Good morning,
As promised, here are my slides (visit full text for link) from the CUBS conference from last week. They benefit quite a lot from my voiceover, so if you have any questions feel free to email me and I’ll include them and my answers in next weeks email.
Tony
The most important property of any game is fun. Make a fun game and you can find ways to monetize. The reverse isn’t always true. A brilliant way to monetize doesn’t necessarily afford a fun game.
Crypto games give us interesting new ways to monetize. Value is baked right into the underlying technology. Smart contracts make it easy to issue and exchange assets. These properties enable new ways to form capital (e.g. presales), reward players (e.g. jackpots), and even avoid regulations (e.g. gambling).
But new ways to monetize have not yielded the killer app category we hoped for. There are many reasons for this, but a very simple and useful way to think about this is as follows:
- Today’s blockchains have many inefficiencies. They are slow, expensive, and hard to use. The exact opposite of web or mobile apps that are fast, cheap, and usable on mediums that almost everybody in the world has access to.
- Fun games are hard to design even without accounting for the inefficiencies of blockchains. It’s largely a hits driven business. Most games have short shelf lives. If it were easy to create lasting game franchises more people would do it.
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