Mobile MiniGames | How To Save The Economy (Step-By-Step)
The Problems With Broken Tokenomics.
While I generally really like what's being done with the game itself, the tokenomics have been extremely frustrating. Not so much because of the current low price or the mistakes that were made, but more because the total neglect shown toward them right now and what I believe is also just lack of understanding. There are many problems that come along with broken tokenomics.
- It's impossible to promote the game: I really like the spread the word around about Mobile MiniGames as I do enjoy the game and think it has a real future. However, with the totally broken economy nobody wants to be associated with the game and promote it to their audience.
- There will be a run for the Bank by investors if things somewhat recover: Many that invested kind of overinvested in the tokens and they are so far from where they are supposed to be that nearly everyone will want to at least partially opt out in case there would be some good news and a recovery. That is including myself, if PRPS would hit 4$-5$ which is still 60% below the top, I will not hesitate to liquidate a part of my bags. For the Devs to bring back the buy-wall it's nearly impossible without them having the funds to buy up everything in circulation because everyone would dump it on them.
- Players Get Demotivated: I've seen this happen in my community and on my land where more than half of the players on my plots don't even log in daily anymore. Others stated they quit because of the broken tokenomics.
- Bad Reviews on PlayStore: The rating of the game has gone down to 4.2 start on the play store and there are more bad reviews (also because of the game crashes) the economy being broken while still advertised as 1 PRPS = 10$ in the game will inevitably lead to more bad reviews.
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That being said, these times are also an opportunity to do really well with the game in case things would recover but the ones doing this are a small minority. The thing is that the Play2Earn Economy being somewhat healthy is important and this doesn't need to be perfect as boom & bust cylces are part of it. Things being completely broken as they are now however is just really bad especially since there might be ways to somewhat stabalize things...
Step-By-Step Economy Fix
Step 1: Make DUBI the Only Discount Token
The entire tokenomics model is based around PRPS to be a token that is traded based on supply and demand while DUBI is supposed to be more stable and give returns to PRPS holdres that lock. By allowing both PRPS and DUBI to be used in the store at discount price the burns don't have any impact on the price since the amount of tokens in circulation from both combined is so high. The fact that DUBI can be used at double value also doesn't do much aside from putting fuel to the fire as this just means PRPS is trading at half the price and most are still using PRPS to do in-game purchases.
If DUBI was the only token that was accepted inside the game and on the G4G Store at the discount rate, this would mean that all buying and token buring would go toward DUBI which has a way lower supply. Right now there is no real demand for DUBI and the price going down just means that PRPS goes even lower. With an increased demand for DUBI, that price should naturally go up at least a bit compared to where it is now. Even if this means PRPS would go down lower, at the same time it would give better returns closer to the buy-wall for those that are invested which to start with was the main idea of PRPS.
(I guess to give those that have locked PRPS the option to use that, PRPS could be allowed to be used close the the market price)
Also, Remove the entire 1 PRPS = 10$ sign in the game as there is no way that it will go to this price anytime soon as it just goes a step too far making players that are unaware actually believe this is the case which will only backfire. An option could be to allow Crypton to be used to buy deals directly in the game. If only DUBI was allowed it could be done at the average trading price of a DUBI-PRPS trading pair (see below)Step 2: Create DUBI-PRPS and/or DUBI-USDC Liquidity Pool incentives
Having large liquidity Pools is extremely important to have a working game economy. The 20k$ PRPS-USDC & DUBI-USDC Pools right now are a total joke and make it impossible to buy or sell without moving the price a lot. I dindn't understand the importance of this myself in the past and was against it when Splinterlands devs introduced giving big rewards to players that helped provide liquidity at the start, but they really showed me wrong as this was vital to their growth. Right now they still do this and have over 6 Million in different liquidity pools.
I get that the team doesn't have the funds to provide a bigger liquidity pool right now but not so much the argument that it's not safe enough. Polgon at one point had 10 Billion Total Value Locked. The only thing that needs to be done is to create reward incentives for players that help provide liquidity and this can be done with in-game progress.
Example
Give a total of 100 TTTT Vouchers each month to players that provide liquidity to a DUBI-PRPS Pool and 100 TTTT Vouchers to those that contribute to a DUBI-USDC Pool. That's roughly 240k of in-game progress for an entire year which should largely fix the current liquidity problem and it should be fairly easy to set up tracking wallets that are connected in the game that provide liquidity based on their share in the pool. The numbers off course are just an example and can be tweaked and it can be started off with fewer rewards and ramped up as the prices stabalize.
This would mean there are 2 Liquidity pools where those that Lock DUBI can take profit and get their returns or easily reinvest it, while those that withdraw PRPS from the game can easily swap it for DUBI in order to re-invest or cash out. PRPS itself doesn't need to be traded that much as it's designed as a buy and hold lock token. It should be easy to find buyers or sellers within a week or a month at the right price on Dubiex.
Another thing what these liquidity pools do is both create demand for the tokens from players that want part of the rewards and it potentially will take a lot of tokens off the market as they will be locked inside of the liquidity pool. All while providing investors and players a way to get in or out without a tiny amount of 1000$ moving the price like crazy.
