fairness of the game is also sacrosanct. There are no cheat codes, purchasable power-ups, or other consumables in the game to give players an advantage. These games are primitive forms of competition where all variables other than the environment are within the player's control. Unlike many games we have seen in modern times, the user only needs to rely on skill to win in the game. Fair play, and the thrill of adventure.

With the development of the game industry, the emergence of home consoles allows players to leave the arcade and return to the comfort of their homes. They can now play any game they want, any time, without any restrictions. In the years between the rise of consoles and the advent of the internet, the public perception of arcade gaming and the competitive spirit surrounding high scores waned. Previously, these top "virtual athletes" could command large crowds, but now that energy has dissipated. Losing all three lives doesn't mean the same thing as "dead", as players can respawn for free without any penalty in the real world. Because it doesn't matter if you lose, and it doesn't matter if you win. The consequences of actions have changed. As Brooks puts it, "the devaluation of risk cuts the link between player skill and entertainment value". Eventually, game designers became more reliant on technological advancements, like better graphics and sound, to distract users from this subtle but important change. Henceforth, an eternal loop of infinite respawns in the comfort of your own home will be the norm. The former name of NOR is actually Eternal Return (Eternal Return), derived from Nietzsche's Eternal Return.

By the mid-1980s, video games were growing at a rapid rate, with ever-increasing production budgets, producing larger games with increasingly complex mechanics and longer stories. The gaming industry no longer competes directly with sports, but tends to compete with film and television. Decades later, we've seen this trend toward high-production-value games, writing in Netflix's fourth-quarter 2019 investor letter: "We compete more fiercely with Fortnite than with HBO."

In the '80s, '90s, and '00s, the industry was dominated by buyout AAA games -- games for which you had to pay a substantial upfront cost, usually $60. These games are released on CDs or cartridges and played on PCs and/or consoles like the Sony Playstation or Nintendo GameBoy Advance.

The "pay-to-play" business model means that only gamers with the requisite hardware (such as a console or gaming PC) and the willingness to shell out $60 can afford to play these video games. While these experiences are precious, the global popularity of video games is limited – in 2001, the best-selling video game Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal sold just 3.1 million copies. In comparison, "Garena: Free Fire" has more than 100 times the number of users, and currently has 311,250,355 monthly active users.

In addition, the value capture for developers is limited - there is no effective price discrimination, meaning that players who are willing to pay thousands of dollars for the game experience do not spend money meaningfully. This has changed significantly with the advent of free-to-play and mobile games.

Mobile games and free-to-play have taken the gaming business to dizzying new heights. Today, mobile games generate more revenue ($85 billion) than PC ($40 billion) and console ($33 billion) combined. Due to the huge distribution advantages of digital-first games, the industry began to lean towards free-to-play games. This opened the door to gaming to more than 3 billion people around the world, and the average age of gamers today is 35. Although the game is free to start, the game still needs to be profitable in order to receive funds. The mobile era has spawned two main strategies: advertising and, most controversially, microtransactions (including charging players extra), and these in-game advantages: convenience, time, and power over other players.

While most of these in-game paid items initially revolved around game skins and other deals that didn't affect game balance, in many cases it shifted. The design and development of the game is based on behaviorism, not from an interesting point of view. By focusing on improving user retention, prior to tiered monetization, the free-to-play industry has spawned a series of behaviorist mechanics that rely on the psychology of addiction in order to retain and monetize players. This includes booking mechanics, using notifications and social features to keep players logged in constantly.

On a darker note, developers intentionally create obstacles for players, creating uncomfortable situations, incentivizing them to spend money to overcome them. For example, allowing players to steal resources, encouraging players to buy shields to protect resources while offline. Additionally, since many games rely on "capturing" large users (whales) and monetizing them, the success of a game also depends on its economic depth, or how much whales are able to spend in those games. For example, fans of Diablo Immortal estimate that players may need to spend $600,000 to fully level up a character. Some parts of the current game industry are more inclined to allow krypton gold, which makes the gaming experience for non-krypton gold players worse.

