Talking about "Black Myth: Wukong", when will GameFi be able to obtain the true scriptures?

Author: YBB Capital Researcher Zeke

Foreword

This article is just some idle chats during the market's garbage time, which requires a certain degree of understanding of the traditional game market. You can read this article as a diary or a random thought. These are just some of my superficial thoughts on GameFi after playing "Black Myth: Wukong" and my views on the future of this track.

1. The 81 difficulties of game science

In three days, the total network sales exceeded 10 million, the peak number of Steam players online at the same time exceeded 2.35 million, the sales of joint peripherals of multiple brands exploded, and national media interviewed many times. Multiple game locations can be entered for free for life with game clearance records, and the 1986 version of "Journey to the West" has more than 4 million views on YouTube. The above are several related news about "Black Myth: Wukong" since its launch. If you don't play stand-alone games, it may be difficult to understand the meaning of some related data in these news. Let me give you a simpler example: judging from the sales and online player data within seven days, this game is almost equivalent to the Chinese national football team reaching the semi-finals in the World Cup, and there is still room for improvement.

Admittedly, this success is also contributed by many factors outside the game. However, in the final analysis, it is still inseparable from the game's own level of strength. As far as my personal experience is concerned, "Black Myth: Wukong" has not reached absolute perfection. But in the context of domestic 3A, it is definitely unprecedented, and its level is enough to compete with the ARPG games of the world's top game manufacturers. Therefore, after playing, what is left is more emotion and reflection. Game Science has experienced far more difficulties and obstacles than game makers in our circle, but why has there never been a game breaker like GameFi since the end of the P2E era?

To understand this, perhaps I can start with my memory of Game Science. In the summer of 2013, the most popular games in Internet cafes were League of Legends and CF. As a frequent visitor to the black Internet cafes near the school, the sounds I heard most often every day were "Welcome to Summoner's Rift" and "Fire In The Hole". Interestingly, one day I vaguely heard some sticks and swords hitting each other with ancient style BGM among these familiar sounds. I asked them what they were playing, and they asked me, you don't even know this? "God of War"!

This game was definitely the best among the MMORPG games at the time, and I still remember it vividly. After all, in the black Internet cafes with only two hours of lunch break during the peak business hours of the day, nearly a quarter of the people were playing this kind of game with all kinds of plots, which was rare. However, this gust of wind came and went quickly. After a few months, I rarely heard these hitting sounds in my ears. I also asked some of them why they didn't play "God of War" anymore, and the answers I got were basically the same: it's not fun anymore, and they can't afford to spend so much money. Later, no one mentioned this game again.

Six or seven years later, a monkey that followed the old man's voice and turned into a golden cicada and flew into Black Wind Mountain appeared in the world, announcing that the domestic stand-alone game circle was about to change. I began to curiously check which big company would challenge such a thankless task, and the result was shocking. Game Science? A studio of about 30 people? You know, the development of games of the same level has more than 3,000 people ("Red Dead Redemption 2"), and the most popular Japanese stand-alone studio, such as FS, the developer of "Elden Ring", has a scale of nearly 200-300 people, and basically has more than ten to twenty years of experience in stand-alone game development. Looking down further, I saw the unfamiliar yet familiar name, Feng Ji, the chief planner of Douzhano. After learning the story behind this producer, I suddenly understood how much unwillingness was contained in the last sentence of the first promotional video of Black Myth: Wukong, "After the bones, go back to the Westward Journey" (Douzhano began to fall after the third chapter of the bones). In 2009, online games were basically dominated by RPGs. World of Warcraft, Zhengtu, Legend, Fantasy Westward Journey, and Hot Blooded Jianghu were all frequent visitors to Internet cafes in that era. Internet-addicted teenagers of the 80s and 90s basically grew up with these well-known IPs. As the most profitable game type, Tencent, which is now in its heyday, could not even get a share of it at that time, so the AGE engine was hurriedly brought out. So who will make the game? Feng Ji, who was less than 30 years old at the time, was entrusted with this important task and served as the chief planner of the game. The start of "God of War" was invincible. Tencent's CG, which was produced with great investment, and the carefully polished game levels made this game a hit. But Feng Ji and the production team made a fatal mistake in my opinion. He wanted to make it more like a stand-alone game than an online game, and paid too much attention to quality. As an MMORPG, there are only three chapters, which is too little content. It took too much time to polish it, and it was not commercially viable enough. Feng Ji understands games, but he doesn't understand capital. "God of War" is well received but not popular. After all the production content was exhausted, in order to maintain the daily activity of players and withstand Tencent's KPI requirements, a large number of repetitive gameplays of Korean games (running maps, sects, and repetitive copies) were stuffed into the game. Unfortunately, this move not only failed to extend the life of the game, but also caused the word of mouth to explode. The final ending of "God of War" was that Tencent changed the operation team, implanted a large number of krypton gold systems in the game, affecting the balance of the game, and died in the abuse of players. There was a very classic saying among the players at that time, which corresponds to the ending of the previous paragraph, "After the bones, there is no more Journey to the West".

