Players regret the money they spent last month or last year as the game asks them to open their wallets again and again for new and more powerful stuff. A player invests time and money into the game, only to have their assets devalued by the continuous sale of new assets. A hero or sword or magical tome acquired on the first day of a player's journey can be just as useful on that day as it is on the tenth year of the journey.Ī byproduct of power creep is purchase regret. If there are always fewer top-tier heroes in the system than the audience has an appetite for, then every time you release new heroes there will be players who desire them, even if their power only matches the power of the other top-tier heroes.īy eliminating power creep, every purchased asset will retain its utility in the game, and thus their desirability for players. But in a world of true scarcity, we can use scarcity as a tool to make purchases compelling without power creep.
In a world where supply is infinite, the dev’s goal is to sell as much of whatever is on offer each and every day. I believe that true, provable scarcity can eliminate the need for power creep. And they form a negative relationship with their hobby. And players end up opening their wallets to stay competitive in events, but they also regret it. And so little by little, we make the heroes more powerful or pack the limited offer with more and more resources. We need to make today's limited offer more appealing than yesterday’s. We need to make this month's offers appealing to players who spun the gacha last month. And the reason for their uselessness is a familiar bane to devs and players alike: power creep.įor many top-grossing LiveOps games, power creep is a necessary crutch. They will never learn how her marriage to the King ended the bloody 500 Years War.
No matter how cool the art, players have no use for Prophet Minera. For those that did, I wanted each character bio to give them glimpses of a larger picture they would paint for themselves.īut those heroes from soft launch and the first few years of LiveOps are mostly useless now. Not just their stats and skills, but also in careful naming and writing of interconnected backstories that I knew few players would even read. Five reasons I believe ownership changes the nature of the player's relationship to a game that becomes their most important hobby.Īs the Lead Designer on Legendary: Game of Heroes, I invested a lot of time on our first few hundred heroes. So here are five reasons I am bullish on blockchain. For me, the potential of blockchain gaming is not about the money, it's not about the promise of my players getting rich quick, it's about how ownership can change the way a game makes them feel. I spend most of my waking hours thinking about game mechanics and how they will make players feel. I should have predicted a $10 billion-a-year game if I wanted to sound like a true visionary. But here we are, not 6 months later, and Axie Infinity has already ground my bold prediction to dust. "I sure hope I don’t look like a Kool Aid guzzling fool 10 years from now" I thought as I pushed the publish button on that post.
I turned my analysis of Top Shot into an article, and ended it with the bold prediction that we would eventually see a $1 billion-a-year mobile game built around NFTs. I immediately understood the potential of NFT ownership and blockchain gaming. Instead I held onto it so I could eventually sell it for more. My brother in-law has an account worth over $15,000." The next day I queued up for my first Drop, lucking out and drawing a limited edition Tyler Herro Moment that I could immediately sell on a liquid marketplace for $1,600. This Normal Human, who doesn't work in tech and has definitely never pushed buggy config to prod, asked if I'd heard of NBA Topshot. The very next day I was chatting with a dad friend while, deep in the heart of Real America, we watched our kids play. I filed blockchain gaming into the mental folder of things people who read TechCrunch care about, but ‘Normal Humans’ would never adopt.
#Reason 9.5 vs 10 full#
A few days later, when the idea of designing a game around NFTs was most delicately suggested again, I explained "I just don't think any technology that MC Hammer is promoting on Clubhouse will turn into anything." The response, "Do me a favor, just spend some time investigating NBA Topshot" sent me on a journey that has resulted in a full blown crypto-bro conversion. "NFTs are digital snake oil!" I shouted before rage quitting Zoom, leaving N3TWORK COO Dan Barnes to wonder if I had been killed in a very unseasonable Charleston hurricane. Early this year, when it was first suggested to me that I investigate blockchain gaming, I immediately rejected the idea.