Step 3: Create more incentives for players to reach higher VIP Levels
The problem with Play2Earn games is always the same, players that only aim to extract value from the ecosystem without putting anything in hurt the economy and give players that do want to invest less reasons to do so. Splinterlands has been fighting this issus for years now with nerf after nerf cutting out the leechers and bots which has been quite succesfull. Some things that Mobile MiniGames could do are to make unique Pets earned from the game Soulbound so they can't be dumped on the market (this is the main earning model for alt accounts that only look to farm). Only allowing duplicate skins or those that were bought to be sold only screws players that aim to extract value while for real players that doesn't change a thing. What also could be done is to unlock all earned pet skins for players that reach VIP Level 8 or so which gives higher incentives to reach that as at that point it allows them to sell if they wanted to. All this would create a supply shock and a rise in demand resulting in higher pet prices and earnings for players that put money into the game. Also, having some kind of VIP Level requirements or Account Crypton Value and linking them to rewards in PvP could give more incentives for players to reach higher Levels spending more money in the game helping the economy.
Step 4: Give reason for all players to own 36 Exclusive Hero Skins
Right now, the incentives to buy Exclusive skins just are not high enough and it can be seen at the declining amounts that are sold. Only 195 of the Hero Skin which actually looks nice got sold this week which is by far the lowest so far. In Play2Earn game, cosmetic value is reduced to almost nothing as most players prioritize the earnings aspect of the game. What it comes down to is that the game is just way too Free2Play Friendly and the extra progress doesn't feel like that big unless throwing large amounts at it (or playing it really smart). While I'm not a fan of Pay2Win, I would argue that the game has too little of it. Especially now with the focus being put on the Competitive PvP, it should be easy to implement direct advantages that come for example from owning Exclusive hero skins. Just giving each heroes where the exclusive skin is owned a +0.1% power boost for each week they have been released until they reach +25% or so already would give give way more incentives for players to buy the exclusive skin boosts. This also means the older ones become more valuable giving players now to buy them as a possible investment for later down the line.Step 5: Devs Should Start chipping away buying PRPS and DUBI at market price.
It's clear that bringing back the DUBI Buy-Wall will be impossible for quite a long time to come and the same goes for PRPS to reach close to the sell-wall level. This doesn't mean that part of the profit can't be used to start buying PRPS and DUBI at market prices. PRPS that is cashed out by players for example shouldn't come from the stack of PRPS that was artificially bought up without any funds backing that up during the PRPS Level increase. Instead earnings from the game should be used if possible to buy PRPS off the market if it's below a certain price as that doesn't further increase the real circulating supply. Same could be done with DUBI at least in small parts as everyhing helps.
Step 6: Weekly Development Update + Q&A Video in the Game
Right now there is a Weekly update stream on twitch mainly to keep the people inside the building up to date. Nobodu aside from the small loyal fanbase watches these. It would be nice if there was also a weekly stream toward the players that is available in the game as a video afterward for players with a small reward attached to it to watch it potentially while playing (something like 500 Crypton to watch 15 Minutes for players with VIP1 or higher ) rThis conecpt was an idea of Freepls on COS Pro Discord. Splinterlands has done this for a long time with the weekly Town Halls and it works quite well. This also could get players more engaged with the game and the development or bring in potential investors.
Conclusion
Unfortunately I fear nothing will change and it will all be about ROAS and playing some World of Warcraft trying to get in a few more players that way while the economy completely remains neglected blaming the bear market.
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A Lot of good and interesting points. I don't understand all of it but it's clear the tokenomics need a lot of work.
The game is fun and has a ton of potential, but I don't know about Athene. He says things like, "I am the most transparent," "We are the best _", etc. Meanwhile, are there even real financial documents to look at? Especially vis a vis the charity. If you say Crypton is going to charity, there should be some sort of document proving that yes?
And the 10,000 crypton=$10 sign in-game is just absurd at this point.
Not sure how he thinks that's a smart idea.
I would try to say something on a stream but I don't think it would accomplish anything.
Maybe he would listen to you? Someone should tell him a lot of people feel the same way about this stuff.
With all that said the game is fun and has some smart ideas so I hope things can be turned around.
He did go through the entire post on his stream and they are looking into some of the ideas (giving exclusive skins more use case & potentially setting up incentives for Liquidity providers.)
Basically, Athene wants to take the 'fast growth' approach with the game putting everything on advertisements to achieve the needed growth. In order to get this to work they are trying to get the returns on advertisement (ROAS) to a point where they are able to pump ads and get money back within a reasonable time and have everything above that as profit that can go to getting the economy back up. If they managed to reach this point they are pretty much printing money with an 'infinite' money loop at least to a certain degree. The question remains how realistic all this is and how much time it will take.
All my suggestions are more aimed toward taking the 'slow growth' approach creating solid tokenomics first instead of needing big user acquisition from ads in order to push the prices back up. That being said, with a total of 15 Million PRPS in total of which half is in circulation and a lot of those owned by the team, the valuation at current prices is quite low based on the actual game that they managed to make without taking any kind of loan or have a crazy payroll since everyone working is pretty much a volunteer.
The good thing also is that their current approach forces them to improve the game, right now they are working on making the competitive PVP a lot more fleshed out. So plenty of updates to come and I'm still quite confident that they at least get to a point where the economy goes back to where it is supposed to be.
That's good that he's willing to make some changes and listen to feedback! Did he show any willingness to change the in-game 10,000 crypton~$10 notice? Does he realize this is super problematic from a regulatory standpoint? Ditto for the lack of financial disclosures for a "charity." It would not be allowed here in the U.S. and my understanding is that Europe tends to be even stricter with this sort of thing? I have some interest in promoting the game as an affiliate but I don't want to do so if it's a problem waiting to happen :(