Feng Ji made a self-deprecating short film afterwards, and took a few direct members and art planner Yang Qi away. In short, the story of making "God of War" is that a group of young people with a dream of playing games were hit hard by reality. However, the story behind is very satisfactory, and everyone knows it, so I will not narrate it in detail here. Fourteen years after the release of "God of War", this group of "young people" finally succeeded in obtaining the true scriptures (it also took Tang Monk in "Journey to the West" fourteen years to obtain the scriptures).

Second, the extreme pursuit of certain things is also a kind of golden hoop

Knowing shame and then being brave, this is a spirit that is extremely lacking in our circle. We always think that GameFi is not successful because the economics are not perfect enough, the form of the game is not right, the chain is too complicated, and the threshold is too high. Especially obsessed with things outside the game, but few people pay attention to the game itself.

2.1 The premise of financialization is that players are willing to pay

I have always thought that I am a person who knows a little about games. I have been playing Game Boy since I was seven years old, starting with the black and white "Pokemon", "Kirby" and "Zelda" in the 2D era. Then to the rise of e-sports games, and now the end of the game console era, I have always been one of them. Basically, I have played all the games that are slightly popular, and most of them are quite good. But even so, I rarely talk about GameFi on my own initiative. I always feel that my understanding of GameFi is not as good as any other track in Web3. GameFi is a product that makes me feel inexplicable. As a pre-investment, I receive at least three or four decks (business plans) of GameFi projects every month. Most of the decks are 80% to 90% about economics, token allocation, how large the scale of the game industry is, and what guarantees blockchain technology can provide. There are very few parts about games, and some don’t even have demos.

They give me the feeling that they understand finance, but not much about games. The essence of a successful game is simple and fun. Excessive financialization is an anti-player and anti-project behavior (provided that the game is made seriously). You may tell me how brilliant the blockchain games in the P2E era are, but in my opinion, that is Ponzi's victory, not GameFi's victory. Many people in the circle have cheered for the entry-level NFTs of blockchain games such as "Stepn" and "Farmer's World", which are often five or even six figures in RMB. But this is actually isolating real game users. More than 95% of online games, even point-card games, have free entry barriers. Traditional players are not incapable of paying, but they only pay for emotions, passion, and sense of achievement. The dragon sniper in CSGO, the dragon blind in League of Legends, the cape in the early PUBG, and the ghost tiger in World of Warcraft are all equally expensive, but they cannot change any attributes of the player's character in the game, and some cannot even be resold. In this era, the business logic of the top games has always been simple. If you can make players happy and secrete dopamine, players will pay crazily. Most of them don't even have economics. Once the game introduces tokens and NFTs that affect the balance, it will actually become very complicated. Let's talk about the simplest one first. For example, a project party that sincerely wants to develop a large-scale blockchain game must at least take care of tokens and NFTs at the same time, which forces the game to be updated and improved frequently. We just talked about the value of the former. Too high a price will eliminate new players, and the community will collapse if the price collapses. Tokens and NFTs are in conflict with the latter. Game development is much more expensive than we imagined. After burning through the early financing. Tokens and NFTs will become the only economic support for subsequent version updates. Selling tokens is equivalent to taking the community death spiral Or giving up the original intention and leaving with a vote. Another option is to make a bunch of new NFTs and then sell them, but the motivation to attract players to buy can only be NFTs that are rarer, more profitable, and have more explosive properties than the early NFTs. So is this disguised increase in issuance a slap in the face of early NFT buyers and even the Web2.5 model? Even if the development period of the new version is survived, how can the huge pit caused by these NFTs be made up in the future? In the end, falling into death is just a necessity, and the end of "God of War" is also a microcosm of this situation.

