Tales from the Front Lines

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Hi friends,

If you follow me on social media, you may have seen the news that my time with Cartridge has come to an end. For readers of this newsletter, that means two things:

• I have additional bandwidth to write and will be returning to publishing Dark Tunnels more frequently.

• I am now a free agent! If you’re in need of consulting or advisory services, want to collab on a project, or are looking for a high-impact early hire for your gaming startup, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

I’m already in the midst of several new writing projects (including the imminent re-launch of the Always Scheming blog on Substack), but I wanted to take a few moments today to reflect on some observations I’ve had while working on the frontlines of the fully onchain games ecosystem over the last several months.

Let’s dive in. 

Tales from the Front Lines

What follows are a few loosely bucketed impressions that I’ve compiled after reflecting on the last few months of working closely with builders from across the fully onchain games ecosystem.

Naturally, given my position at Cartridge, the majority of my interactions over the last several months took place within the context of the Dojo ecosystem. That said, none of the following ruminations are specific to any one team, area, or ecosystem within the onchain games market. I think you’ll find that the takeaways are sufficiently generalizable to apply to a broad swathe of onchain projects.

You’ll just have to take my word for it that none of these opinions reflect anything specific to Dojo, Cartridge, Starknet, Realms, or any other associated or adjacent group.¹  

A Lack of Clarity

My biggest takeaway by far has to be that there is a general lack of clarity among builders in the onchain games ecosystem.

Most people seem to have a strong understanding of what fully onchain games are (or at least, what they aspire to be in an idealized state), but far fewer can articulate a truly clear reason for why their game should be built maximally onchain.

That said, there are definitely several common themes emerging. These are not mutually exclusive, nor are they meant to be collectively exhaustive. They are certainly rife with generalizations. Caveats aside, here are the major ideas I’ve encountered:

• Composability & UGC: fully onchain games must lean into the interoperability and “money LEGOs” aspects of blockchain infrastructure, enabling boundless creation and rewarding contributors via crypto payment rails. This group draws inspiration from gaming’s legacy of modding and hopes for a long term result akin to something like a web3 Roblox or UEFN.

• Decentralization / sovereignty maxis: players must own their assets, games must be governed by the community, no one should have to KYC in any way, nothing about the game or its infrastructure should be permissioned, and bots are to be welcomed into the game on an equal footing with human players. A related corollary here is the desire to leave behind the encumbrances of centralization imposed by traditional games publishing.

• Highly financialized and “degen” games: building fully onchain allows for high stakes gameplay, verifiable payouts, rapid establishment of markets and trading instruments, and gambling on everything.

• Builders interested in solving hard technical problems: No clear raison d'être beyond the desire to try something new and tackle challenging engineering problems.

• AW / FOCG LARPs: People co-opting the autonomous worlds meme or the fully onchain games moniker for visibility, social clout, fundraising hype, or other questionable reasons.

I’ll let you arrive at your own conclusions about the viability or legitimacy of these approaches.

I don’t mean to imply that there is any single correct answer here, either. Despite writing thousands of words on this topic over the last year-and-a-half(!), my go-to answer to the “why should I build fully onchain?” question is often “it depends on what your game’s strategy is 🤷.” ²

The larger point is that none of these games will ever truly reach scale without crystal clarity of purpose, because it is precisely that focus that will dictate many downstream decisions: from tech stack to game design to token integrations to hiring to marketing and on and on.

What’s more is that all of the reasons listed above are why developers seem to want to build games fully onchain. When you look at these from a player’s perspective, however, these arguments quickly fall flat. The vast majority of gamers (crypto-native or not) will not care one iota about (most of) these explanations.

This brings me to the next key observation…

The Games Simply Aren’t Good Enough…Yet

Pretty self-explanatory, I think.

Admittedly, I haven’t played every game out there. There are undoubtedly gaps in my research; I am just one man, after all (with a family, an endless backlog of games, and an obligation to write about titles outside of crypto, too).

As such, I have basically zero patience for onboarding bugs. I consider myself an intermediate-to-advanced crypto consumer, but if I hit a snag when trying out a game, I basically cross it off my list until I have time to come back to it (sorry, Kamigotchi — I’ll try again eventually).

I also know that certain games are not for me. 4X games, for example, are just not my thing. As such, similar apologies are owed to Influence, Citadel, Eternum, et al. No disrespect, they’re just not my cup of tea.

If I were to take a guess at my most played games in the FOCG ecosystem, they are probably (in some order):

• Pirate Nation

• Primodium

• Paved

This presents a particularly perplexing predicament given the plethora of playable prototypes and the prevalence of (predictably) pompous, puffed-up public pronouncements among prominent pundits in the space proclaiming that their projects present promising, pivotal paradigm shifts and pioneering new pursuits on the path to parabolic player adoption.

(....Words3 is also among my most played games).³  

Gamers have many demands on their attention. No amount of breathless hyperbole on social media is going to convince anyone outside of our existing echo chamber to try your game. It needs to stand alone as a truly engaging experience.

Sadly, I have yet to find a fully onchain game that meets that bar (for me) and I suspect that many readers will share my perspective.

