There has been some buzz recently about Pixelmaster, a “million dollar homepage” style game built on EOS. Users can draw on a public canvas by buying pixels from one another. Additionally, Pixelmaster contains some economic incentives popularized by FOMO3D–a jackpot game on Ethereum.
I’ve watched the crypto games space closely for the last year and a half (and spend most of my time on what you might argue is a big crypto game or a platform of crypto games). I have a more blase perspective on these games than those breathlessly reporting record-setting jackpot sizes or those crying ponzi scheme.
On the one hand, I think it’s great to see experimentation around using economic games to bootstrap engagement. On the other, I’ve seen about a year and halfs worth of hyped and then slowly dying games trying similar things whether it’s with jackpots or NFT speculation.
I think something that sticks will emerge from this experimentation, but it’s not FOMO3D or Pixelmaster (or Cryptokitties). Barring substantial changes to the rules or an unexpected wave of users, both of these games will continuously see lower and lower engagement until they die.
Why? They are–at their core–greater fools games. Assuming a relatively fixed player base, greater-fools games churn fools and eventually die.
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