So GameFi gives me the feeling that it is more like different types of mines, each with different rules, but in essence, you buy a shovel, go to the mine every day to work, and then dig until the mine collapses. This situation is still common even now. Speaking of this, let's talk about something a little more complicated. The discussion of GameFi in the circle is still keen on the "mine rules", and recently ServerFi is being discussed, but it feels to me like everyone thinks that with ServerFi, it seems to have found some kind of "mine rules" that can keep the mine in balance forever. After entering the 3A era, GameFi has indeed become richer in elements and more playable. Large-scale blockchain games can indeed be more complex in economic design. I also tried to understand the so-called game economics in 23 years, but in fact, any kind of economics needs the support of the player base (without the player base, it is impossible to create a turnover out of thin air, and the economic design can only restrict different participating roles), otherwise it will evolve into a game between players and project parties. Introducing complex economics may not necessarily make the game fun, but in most cases it is the beginning of collapse. If you have a certain understanding of traditional MMORPGs, then it should not be difficult to understand how difficult it is to find a balance between the faucet and the sink. The difficulty of making complex game economic designs is no easier than governing a small country. After looking through a lot of MMORGP designs about game economy, I actually only found one example that has been successfully maintained for many years-"Fantasy Westward Journey", but the number of registered players of "Fantasy Westward Journey" exceeds 100 million (close to the total population of Japan). Its game elements and designs are so complex that not only GameFi can't learn it, but even Web2 has few successful replicators. The cryptocurrency world is a utilitarian world. As long as they can make money, all the rules, designs, and loopholes in the game will be repeatedly studied, and collapse is often just a thought away. To maintain balance, the only way is to constantly update the rules. This kind of behavior of changing orders every day is a slap in the face of decentralization. "Mine rules" have never been the most important. The meaning that blockchain gives to games is also very simple. It makes the ownership and economic system of digital assets more fair and transparent, and can also bring opportunities to bottom-up game developers. But blockchain cannot change the essence of things, and it should not put the cart before the horse.

2.2 3A games

After the end of P2E, GameFi is basically divided into two directions, 3A-level chain games with playability as the entry point and On Chain Games with fairness and in line with the spirit of the Autonomous World as the entry point. Let's talk about the former first. Although I also look forward to a 3A game that breaks out of the circle in GameFi, 3A may not be suitable for this circle. I am not saying this to completely deny this type of game. I believe that there will be successful 3A masterpieces in GameFi in the future, but at present, it is difficult to not be out of the circle. From a business perspective, 3A games are a very tasteless game type in Web2, and even more so in Web3.

We must first understand the definition of 3A, a lot of money (Alot of money), a lot of resources (Alot of resources), and a lot of time (Alot of time). As for how big this amount is, there has never been an accurate definition. If it is based on my standards, this type of project represents the highest standard in the industry. As long as it fails once, it may make a world-leading game company irreversible. Blockchain is bottom-up, and in essence, the two are very incompatible, but the current GameFi development path has an inexplicable obsession with 3A. 3A equals grand production and beautiful pictures, but it does not directly equal fun. In the blockchain world, 3A chain games raise funds through pre-sale of NFTs, which is basically a default behavior, but the game basically has no semi-finished products at this time. What will happen in the future depends entirely on gambling and imagination. Once a failure occurs, it is not the project party that pays the bill, but thousands of retail investors and VCs. For a game with a development cost of over 100 million yuan, in order to form a virtuous cycle, based on the conversion rate of normal online game paying players (low conversion rate: less than 1%, medium conversion rate: 1% to 3%, high conversion rate: 3% to 5%), at least hundreds of thousands of players are required to enter. Whether this round of 3A chain games can have such performance, I think it should not be difficult for you to understand (Web3 players in 24 years have dropped by 6 times compared to 23 years, and currently there are less than 1 million), most of them will fall into some of the situations described above, become mines and eventually collapse. As for the current situation, it is basically impossible to form a closed loop in the circle from top to bottom of the entire business logic. Making 3A chain games is more like making money from both VCs and retail investors. If someone is really obsessed with this path and wants to be the game changer, then I hope you will not be wiped out by utilitarianism. Games are very concrete entertainment products, and they can never fool real players. I also hope that the story about game science can encourage you to find the truth in this impetuous circle.

