Is GameFi Experiencing Exhaustion? — Aug 12 iZUMi Finance Twitter Space Recap

Host
Yond, Marketing Manager of iZUMi Finance // @0xYond
Guest speakers
Kata, CMO of X World Games // @kata_xwg
Adam, CMO of Tiny World // @tinyworldgamefi
Lily, Operation Director of Tap Fantasy // @tapfantasy2021
Antony, CMO of Game Wonderlab // @Antony_Lee_GW
Mark, Wizard of Froyo Games // @zeroxfroyo

On August 12, iZUMi Finance held a GameFi-themed Twitter Space panel with five top-tier GameFi projects on BNB Chain. Guests include X World Games, Tiny World, Tap Fantasy, Game Wonderlab, and Froyo Games. The panel kicked off around the recent Ultra Evolution campaign of iZiSwap, a mega-sized double incentive mining campaign that connects more than 10 quality projects that are built on BNB Chain. The panel held heated discussions such as the current exhaustion of the GameFi industry, the barrier of entry & user education, regulations on Play to Earn, etc., for a solid 80 minutes. With an audience count peaking at almost 500, iZUMi has achieved outstanding social media influence even during a bearish market.

If you want have a tl;dr, here’s the take-away

• iZiswap helps with better trading efficiency, pay attention to details to establish trust of community
• Games involve a large amount of transactions and token swaps, for which iZiSwap can effectively reduce slippages and improve capital efficiency.
• Games should be fun for everybody, and tokens are just about a trading medium that allows people to trade off their game items. Blockchain games shall emphasize on gameplay instead of speculation
• There needs to be a transition from Play to Earn to Play and Earn. P2E is not sustainable at all.
• Guilds shall keep the value inside the game economy instead of just farming and selling tokens for fiat.

Here is the recap of the panel, enjoy.

** X World Games, Tiny World, Tap Fantasy, Game Wonderlab, and Froyo Games, are top-quality BNB Chain projects that partnered with iZiSwap in the Ultra Evolution Campaign, which was started on July 18. Stay tuned for more projects that are landing on iZiSwap! **

Yond @ iZUMi Finance

First of all, I really appreciate the fact that you’ve all made your ways to deploy a big part of your liquidity to iZiSwap! The Ultra Evolution campaign brings all of you together to enjoy the high capital efficiency that is exclusive to iZiSwap. What does this partnership mean to you and your user communities?

Lily @ Tap Fantasy

Tap Fantasy is happy to collaborate with iZUMi Finance to launch our pool there. I agree with the idea that games would involve a large amount of transactions and token swaps, for which iZiSwap can effectively reduce slippages and improve capital efficiency. Also, I believe this is a good opportunity to exchange the user base for both sides and also unite our communities, which will make us both stronger.

Mark @ Froyo Games

I’d like to add that on top of just the benefits we get from low slippages, our community is very excited to jump into the new pools. We have built pools on Pancakeswap and Sushiswap. IZiSwap is something new that’s coming out and new hunters are pretty excited about it. Thank you for this opportunity for us to work together!

Yond @ iZUMi Finance

At the end of last year, there was a crazy amount of GameFi projects that packed the market with low-quality ponzi schemes and then soft rugged for a very short life cycle. Now that the market has gone through a deep crash, many of those products are dead, but still brings a negative impact to average users who wanna try out GameFi. From your perspective as a developer, how do you recover the market confidence, or what do you think of the current GameFi user market in general?

Adam @ Tiny World

It’s true that this kind of projects have given us a bad name, taking away the credibility of genuine GameFi projects which are innovative solutions. First, I think it’s really important to build trust between the developers and the user community, to educate the users on what to look out for, how to avoid scams, and to ensure users know how to use your platform, so that they’re not just making mistakes that are costing them money and just walked away. This is something that we really fought against by preparing tutorials, by educating the user community, and by collecting their feedback as well. I think also the low quality projects that might have been scams, have brought a bit of a demand for higher quality gaming on blockchain. We really believe Tiny World can be an open thought for traditional gamers coming into the blockchain gaming space. And gaming is a huge industry, the more gamers are introduced to the blockchain and Web3, it’s going to be better for everyone involved in this space.

The market conditions might be a bit tougher currently, than they were earlier in the year, projects like Tiny World and others are still seeing growth. The active users are over 57% in the last 7 days, for continuous development and strong marketing efforts, and obviously hard work. The GameFi market has been fairly stable recently in terms of users. As soon as the market condition improves, to sort of closer than what they were earlier this year, then I think GameFi will be one of the first to recover the users that have been lost.

