How to operate a blockchain game for the long term? Ten principles for designing Web3 games

The long-term operation of blockchain games has always been the biggest challenge faced by the industry. How to seamlessly integrate the value carriers of games, such as game equipment and coins, with the blockchain and game mechanics is a major test. Yiye Venture Capital has provided ten design principles for the long-term operation of Web3 Games. Source

10 Principles of Web3 Game Design

When designing games integrated with Web3, if they are to be operated long-term, the in-game economy can be cleverly supported by player consumption, which should be the design goal of all Web3 games. However, most projects currently have failed to achieve this.

OneLeaf Ventures has put forward ten suggestions on how to enhance the product life cycle of Web3 games, including:

• Choosing a Longevity Low Threshold Positioning: Low gameplay threshold and long lifespan.
• Interactivity Over Single-player: Replace independent gameplay mechanisms with player interaction and resource exchange.
• Functional Design Over Numeric Design: Functional design increases the value of various items.
• Consumables Over Durables: Turn game progress into consumables, which can also be categorized by durability.
• Maximizing Consumable Circulation: Reduce anxiety about consumable destruction.
• Optimizing Upstream and Downstream Market Mechanisms: Differentiate tax strategies for different markets.
• Flexible Currency Policies: Open, unregulated currency policies priced in USD, etc.
• Private Sector Over Official: The in-game system should gradually reduce the importance of the official sector.
• Diverse Asset Types: Integrate basic raw materials, core durables, and homogeneous tokens to blur the direct cost calculation of resource output.

This article will focus on introducing some key points, and we welcome you to read the full article.

Choosing a Longevity Low Threshold Positioning

If a game requires long-term operation, it needs a constant influx of new players and high playability. Therefore, game positioning mainly has two aspects:

• Game Lifespan: Including game content and playability
• Playability Threshold: Including the level of understanding and hardware costs

If both aspects can be met simultaneously, typically the game's operation will be relatively successful. Games like Minecraft and League of Legends are more suitable for Web3 game development as they can be operated long-term.

Interactivity Over Single-player

It is essential to replace single-player actions with interactive mechanisms in games, deliberately creating scenarios and demands that require player interaction to handle and digest personal progress output, rather than allowing players to complete game progress individually, which helps promote player transactions.

Single-player Design: Not Suitable for Token Economy

In traditional designs, player values usually inflate along with game progress and resource acquisition, continuously pursuing higher values can bring pleasure to players, but this process cannot be reversed.

In single-player design, players can be self-sufficient in game progress, achieving the main goal of personal development during gameplay, without relying on other players' outputs. Item acquisition in the game comes from the game process itself, not from other players.

For example, in Elden Ring, the official once broadcasted content with ten maps, and players can explore and obtain map fragments to unlock new regions. There is no resource scarcity between game cycles, which is about personal progress, one-way progression, and lacks market dependence.

Interactive Design: Boosting In-game Economy

Web3 games require exchanges to support the value economy. To strengthen resource dependence, different game cycles can be established, each designed to require different resource constructions, limiting the universality of different constructions, increasing the specialization and marginal cost of each game cycle.

Different game cycles have different outputs and serve as essentials for other game cycles, incorporating resource circulation as one of the gameplay mechanics, enhancing market dependence. Players cannot play the game without trading. This approach promotes an active market economy and eliminates the effects of early content inflation.

For example, in Death Stranding, the Cairo Network can be designed for multiple players to collaborate and deliver different resources to unlock network areas, encouraging resource exchange and collectively advancing the game progress.

Functional Design Over Numeric Design

Game item designs should broaden horizontally with diverse functionalities rather than stacking numerics vertically.

Through diverse functional designs, highly combinable items can stimulate player exploration and creativity, promote economic activity, and make differences difficult to quantify.

Numeric Design: Singular Experience

Designs centered around numeric growth in player experience will lead to a pursuit of uniformity, lack of differentiated experiences, weak replayability, and a quest for pleasure through continuous numeric growth, rather than reduction.

Numeric design economically displays clear values, making pricing systems uniform, and basic resources, due to a lack of reusability, can easily become redundant, reducing economic activity.

Players tend to prefer items in a system where overall values continuously rise, leaning towards permanent ownership rather than allowing them to be damaged.

Functional Design: Increased Demand through Combinability

Functional designs treat value carriers as combinable tools, allowing players to continuously experiment with new combinations after understanding the tool's functions and properties, pursuing new experiences rather than numeric growth. Examples include The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Minecraft.

Tools with strong combinability, diverse functions, and stacking effects should have high demand for both new and experienced players, with non-explicit numerical values and ambiguous value, which can construct different pricing systems, enhancing economic activity.

Value carriers with diversified functions but uniform numerical variations are more suitable for continuous consumption rather than permanent existence.

Flexible Currency Policies

Some GameFi in the past set economic controls, such as lock-up periods for withdrawals or restricting the use of in-game tokens for participation, but these practices have proven to have many drawbacks and are not recommended.

Relaxing Capital Controls

• Strict capital controls will make the game no different from Web2 games. Not restricting commodity circulation makes the market more active.
• Capital market cycles are inevitable, and forced controls can lead to runs and panic. Regulating resource release and continuously consuming durable goods is more appropriate.

Fixed Exchange Rates

• Ordinary users do not hedge, meaning they need to bear the risk of token price fluctuations while playing games.
• Fixed exchange rates cause user anxiety.
• Fluctuating exchange rates further encourage speculative behavior and change user profiles.

Hence, stable currency exchange rates have more benefits than drawbacks, and exchange rate fluctuations and speculative effects should be applied to commodities rather than currencies.

Flexible Currency Policies

The real economy is guided by investment returns and is highly sensitive to monetary policies. However, games are entertainment activities driven by the pursuit of happiness, so currency policies should have very low flexibility.

Nevertheless, resource control should closely follow market changes to prevent economic overheating and future risks. While monetary policies should not be completely independent, they should be flexible.