2.3 On-chain Game

On-chain Game can also be called on-chain game, autonomous world, pure Web3 chain game, Islamic game, etc. This is a concept that has existed for a long time, but it became popular only last year. However, it is rarely mentioned today. From the perspective of decentralization, there is nothing wrong with the path of on-chain game. We also said in the above article that there are various ways for Web 2.5 games to break decentralization. The purest fairness can only be to leave everything to the code. But this concept is full of flaws from other perspectives. For example, is the significance of game playability really less than fairness and permanence? If the rules are completely on the chain, if there is a loophole, how can the token not collapse? Every action requires Gas and signature. Can it really be called a game? At this stage, the on-chain game can only meet the needs of a niche group. Similar to the earlier SocialFi, would you use a social platform without content? Although there are many solutions to these problems now, most of them are not perfect, and the launch of this concept may have to be in the next round.

Third, the wind rises from the tip of the green duckweed, and the waves are formed between the waves

Blockchain is not only for running games, and the financialization of games does not necessarily have to be online chain games. In addition to Web3, there are actually many bottom-up game makers. They may be college students, self-taught enthusiasts, and middle-aged gamers who have just been laid off from large companies. They may not be able to create miracles like Black Myth: Wukong, but there are thousands of game types, carriers, and gameplays, and independent games are often the direction they choose. The amount of money they lack is actually very small, and blockchain itself is a very good crowdfunding platform. It has always been an idea in my mind to build an economic system for independent games around this group of people. The circle is too eager for quick success, and there is a group of people outside the circle who still love it. If you are interested in this idea, you can watch some documentaries, such as Modian's "Lonely" and Sena Film's "More Than Games". This is a positive thing with the opportunity to make money.

The specific implementation process may not be so rigorous, I will briefly explain my ideas. Although there are many Launchpad platforms for games in the currency circle, most of them are still centered on online games, and most of the crowdfunding methods are still sold through NFTs. In the end, even if the game is successful, the players can still get very little income. Independent stand-alone games have the advantages of fast production and low cost. Crowdfunding can be conducted by putting demos of some levels on the shelves. In this way, an exclusive community can be obtained before the game is released. Enthusiasts and stakeholders can contribute their own strength to make the details of the game better. Crowdfunding NFTs can be divided into many categories. For example, the lowest-end NFT can be used to buy out the future play rights of the game, and the higher-end NFTs can be used to increase skins, while the higher-end ones can be used to share part of the future income of the game. The way to release crowdfunding funds is through voting by NFT holders. For example, when subsequent production funds are needed, the previous production situation, related demos, and videos are released first, and the funds are released after the community reviews the complete quality. If a game's demo performs well, the price of the corresponding high-end NFT will also rise. After this set of logic matures, the platform can also try to launch some larger-scale game crowdfunding. Here is another story. The funds for the birth of "Black Myth: Wukong" actually came from the independent mobile game led by Feng Ji. The greatest things in blockchain are not born in dark corners, and independent games can also be very successful.

Fourth, flatten the bumps and make a highway, fight through the difficulties and set off again

Finally, I would like to share here a passage of Feng Ji’s thoughts two months before the launch of Black Myth: Wukong.

“During the development of Black Myth: Wukong, most of the decisions I made can be simplified into three words—‘give it a try’.

Try the features that others had done flawlessly ten years ago, but we still couldn’t get the hang of.

Try the creative ideas that everyone was excited about talking about, but the actual quality was so bad.

Try the gameplay that was boasted about in the promotional video with a demo, but the performance was poor or quite boring when it was actually made.

Try everything that looks beautiful, but because of overconfidence or impulsiveness, a lot of time was invested in trial and error, but it was repeatedly hit against the south wall and bleeds.

Black Monkey may be too lucky. It has been full of challenges since its launch, and naturally there are also regrets that it is not enough.

When I finished the first level that could be tested internally, I didn’t know how much it would cost to turn the entire story into such a level.

Even if I already had a seemingly complete story, I still didn’t know what it meant to make it stable, smooth, adapt to different software and hardware platforms and more than a dozen languages, and then release physical versions and CDs.

It’s better not to know.

Since you have chosen to dance in an uninhabited area, you should calmly embrace the fear and anxiety brought by uncertainty. Because behind the fear and anxiety, there are also surprises that satisfy curiosity and the pleasure of recognizing yourself.

In this unknown fog, our only guide is to ask ourselves more and ask everyone in the team more - what we are doing now, do we understand, recognize, and love it as users?

Has anyone else in the world done the challenge we are facing now? Even if no one has done it, can we do it?

If the answer to the above is yes, then of course it is worth a try.

Just like in the tenth year of Game Science, we decided to publish it ourselves for the first time, set the price for the first time, put it on the console for the first time, make a physical version for the first time, and promote it globally for the first time... It was also based on such self-questions and self-answers.

Give it a try, it won't kill you. ”