This is especially corrosive in multiplayer games, where big consumers (whales) feel superior because of an unfair advantage. The market has spoken, and this business model is clearly extremely attractive to many developers. Unfortunately, some studios have gone too aggressively with this model and created a relationship of saber-rattling with playerbases who view their actions as predatory. Again, developers use these practices to varying degrees, from acceptable to extreme. Not all implementations of this mode are overt, and games like Rainbow Six: Siege don't ostensibly have any advantages you can buy for money. However, there are also subtler and more indirect manifestations, such as releasing new operator roles and intentionally shaking metadata to encourage user consumption. At their most extreme, the skins that are popular in most modern games don't confer in-game utility, but some players still feel they have an advantage in competitive scenarios.

In conclusion, in typical S-curve style, some aspects of the industry have shifted from user attraction to value extraction. Much of this monetization has become so ingrained that everyone is forced to play the same game. We've seen design stagnate at the monetization level, as various psychological tricks to engage players become more formulaic over time. Microtransactions and krypton gold can erode the concept of the magic circle, thereby confusing the axes that drive the flow state and ultimately ruining the player experience. Whether cryptocurrencies represent the next step in the evolution of monetization in games, and whether they can change this trend, we will explore later.

Blockchain in games

Before we delve into the current generation of crypto games, it is worth reviewing some properties of blockchain technology that we think would be interesting to apply to games. Below, we will analyze these advantages from the perspective of players and developers respectively.

For players, we saw the following key benefits:

• Digital property rights: In traditional games, digital items purchased by players (such as skins in "Fortnite") are actually only "rented" from the game company. When game assets are turned into NFTs, there is new security for players and their achievements. If the game ceases to function, other parties could theoretically step in, acknowledging the utility of these assets, and they might still have lasting collectible value even if the game doesn't exist.

• Liquidity in Secondary Markets: True digital ownership transforms consumer psychology, creating residual value for digital purchases in a global, verifiable liquidity layer. If users wish to leave an ecosystem, they can retain value from their investment.

• Source: Virtual goods now have a rich, verifiable history. For example, if your favorite esports player wins a world championship, you can get a signature skin for the weapon he uses in the game.

• Community Governance: Players can now participate in deciding the development direction of their favorite games through DAOs and committees

• Value Accumulation: As more and more players invest time and money in the game world, the value created by the game can obviously accumulate into the ecosystem token.

• On-chain reputation: unlocks a new player-centric design space, as players can now build strong player profiles across the ecosystem. We'll explore some of its uses later in the PlayFi section.

• Web3 Payment Infrastructure: By using encrypted payment rails, seamless payments are possible across many use cases, such as smart contract prize pools and tournament prizes - which are particularly burdensome in traditional esports.

For creators and developers:

• Increased profit range: Compared with the free-to-play mode where less than 2% of players purchase in-game items on average, there is a greater chance to make money from players. The ability to monetize the “long tail” of users comes from a deeper willingness to spend, which is driven by the previously mentioned player interests (e.g. digital asset ownership, provenance, etc.).

• Enhanced economic alignment: Sharing part of the game economy with players and creators means lower user acquisition costs and greater retention than traditional free-to-play games, resulting in higher life cycle (LTV).

• Improved Creator Economy: In UGC games like Roblox, creators only get 30% of the revenue. With blockchain games, creators typically retain more of the value they create and benefit from on-chain royalties.

• Interoperability and composability: While this will take time, blockchain technology has the potential to enable cross-ecosystem interactions by leveraging existing building blocks and open-source infrastructure. Interoperability between different games is very difficult, and composability and a wider web3 technology stack will be more promising innovations.

In the end, it would be a big mistake not to emphasize that crypto has brought very clear improvements to the game financing space. Many people may know that the Tencent-style monopoly of the entire industry has built an unbreakable moat. Most aspiring game developers create games out of a raw passion, but they quickly realize that the stagnation of mainstream business models and the moats built by large developers only give them two options:

• Try spending a few years working on creating predatory free-to-play mechanics and hoping you can work out the LTV > UA cost formula.

• Give up your creativity and become a cog in the big corporate machine.

The AAA gaming industry is often criticized for its toxic work culture, devoting hours to frantic work at brutally critical moments. What's more, the deep-rooted F2P model is sometimes overly biased towards value extraction, which has stripped the soul of many games. In the process, many people's love for the game was stolen. At the same time, the industry's demand for talent far outstrips supply.