Kata @ X World Games

You can really see the projects that are continuously building in the market right now, especially on the BNB Chain. I see everyone updating their services, developing their foundation, building new products, bringing in new services. It’s great to see and I’m really excited about the future of GameFi, because blockchain technology has a purpose in it, whether it’s decentralized or centralized, we just want to create a trusted service. We do all this building, so that when the market does bounce back we’re ready to support all the influx of users coming from traditional gaming or coming from maybe not even gaming at all. I’m pretty excited about it and I don’t have a crystal ball either, but hopefully, once this passes, we will be building as well and ready for it. I’m excited to hear about everyone else and what they’re doing too.

Antony @ Game Wonderlab

My team actually have more than 15 years experience in game production, but I actually refer from the traditional game industry so we are still new to the crypto market. We are still doing a lot of research on the current GameFi projects. After we finish all our research, we actually still believe that games should be fun for everybody, and tokens are just about a trading medium that allows people to trade off their game items, from over the counter to exchange trading. We think this would be what a blockchain game should look like in the future, which emphasizes on gameplay but not speculation anymore.

If we take the speculation part away, it will influence or weaken our token speculation. Maybe this will have a negative impact in our initial stage when we launch our game, but we still need to spend more money on the game development in order to attract more players to play.

Also, the money making effect will also be weakened, and this pressure is very big to us now, especially during this bear market. The financing method is tightened, so it’s very difficult to find money. The trading volume is very low, too. We think that someone has to be needed to make a fun game to change the whole market. I think the game farm market will develop better in the future, after we finish the bearish market while the bull market is coming. We will be fully prepared for it.

Mark @ Froyo Games

I agree with Antony that there needs to be a transition from Play to Earn to Play and Earn. We all know that P2E is not sustainable at all. I’m not going to mention names here, but some projects they just wasted $100,000 development cost and put in a really disgusting P2E or hyperinflation economy. Once these games are wiped out from the industry, it will eventually get better and the confidence will eventually come back.

There’s also another issue, we have worked with big titles for the last seven years and we have more than 390,000,000 downloads for all our games previously. It’s just not very easy to transit Web 2 gamers into Web 3, this is one of the issues that we are facing as well. Of course, not everyone is into NFTs and GameFi.

In P2E, you just want to go and play the game and earn. You don’t actually care about it. Whereas Play and Earn is more like you enjoy the game, the game is of good quality. So you’re actually playing the game at the same time you’re earning. I keep playing the game not to earn but to have fun while enjoying the game, and at the same time earning. That’s the transition from Play to Earn to Play and Earn. With a lot of upcoming projects which involve a lot of Play and Earn, the concept is emphasized, especially in Korea.

Yond @ iZUMi Finance

What do you think of guilds in the GameFi ecosystem and what are their positive and negative impacts towards a specific game product? What sort of support will you give towards guilds?

Adam @ Tiny World

I think there are many positives of guilds. You can attract higher user numbers and get more exposure. It really helped Axie Infinity to get so large. In my opinion, this sort of business model does create a lot of selling pressure on the major token, as it’s usually the only income generated by the scholars who will sell it instantly for fiat currency and doesn’t go back into the ecosystem. The token then suffers from inflation.

According to our Tiny World, we are actually looking to create our own guilds led by our real users and the community, so we can found guilds through our DAO and through the treasury. The community governance can allow the token holding community to choose who these guild managers may be. A good chunk of spending that happens on the Tiny World platform, or the majority of the profits, actually go back into the treasury in Tiny World.

This extra spending actually goes back in and boosts the economy again. It creates this closed loop economy. If you have a guild that is bringing you lots of users but it’s taking a lot of liquid value out of your project, then this will be keeping that value inside of the economy. This is what we’re thinking about how we might interact with guilds in the future, and it’s on our roadmap in about a year’s time. Obviously, you’ll have to build all of the infrastructure for that, but in terms of how guilds potentially improve their weaknesses, creating incentives can encourage users to hold these tokens rather than just selling them.

We could potentially offer a stablecoin leaderboard for guild members, which can potentially avoid selling the native token and causing an inflation in the token currency. That’s where we stand with guilds, and I’m sure some of the other guys here will have their own opinions and ideas of how they might interact with guilds in the future. And I’d love to hear them.

Mark @ Froyo Games

Some renowned guilds are our close partners and they happen to be our investors as well. I think the real positive impact is that they are able to bootstrap your Web 3 games with an early user base. But at the same time, most of the guilds are here to just farm and dump the tokens. That’s the reason why you’re building a real Play to Earn game and this is what happens. But I guess a lot of guilds are transiting into other business models as well. Let’s be straight here, the model is not working and most guilds are transiting into a bank, or lending. Some of them are even coming up with their own titles. The positive impact here is really that they are here to kick start your early user base for the game.

