Play & Own is the The Way for web3 applied to Online Games

Play & Own is the The Way for web3 applied to Online Games

This is part one of a three-part series on our learnings of best practices applying web3 technology to online games.

• Part One — Why Play and Own is The Way
• Part Two — Why web3 Games are More Fun
• Part Three — Why Two Tokens are Required for a Stable web3 Game

We have been live for ~6 months, and for each week in that time, we released new items for the players to buy in Million on Mars. This weekly cadence of drops is unheard of in blockchain gaming, but we think it is the minimum live operation required to operate an MMO. Most web3 projects employ the Kickstarter-Esque one-time, highly hyped, high-scarcity model. They collect a lot of player cash up front and then use that cash to deliver on the promised roadmap at a later date, or in way too many cases — do not deliver. We feel strongly that it is much better to launch a live game and treat it as an ongoing service, to respond to the players feedback and desires via a content cadence and new features — and measure yourself on the KPI of recurring revenue.

Million on Mars is a rich player-driven economy expressed through scores of crafting chains, an in-game marketplace, a work order system and building rentals via the habitat and settlement systems. All which facilitate player-to-player trade. Today, we are kicking off a shift to our players creating Mining Rigs and Solar Panels — our most consistently valuable weekly drops — using Minting Tokens. In effect, we are putting ourselves out of business of doing the weekly sales of blueprints — why in the heck would we do that?

To answer that question, I need to unpack what is Play and Own and a true player-driven economy. Let’s start with Ownership. Currently, our players have three primary forms: Land, Dusk, and NFTs.

Players own Land

With Million on Mars, they play and acquire or purchase 250-meter-on-a-side hexagons of land that work out conveniently to 40 acres on Mars. These land plots were lovingly processed from the Mars Reconnaissance Observer spacecraft and the data is processed by the HiRise team (JPL and University of Arizona). They are stereo-optically processed to deliver 1m of height resolutions, so our players have the most authentic possible experience of owning their homestead on the high frontier.

The ownership of land is an organic expression of ownership. Furthermore, the ownership of land on Mars enjoys the fantasy romance of Mars with the practical benefit of being a real place.

Players own Dusk

The in-game or virtual currency that is our dominant medium of exchange is called Dusk. Dusk is used between players to buy and sell crafted goods and raw resources within the in-game Marketplace, to hire each other to perform skilled work orders, and to pay for fees in the game such as the upgrade, transport or dismantling of buildings. Our white paper covers the plumbing details of Dusk in-depth, but in general, we have fees or taxes on flows of Dusk on the order of 5% of the flow, and of that 5%, we discard or “burn” 80%, and the other 20% of those fees are credited to the “Treasury”. This Treasury in turn is a source of new-to-the-player Dusk from various gameplay systems. The burnt Dusk is the critically important deflationary lever to offset the inflationary sources of Dusk. Players own their Dusk both in-game like a traditional MMO, or at their option they may withdraw their Dusk to the blockchain (subject to a 10% withdrawal fee, 14 days cool-down, and land ownership). Once withdrawn to the blockchain, the player may sell that Dusk to another player via a decentralized exchange such as Alcor on the WAX chain, Radium on the Solana chain (soon), or may choose to add their Dusk to a liquidity pool to earn passive income while holding the Dusk token.

Players own NFTs

We have scores of NFTs that run from Solar Panels, Smelters, and Mining Rigs, to resources, tools, and ultra-rare one of one artifacts. We release chapters and illustrations from a novel that our CEO Keri Waters is publishing serially, bringing forward a positive vision for the future for our players, and even a soundtrack from Matt Gilmour. Frankly, we release new NFTs each week as we deliver on our roadmap of features and content cadence.

The amount of economic activity between the players is astonishing. It is still early days, and we are growing rapidly, but the annualized per capita economic activity of our players is about $2,000 each. Of which, about two-thirds of that activity is still conducted in the perfectly vanilla in-game virtual economy.

How to drive Stability?

How do we keep Dusk stable?

How have we been able to keep our players happy to participate in our weekly drops that consistently sell-out?

How do our NFT assets generally rise in value over 6 months of time (a very long time in this space)?

The answer to these three questions is really the same answer — constantly develop more utility for the players — across everything they own. “More utility” is the dry term for making the game more fun! Okay that sounds straightforward as a game developer — you should always be making the game more fun right? Everyone does this right?

Well, no, actually.

Very few teams actually keep making a live game more fun — or at least fun in a manner that is directly measurable by the players. How can I say that so easily, when those words seem arrogant to me? Well, to explain that, we would need to measure fun. What is the unit of fun? This has been debated in the game industry for the last couple of decades; is it engagement? Is fun some sort of indescribable art form? Is fun just something you know when you see it? Yes, I do believe what we do is a proper art, but I also believe in measuring anything and to reserve your intuition for the truly creative challenges. Sure, I appreciate retention and engagement metrics, but there are many applications we must use due to their utility for non-fun activities that are so compelling — the bank app, the map app, the work chat app, email, so I find retention and engagement very useful — but do not fully capture fun in my experience. So measuring fun has to be reflected in something you use a lot, but what else? I acknowledge it sounds un-romantic, but in my experience revenue from players (not from ads or other sources other than the player) is the best metric for fun. When players give you their money in this world crowded with entertainment options — many of them free and excellent — that money is the most crisp form of a KPI for Fun that I believe exists.