In the typical free-to-play universe, it's not uncommon for marketing budgets to match development budgets, as tedious UA costs make it hard for players to rise above the noise. In a crypto model, this marketing budget can be deployed in an incentive design to steer the economy. Many of the world's best games were born in organic grassroots communities, not in the R&D labs of billion-dollar gaming giants. In the same way that the creator economy opens up a world for people to pursue their interests, the same goes for game developers.

contemporary crypto games

Encrypted gaming has taken off a storm in 2021, but it has lost some of its appeal as user stickiness has declined. While this mode isn't perfect, it has a number of advantages over traditional games. As previously mentioned, encryption can unlock digital property rights, verifiable secondary market liquidity, community governance, shared ownership structures, and significantly enhance developers’ financing options. The downside is that with the tokenization of most in-game assets, the economy becomes more difficult to manage. This is most difficult early on, which seems counterintuitive since the game is released in stages, meaning that much of the game's content and economy may not work. This often results in a decent increase in the supply side of the economy without the necessary offsetting demand to absorb that increase. In this case, game developers often create a number of tweakable means to help keep the economy in balance, but without full game functionality, their means are limited.

Liquidity in all parts of the economy combined with the game loop will cause the economy to overheat. In the beginning, the initial scarcity of all resources in the game, combined with pure financial speculation by non-players, helps keep demand and supply in sync. This dynamic creates an enticing environment for purely extractive players. These players exacerbate the imbalances we discussed earlier because they join early, creating more demand for both the consumable yielding assets and the consumables they produce. As the supply of an asset increases rapidly, it is not being met by the appropriate level of demand that would exist in a more established economy. Prices start to drop due to oversupply, and extractive game players and purely speculative market players leave. This further exacerbates the mismatch between supply and demand, because when they withdraw, demand is destroyed, leaving the economy in a bind.

One potential solution is to limit the transferability of consumable items early in the game until more game components and economies are built. They won't be on-chain, they'll just be associated with the account that generated those resources. This curbs the possibility of economies overheating before they are able to handle such levels of supply. It also lowers the price of early-stage assets because there are no yield-generating open-ended assets in the game whose prices have been temporarily driven up to astronomical levels by speculative capitalists. The skyrocketing asset prices caused by these value extractors can ultimately discourage players who are genuinely interested in it. It is a good solution to temporarily limit the transferability so that real players can claim these items on the chain in the future.

Another solution is to limit the economic relevance or lifespan of these consumable game items or assets. By giving players early on the expectation that these assets will not generate permanent ROI, teams will be able to better manage and tune their economies. Examples include setting seasonal resets for the economy (e.g. Diablo 2's ladder mode, Path of Exile season), setting resources that expire, or setting lifecycles for in-game assets.

Still, the introduction of money into the game has made it the dominant motivation so far. Therefore, the gameplay of these early games was affected by two aspects: 1) the dominant motivation of most players was the expectation of monetary rewards, rather than the game itself; Success through Kryptonite.

In 2019, Delphi helped design AXS, Axie Infinity's in-game governance token. At the time, Axie Infinity had very few players, and no one in the community really anticipated the virality and dominance of "Play-2-Earn" at the time. Still, we ended up at a situation where most players were pure value extractors, new user growth stagnated, and the in-game economy was in decline.

Now there are guilds that seek to specialize and industrialize the academic model, such as the Yield Guild, these organizations match users with a large number of assets, unlocking economic opportunity for large populations. It's worth highlighting the real impact this has on thousands of people in countries like the Philippines, where playing and earning has really changed the lives of many during COVID. In 2021, we see guilds receiving $512 million in public and private market funding. Most of the funds are used to invest in the internal assets of the game, as well as the venture capital of the game itself. Because of this buying pressure, we found that most fast-following games followed this trend and tried to adapt similar mechanics. Arguably, this field may have started an incentive loop in game and economic design without giving enough thought to whether that was the best path.