Yond @ iZUMi Finance

What approaches have you made to maintain your player retention and extend the project’s lifespan? Most GameFi products die after a couple of months, how do you prevent yourselves from being short-living? What do you want to propose to your users?

Kata @ X World Games

I think a great way to do that especially if you have the intentions to enlighten some projects is to talk with your community on a daily basis. They are your user base, and they are the reason that you are existing in the GameFi space at this time. And they’re the most important part in your machine. Especially during a bear market when we’re all building, and our users might not see what’s going on in the back end even though we have so much going on that we would love to tell them about. It’s really important to provide them with consistent information, if we can update, of course, or just events putting on something to keep the community engaged and then also listening to them.

We want to hear your feedback. A lot of our new mechanisms that we’ve introduced in the X World Games ecosystem go through a lot of beta testing with our long term community members. We have like our secondary groups for those members who are open to join whenever we do our testing we usually put out like our Telegram link to it and those people get to test the new stuff before it comes out. it’s really just being able to interact with your community members on a daily basis, that I think that they will stay. They built a family with you, so I think it’s important to treat them like that.

Lily @ Tap Fantasy

Our team had rich experience in developing traditional games. Basically we will use operational activities such as setting up competitions and rankings, and keep updating the gameplay so we would like to provide a continuous freshness to the players. Also, we developed the new mode called Design to Earn, which means we provide SDKs to the third party or other game designers, just like the Design to Earn in Roblox. Designers can earn shares of the operating income by creating small games in Tap Fantasy and we’ll provide the free map editor and SDKs for them. In addition, designers can also create NFTs in their small games and earn by selling those NFTs. Actually it’s written in our road map of this year and it’s coming in the 4th quarter!

Antony @ Game Wonderlab

Firstly, my team should take the full responsibility for the whole project from the beginning to the end, unlike some projects which rely on the community and don’t take the responsibility. We maintain the full supply and demand of the tokens by using our own cash flow to stabilize the whole tokenomics. And we also continuously import new players from the traditional game market to our Web 3 games, because the games we launched are all very popular games in the traditional market. Some of the games even reached almost 10 million players in the traditional game industry. We already had a very big and good user base.

Now we are trying to import those players into our Web 3 games on the web platform. And we tried to find a partnership with other projects to educate those people, just like the partnership we had with iZUMi Finance.

In August, we already launched our first game series combined with 5 games. We have achieved token unification through the whole of the five games, meaning that the players don’t need to worry about their token prices or their NFT assets to be worthless someday. The NFTs players have can be used in multiple games in our Game Wonderlab and that’s the way we are trying to maintain our whole platform as a whole.

Players who join Game Wonderlab will not only play games, they will find a lot of ways they can do in our platform, such as using the game token to read comics. This would be realized by the end of this year.

Adam @ Tiny World

I think it’s really important just not to stand still in this space. It’s important to continue to build and to do your due diligence on your project and ensure that it’s set up when the market comes back. This is when you can really retain your loyal user base by continuing to develop products that you have, by sticking to your clear and strong roadmap. What we’ve done in Tiny World is we’ve implemented an economic model update which strengthens the total game economy which will allow for sustainability and growth into the future. The team has even delayed the best thing of their portion of the native tokens by a whole year, which it increases the trust within the community and will allow those players to think that Tiny World is going to be in a good position moving into the future.

Mark @ Froyo Games

When it comes to Web 2 retention you will need to keep generating content, to retain the users. But when it comes to Web 3, it’s kind of like a chicken and egg thing. The higher the rewards are, obviously the retention will be there. The lower rewards you have, you lose your user retention. There needs to be a synergy between rewards and a fun game play to retain the users especially in Web 3.

For Web 2 games, if you do like Play and Earn or what’s not as rewards is illegal. When it comes to Web 3, there is a token model in it, that people get to earn something. It gives an upper advantage when building Web 3 games to actually retain more users to generate content with a layer of rewards. That’s really something good to implement, since it gives you an upper advantage for user retention.

Kata @ X World Games

I think it is a balancing act of course and what we’re doing in actual games during this building period we’ve released a lot of new mechanisms to our community, that are like crypto based mechanisms. It provides a more fun aspect. If a player’s grinding for a certain NFT card, we’ve introduced a lot of new NFT card crafting mechanisms into our system. One would be collecting shards in order to create one of the NFTs that are in the hero shard boxes. The other one is within the game when you’re receiving all of your in-game items in your treasure box, you’re actually building up to upgrade your cards. It’s really cool to add all these new mechanisms into the gameplay, to freshen up the system because it is a time to build. There’s just so many ways that we can be creative in the space right now and introduce new things to our community members. But again, it is a balancing act. I think right now the crypto space especially, they’re looking for rewards in a bear market, but we also want to provide interesting gameplay too. It is really about being able to encapsulate all of that and just make it enjoyable for the user, because it is the user experience.