On a related note, I’ve been disappointed to witness the marked lack of innovation in game design, too. I understand that skeumorphic iterations play an important role in teaching users how to interact with fully onchain games, but how many EVE, Minecraft, and Pokémon clones do we really need?

I sincerely doubt that “[existing franchise] + web3” is going to move the needle for the FOCG ecosystem in any meaningful way (though I would be happy to be proven wrong).

With all that said, the financial aspect of onchain gaming plays an important role here. There is a fair argument to be made that (some of) these games are actually more fun to play because they present players with an opportunity to win money, farm tokens, or otherwise be rewarded for their participation.

There is some nuance to that, though. For example, competing to capture the top spot on a leaderboard and win some tokens is a much different proposition than, say, tapping a button on Telegram to qualify for some as-yet-undetermined airdrop.

The level of financialization built into a game’s client by its developers versus how much is left to the community to create remains unresolved. In many ways, this cuts to the central question of whether a fully onchain game should target crypto-natives or not.

I think there’s still a lot of unexplored design space here and believe that it’s an area worth digging into. Maybe I’ll write a future newsletter exploring the best ways to apply financialization as leverage for fun (as always, don’t hesitate to get in touch if this resonates with you).

Either way, the tricky part remains: that “fun” is different for each of us.

Insularity

This will come as little surprise to most readers, but the games industry at large really doesn’t understand what’s being built within our ecosystem.

At the same time, though, I’ve found that developers building fully onchain games rarely venture beyond their own little bubble to draw learnings from the rest of the games industry.

Eventually, this will need to change.

By my (decidedly unscientific) estimation, the current overlap between the creators and players of fully onchain games has to be like 75% or higher.⁴  

Dogfooding our own creations is all well and good, but the composition of the current FOCG audience is simply not conducive to building and sustaining a business.

This matter is further complicated by the exhausting purity tests and gatekeeping rampant among builders in the space. I’ve ranted about this before, so rather than harp on the issue I’ll simply direct you to my last newsletter on the topic.

In order for this format to establish long term credibility with gamers, operators, and investors, it needs to grow. We need to welcome new entrants and encourage bold experiments — even if they don’t fit our priors.⁵  

I’d strongly encourage readers to check out what’s been happening recently with Off The Grid. Fully onchain it is definitely not, but Off The Grid has arguably done more to onboard the masses to web3 in the last two weeks alone than fully onchain games have in the last three years.

I can already hear the detractors’ objections to that statement:

“But we’re not going after those users! We’re targeting crypto-natives!”

Hey, more power to you. I wish you luck. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the approach that got us into this predicament in the first place. Maybe that will work for our current linear growth trajectory…but I’m looking for exponential curves.

There is some good news, though.

Despite the issues outlined above, I saw — and continue to see — plenty of signs of growth, especially at the grassroots level.

I am always interested to hear how developers navigate their way to this particular intersection of the idea maze. Sometimes, they just sort of stumble their way through (see: the first section of this newsletter), but occasionally they have very specific reasons. Perhaps they are lucky enough to have thoughtful guides, friends, or advisors that help them along the path. The most experienced among them seem to arrive through experimentation. Take the Archetypal team, for example, which has already prototyped experiences with MUD, Dojo, Argus’ World Engine, and probably a few other platforms I’m unaware of, too.

I hope we continue to see small teams and solo developers taking the plunge and trying crazy experiments onchain. Game jams and hackathons are great for this, but we can certainly do more.

Connect with students and university blockchain clubs. Reach out to traditional game dev channels. Try to bring in the normies. Pitching incumbent studios is fine, but it’s definitely a harder road. For every CCP Games there are likely hundreds of Believers that are never going to change their minds. And that’s okay!

There are still plenty of other areas of opportunity. For example, in my own limited experiences spanning the last year or so, I’ve connected with VR studios looking to try new experiments, work-for-hire shops interested in building something of their own, traditional film and television execs exploring a new medium, and even major sports leagues tentatively dipping their toes into crypto.

Personally, I find it extremely encouraging that there is meaningful interest in our little niche of gaming deriving from a wide variety of unexpected sources.

If we can only get out of our own way, we might be able to build something truly magical.

In Conclusion

Perhaps this has not been my most optimistic newsletter, but I find a good reality check can be helpful from time to time.

I hope it leads to some self-reflection for readers actively building in this space. It certainly has for me.

I’ll be back in your inbox soon. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Until next time.

Notes:

1. Besides, I’m contractually obligated not to disparage anyone or reveal any confidential information, so I obviously won’t be doing either of those things 😁.

2. For what it’s worth, I view this as a bit of a failure on my part. I hope to explore the topic further in coming newsletters.

3. Other honorable mentions that sadly did not fit my alliteration scheme include Force Prime Heroes, Loot Survivor, and Metacube.

4. I’m being charitable here, as Pirate Nation is successful enough on its own to meaningfully skew this metric. Remove that game from the equation and the percentage probably spikes higher.

5. As an aside, having any sort of priors about what a fully onchain game should look like is absurd. You’re necessarily going to be influenced by what’s come before and end up with something skeuomorphic and uninspiring.

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