We believe guilds exist primarily to coordinate in-game resource extraction, which has strayed from their original vision. Unfortunately, as is often the case with cryptocurrencies, many of the current "players" in the crypto gaming space are mercenary in nature. Like yield farming, users seem to be attracted to the strongest incentives, rather than genuine enthusiasm for the game. Not only does this cause developers to overpay for early adopters, but it also hurts the experience for real players. These early games overemphasized the monetization element and ended up confusing the player's natural needs.

We still believe there will be a lot of demand for financialized games that choose to put the majority of the economy on-chain. These games bring about a new form of gameplay where skill and advanced knowledge of in-game metadata can create alpha in the game economic environment, with financial rewards for dedicated and savvy players.

The bottom line for these financialized games is that the percentage of players who purely extract value is smaller than the percentage of players who are happy to pay for entertainment. Ideally, value-extracting players provide useful or interesting content to paying players. We see this first generation of crypto games as an extension of traditional games.

It is very important for developers of blockchain games to have a clear understanding of what they are creating and who they are targeting. We believe that many developers have taken the decision to open up the economy too hastily, without fully appreciating the complexities involved in effectively navigating this path.

Earn money for games with cryptocurrencies

Another model that the Delphi Gaming team is exploring in depth recently is called PlayFi, pioneered by NOR. We think this model is very suitable for e-sports and competitive games, and Delphi will actively support the development of projects with these concepts. In order to better explain this, it is necessary for us to revise the magic circle concept in the game. True player agency and a free flow state, uninterrupted by surrounding forces vying for human attention, are the reasons why great games, like Super Smash Bros. , stand the test of time. Games that refuse to compromise on these core principles are characterized by elegance and purity. Furthermore, games that follow this pattern seem to be immune to the ephemeral effects of the contemporary digital environment. For example, Counter-Strike remains strong as one of the greatest competitive shooters of all time, while many other games have risen and fallen around it. Much of this can be taken from the way traditional sports work.

In professional sports mode, almost without exception, the core game mechanics are very basic and very accessible. For example, in a football game, the goal of the player is to kick the ball into the net. The game has certain fixed parameters; the crossbars have to be a certain height, the goalposts have to have a certain width, and the ball has a certain size and weight.

Furthermore, it is easy for players to participate in these sports. Any would-be athlete doesn't need to go very far to find a ball and a goal...often, sports are easy to pick up but hard to master. In football's many derivative configurations, players may like to introduce betting to raise the stakes and amplify the competitive spirit.

Importantly, as these scenarios become more competitive, players become more skilled and the overall difficulty rises accordingly. As the level increases, the profit margin will also increase. And these experiences are scarce. There are only so many players in the world who can compete at this level and they stand at the top of a huge talent pool. As a result, we've seen engagement opportunities in the form of coaches, fans, commentators, analysts, scouts, prediction markets, merchandise, collectibles, and more expand dramatically outside of the core game. As Brooks puts it: “The strong link between increased game difficulty and increased economic opportunity/engagement is at the root of the professional sports model and at the root of PlayFi.”

Essentially, we can think of sports’ monetization model as one that revolves entirely around metagames. These metagames are like spinoffs of purely skill-based games. Metadata can be thought of as data that describes other data. By extension, metagames can be thought of as derivative games that describe or are rooted in the core game. Importantly, the market game is distinct from the core competition loop.

At its core, football is not a game of markets⁠—it is a game of skill on the pitch. Its path to profitability starts with people focusing on the sport itself, then taking metadata from the games that make the most sense and playing metagames with them.

In the context of video games, where we've acknowledged that the core magic circle of a game must remain intact, one might wonder how we accommodate a larger audience that isn't interested in personally ascending to the top of a game. After all, there are countless user archetypes in modern games, including whales with a desire to spend, speculators who want to bet on top players, and more casual players who enjoy games in other ways. If left unchecked, money will always favor the dominant motive. So the first thing we did was to separate the marketplace game from the core game loop. In this way, we can begin to define independent magic circles that coordinate with each other, but do not interfere with each other. No one will be tricked into playing another game.