Yond @ iZUMi Finance

It’s already August and we are already 2/3 of the way through 2022. How do you rate GameFi in 2022 so far? With only a few GameFi products that are renowned among the player community previously this year, there seems to be a lack of new narratives and opportunities for GameFi projects. What are some real problems you are encountering recently?

Kata @ X World Games

We had this recently in our ecosystem, which we kind of worked on protecting. It was super interesting, like we had a part of our ecosystem to have a free NFT airdrop, and it was a common card because all of our NFTs have different rarity. It was more of an introduction to the game where you receive your common card. But this created a detrimental issue especially to a lot of Play to Earn games, where our community noticed a free rider issue where people weren’t gaming and they were just staking. Because the issue with creating a DeFi space and a gaming like Play to Earn space is sometimes that some people are just here for the DeFi, while some people are here for the gaming. We wanted to ensure that all of our users had something for them but also that they were participating because we are first a GameFi company.

We actually asked our community members what they had their opinion on the situation and we were able to build a new tokenomics. Essentially, we created a new BEP1155 asset called Lucid, and it actually changed our in game reward systems. And Lucid is a necessary asset in order to enter into our staking pools. In order to enter into our staking pools, you must burn Lucid in the process. We created this system just to put a small requirement on our tokennomics system just so that we can ensure that our ecosystem is protected from this. We pulled back the common cards from our mystery box, because there was a surplus of them in the ecosystem, which users were just buying up and using to stake. It was detrimental to the ecosystem. We really took it on ourselves to help correct that because our users and long-term holders were frustrated. We asked for their opinion and I know that’s why DAO exists and we have our own world of DAO. It’s really great to be able to collaborate that way, we came up with the new model in May and launched it. So far everything has been great. Everyone is very very very happy with the new system. We’ve seen just definitely an increase of user appreciation and engagement in all the mechanisms we’ve introduced.

Lily @ Tap Fantasy

Under the current market condition where the market is going downhill and returned to a more rational state. Only the high quality games can be recognized by players in this cycle. Tap Fantasy has been running very stably, and the problem we are facing is to expand our player base, since we just launched our cross-chain version on Solana. We are planning to build a Metaverse on blockchain. We are just solely focusing on how to operate the game to make this project better. We would like to make it more playful because for me, the key of Play to Earn is that players really enjoy playing. Only if the user really enjoys doing the thing itself, that the economic system will get stronger.

Antony @ Game Wonderlab

Currently, the most crucial thing to us is about how to educate those traditional players. We don’t really have the experience in how to help those new players to learn all the crypto knowledge, like how to create a wallet, etc. Now we are trying to find partnerships with a lot of projects from different perspectives. This is the difficult thing for us to solve right now. The bearish market doesn’t really matter to our project because we have a sufficient fund for us to run, which can maintain our whole project to last for years.

Mark @ Froyo Games

The real problem we face is that we need to strategize our distribution channels. Look at the shareholders there, they have like 3–4 million telecom users, and we just need to figure out how we’re gonna distribute the games, especially our upcoming Metaverse that will be publishing for iCandy to all these Web 2 users.

About iZUMi

iZUMi Finance is a multi-chain DeFi protocol providing One-Stop Liquidity as a Service (LaaS). Its philosophy is that every token deserves a better on-chain liquidity in an efficient and lasting way. Deployed on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and Arbitrum, iZUMi has provided liquidity services for BitDAO and 10+ protocols, and managed over $60M liquidity from reputable institutions and 8,000 individual LPs.

About iZiSwap

iZiSwap is the first concentrated liquidity DEX on BNB Chain with an innovative DL-AMM model. Before the birth of concentrated liquidity DEX, liquidity was distributed uniformly throughout the price curve between 0 and infinity. However, in many pools, most liquidity was never used. On iZiSwap, liquidity is being put to work more efficiently.

iZiSwap aims to help projects bootstrap and manage their own pool and on-chain liquidity transparently and efficiently. Our Double Reward Incentives Campaign will keep on inviting excellent projects to join.

If you are a project and interested in in the Double Reward Incentives Campaign, please submit an application via this link https://forms.gle/65tGaEG69BPg2Krg8

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