And what is an even better form of a KPI for Fun than the revenue we might make once a week on our weekly sales? The 24x7 charts of our Dusk token and our NFTs on the secondary market. Why? Because that is a real-time measure of what players are paying each other, to have a bit of fun, and the pricing of that fun is a constant dashboard on how we are performing as a game, product, and service.

Our Dusk token shrugged off the recent crypto panic

Dusk, being our high-frequency utility token, enjoys the status of being the most stable cryptocurrency on the Wax ecosystem, and for that matter, the most stable coin we are aware of in the greater web3 game space.

Again, how do we keep it stable? We have a damn good game — that is the starting ingredient and that is not to be taken for granted in the web3 space today, but being a damn good game will be table stakes before the year is out. Second, we have built in tons of “sinks” and utility for the token. Unlike a web2, traditional MMO, the players actually welcome fees in the “auction house” or marketplace, they welcome maintenance fees, upgrade fees, transport fees, withdraw fees, heck — put a fee on just about every player-to-player and player-to-game economic flow. Web3 players understand, and welcome these fees as these fees are the critical deflationary or burn mechanics to offset the inflationary source of new Dusk created in the system through normal gameplay. Web3 gamers welcome this deflation for it directly rewards the players with better gameplay strategies over the players who indiscriminately gather and spray their tokens. This is what creates The Game in the economic domain.

We take that same philosophy — always be sinking Dusk, and we apply that as well to our NFT collection — and sink and burn our NFTs! We have minted over 500,000 NFTs to date, and over 65% have been burnt — for utility in-game. This is an excellent record in current web3 game metrics, but we still have at least another 100,000 or more NFTs that we are keen to get burnt in exchange for utility. An example and an early innovation we developed is that a Building Blueprint is burnt upon install on a land, which this directly offsets the supply of buildings in the secondary market. With this, we are giving the players utility (again the dour word for fun) for burning their NFTs and driving up the scarcity and value of their digital assets as NFTs. All of this sounds straightforward as I type this, but again 97%+ of the projects out there do not actually do this — most of them are trying desperately to deliver on a fraction of their promised roadmap of features, let alone follow-through on the liveops of content cadence.

Land. The Genesis NFT — going back to the days of Second Life, Ultima Online, and my own GoPets. Selling virtual land has a long and rich history worthy of its own article, but here I will focus on keeping a close eye on the scarcity of our land. Like the sage philosopher Goldilocks, we want our land to neither be too rich nor too poor. To maintain values we have three main tools:

• The fundamental rate in which we release Land Deeds and Digital Terrain Maps.
• The rate in which we release new and fun buildings that need space,
• The space available on the lands themselves.

With these three levers we can keep bringing new players into the game with accessible access to land, there is even a path to land via pure gameplay, as well as preserve the scarcity of our most valued lands and land deeds in the secondary markets.

An Example of our Rare Land Deed rising in value over time, while at the same time we rolled out pathways to players earning ownership of Common Gen 2 land deeds through gameplay.

These three forms of ownership in Play and Own are already strong inside Million on Mars, we have proven excellent content cadence and delivery on our roadmap, and stability of our medium of exchange token — Dusk. But a core value for us is to relentlessly drive more and more of the economic activity into the players hands.

This has been a long road trip, but we get back to answering the question of why we are intentionally putting ourselves out of the business of selling blueprints in our weekly drops.

Instead, we are now shifting that opportunity to the players! Starting today players will be able to craft Mining Rigs, Solar Panels, and C.A.D.s with Minting Tokens. We will continue unlocking new crafting chains for the players to create the rest of our catalog of buildings. This is what it means to be a Player-Driven Economy — constantly search for more methods, systems and content and move that value creation to the players themselves!

Moving the minting of blueprint NFTs to the players has several strong benefits:

• It is more fun and engaging, and fulfills the lore of the world to craft the buildings out of the in-situ resources.
• It allows the players to have much finer grain controls on the supply, demand and pricing for the buildings.
• As we go multi-chain with Solana this month it also allows the players to decide where to feature their NFTs rather than us being paternalistic.
• Frees up the team to spend more time building additional crafting chains and experiences, and shifts that supply, demand, pricing, and chain discovery to the player driven market.
• Further delivers on the promise that as a Play and Own game — the players really own the economy!

The exact crafting gameplay loop for player minted NFTs leverages all of the current game systems, where players have land, install buildings and harvest resources and craft intermediate parts and then blend with Minting Tokens and as the final step our treasure system calculates the rarity output and so the player actually crafts the Legendaries and Mythics — FTW!

This is the foundation of our learnings with Play and Own. In the next article I am going to detail why we believe that web3 really does enable players to have a more fun and engaging game over web2 — and not only why we believe it — we have the experimental data to prove it!

Originally published on Medium.