As with the professional sports model, the scarcity of experience matters. This is reflected not only in the technical level, but also in the rhythm of the game. For example, in football, Ronaldo only sets foot on that field once a week. Limiting the frequency with which these competing situations arise further facilitates the generation of meaning. In NOR, the scarcity and real risk of the player experience is driven by permadeath tournaments. In each game, the players themselves are NFTs that are permanently burned. They fully own their data and metadata, and benefit directly from the economy surrounding the core game. The goal of the PlayFi model is to encourage users outside of core competitors to play meta games with meta data. In theory, the more people care about games, the more they spend directly on metagames. By maximizing meaning generation and competition within the core game, we are able to maximize revenue through peripheral monetization.

In addition, we retain the promotional advantages of the free-to-play model, because players can play the game for free, and we can effectively price differentiate those players who are willing to spend more money on the meta game. We also avoid the disadvantages of krypton gold games.

At the heart of this framework is skill-based competition, which requires a tournament system to function. NFT is the underlying technology that allows us to tokenize any unique digital item - including event tickets. For example, let's look at the picture below, which has a total of 8 entry-level card slots. These starting points can all be sold in primary auctions and then freely traded in the secondary market without affecting the core gameplay. A smart contract representing a prize pool may receive 50% of all revenue (except for sponsors), further enhancing the attractiveness of the competition.

While this sounds somewhat similar to some modern esports, with the infusion of Web3 technology, ultimately cryptocurrencies will primarily serve as backend accounting engines, facilitating ticketing, payments, player NFT contracts (on-chain reputation), automated match bounties Smart contracts, etc. Cryptocurrencies unlock new levels of transparency for player profiles, deep liquidity layers facilitate seamless payments, and give people new ways to place bets without navigating heavy infrastructure. Furthermore, many properties of encryption (such as digital provenance) open up a new way for us to think about the digital realm. For example, buy NFT skins for e-sports competitions.

We now have a rich digital experience where fans can collect items from meaningful moments in esports history. What's exciting about building this kind of architecture in crypto is its ability to unlock open-source infrastructure that can be used for many applications across the industry. All esports-style games should meet the same standards. Once all the data, metadata, and infrastructure is consolidated into one place, we can let third parties come in and develop their own metagames around these games. It's hard to imagine how many more popular downstream applications this will lead to, but we're excited to see new modes and gameplay emerge. Once the technical foundation is laid, we believe users will drive creativity within their respective ecosystems. We need to spend some time researching the best meta games for professional events, and we hope PlayFi will do the same.

In the "earn while playing" game, the tokenization of game assets not only increases the start-up cost, because players need NFT to play the game, but also because the game assets are NFT with secondary market liquidity, the krypton gold mechanism is gradually Weakened competitive play. In the PlayFi model, the first change is that users do not need to own NFT to play games. In other words, make it like any other normal video game. Importantly, this does not mean that NFTs cannot and will not exist. Rare and unique digital assets still have their uses, but how those assets get into the game matters. For example, I might still get a digital collectible as a reward, but it should make sense to me in the context of the game. Additionally, because all monetization can occur outside of the game, we are able to alleviate many of the distribution frictions associated with crypto games in traditional app stores.

Interestingly, these components do not conflict with current P2E games and guilds, but rather facilitate them. For example, a game like Axie could offer a free mini-game mode that is purely skill-based and award NFTs to tournament winners as a true badge of honor. This can also reduce resistance for new players to accept the game.

Guilds like YGG are able to continue to grow their businesses beyond just providing player liquidity to bootstrap new gaming ecosystems, and are now also able to use players' NFT attributes to attract talent into them like traditional e-sports teams guild. They can then put them in competitions, earn prize money, and earn rewards for their efforts.

While not yet market-proven, we believe PlayFi has what it takes to propel esports into a golden age and unlock its true potential as a global entertainment heavyweight. We will actively support the infrastructure construction of NOR and other projects in this field.

in conclusion

The past 12+ months have been milestones for the crypto game, and despite all the growing pains, we look forward to playing a part in its development more than ever. It's early days in this field, making it hard to tell which models will win out over time. As proponents of this field, we must regularly challenge our assumptions and try to map out new ways these technologies can improve games for players and developers.

We think this is an excellent time for developers to reflect on the complexities of open economies and the vulnerability of these games to overfinancialization. We hope that through the path provided by PlayFi, we can further explore how encryption technology can improve games and profit models. The only way we're going to change mainstream perception is by creating experiences that demonstrate the power of this technology.