Mar 31

Mar 31 🎮 The Game Economy Trilemma in Web3

Shorts are analyses and opinion pieces originally published as a part of our weekly newsletter.
If you’re not one of the 11,000 subscribers of our newsletter, tap here!

Missed a previous newsletter? You can find them all here.

🚀 In this week’s newsletter we dive into the “true ownership” game economy trilemma and the intricacies behind obstacles for web 3 economies.

On the go? Listen to one of our podcasts from this week, we’ve got:

🎧 How To Become A Stoic Leader And Control Your Emotions - with Sophie Vo and Mishka Katkoff

Asset price floor, mass market user base, progression utility - pick two

Contrary to what most web 3 and crypto gaming proponents would have you believe, the idea of “true ownership” of your in-game assets is neither new nor unique to Web3. Companies like Blizzard and Valve have been trying to make it happen for years and to some extent have already succeeded with products like the Wow Tokens or the Steam Workshop. The definition and feasibility of “true ownership” as a concept in Web3 is vastly misunderstood and played fast and loose with for fun and profit.

Fun for (game) economics illiterate crypto and tokenomics pundits to fantasize about pie-in-the-sky seamless inter-game economies incorporating every game under the sun with no regard for why any successful game makers would let a third party’s monetary policies influence their game economies.

Profit in that if you handwave the very real structural problems of the above away you can layer some convincing-sounding jargon on top about tariffs and import duties on virtual commodities that make you sound smart despite being nonsense on stilts - which will get people to hire you because this is how we live now.

The secret sauce in solving the “True Ownership” trilemma is emulating real economies closely enough to have their variety of price points and complex value chains. But at the same time keeping them simple enough to power a mass market offering where players need actually to understand what they’re playing.

In a genuine sense to solve this, we need an economic model that solves many of our real-world economic problems, where value chains are constructed to both add value to the finite product *and* make sure the act of adding value is compelling and entertaining for the person doing it and the people in it are compensated fairly.

Of course, dealing with virtual economies makes things a lot easier and if done right can offer a model for the real world. But to get there we need to abandon seductive but bankrupt models like Play To Earn and fuzzy utopian notions of seamless “True Ownership” and ”Interoperability” and start grappling with the hard problems of creating real sustainable secondary market-driven games.

Read the full analysis written by Catalin Alexandru who has worked as a consultant, game designer, and game journalist with 45+ leading game companies and global brands including:

Read the full analysis here

🎙️ Deconstructor of Fun Podcast

🎧 How To Become A Stoic Leader And Control Your Emotions - with Sophie Vo and Mishka Katkoff

In this new segment of Rise and Play, Sophie Vo sits down, once again, with her business partner Mishka Katkoff, CEO and founder at Savage Game Studios, and Deconstructor of Fun.

In the episode, Mishka shares his reflections and thoughts on leadership going from a startup CEO to a managing director at a PlayStation studio.

What can you gain from being more Stoic as a leader? As leaders, we tend to believe that we are responsible for everything that happens around us: company outcomes, actions, and behavior of others.

The reality is that we have very little control over what’s going on around us. It takes wisdom to know the difference between precisely what we have control over, and what we don’t. “Identify what you can change and what you cannot change. Accept the things you cannot change, and have the courage to act on the things you can change.” The only things you can really control are your perception and actions.

So, how do you apply this to your day-to-day business and process of decision-making, callous decisions? That's what this segment covers today!

🎥 YouTube
🎧 Podcast