Web3 Games and Their Guilds - William Robinson

the best curriculum of the best thinkers in web 3 and help startups who are the very best of their game to get to where they need to go i've been doing that because i have a phd in video game design and help a lot of web 3 games figure out their path forward and i've been researching guilds and web 3 games for last six months or so trying to understand what's going on and play to earn gaming and where there's value being captured and today i'm going to talk to you a bit about what i've learned so what is a guild guilds aren't new to games they've been around for a long time they're a group of coordinated players and because they're coordinated they can sometimes create value and that's pretty interesting and those value they create isn't always for themselves so like a guild in world of warcraft creates a lot of value for blizzard because those players get sticky relationships with each other they're able to engage in new and interesting content for themselves and what we see here is a concept that game scholars call playbird when players start to actually do work to make the ip or the game more valuable for the game maker and what web 3 promised as a change was to open up the possibility of value capture for players so we had value creation from the very beginning here with tokenomics we might be able to redistribute some of that value created to what the players are making and that was a pretty interesting like concept worth exploring that's been going on now for like three years i would say and what i want to talk about today are the sort of three kinds of guilds and the ways they create capture and distribute value so the first i call guilds that shill these are guilds that grow player bases because they grow player bases they create demand for the assets in there they create a more vibrant community more players more good is generally how it works and so what happened and why they were incentivized to do this is pretty novel and interesting you can imagine a game called axi infinity think of if you've never played it a pokemon game and if you get one axi and you play with it for a sufficiently long amount of time you can end up with two axes and that's kind of interesting because uh if you paid you know x dollars for one axis and you could sell for 2x well now you're making profit um and that was an interesting idea the axis weren't very expensive when things started but people started thinking huh if i can you know make a little bit of profit maybe i'm going to play and that created demand for axes right because you want to play to get more uh axes and then as the demand for axes grew the price of axes grew which created more demand for axes we had this sort of virtuous cycle which created a real crunch because the ability to create new ones was really tough and at a certain point it was costing like five like three thousand dollars to play this game that was that was shocking right and players couldn't afford to play axi because it was too expensive to get enough axes and so guilds emerged to do some capital alleviation for players said hey you want to play axi and make some money great i have some capital for you in the form of like three axes i'll lock them up in this way you play the game and i'll make uh a cut 50 30 whatever it is this is a strange model it occurred about two years ago and what we had here was basically a ponzi scheme right this is like multi-level marketing at its finest you buy a case of milkshakes uh and sell a case of milkshakes and if you sell enough cases of milkshakes then you'll be in the green but you know at some point running a milkshake drinkers uh and a whole bunch of people are left holding boxes uh and so uh with axey that happened um we had a huge number of players on boarded like in the millions but then we like couldn't keep doubling the number of players the rate we were expecting uh and by we i mean like i feel complicit in the web 3 gaming community in that way and so what ended up happening was a total crash in price and the guilds that were holding these axes for their players were the ones left with exposure to the downward price of their value which is pretty remarkable right so the people who got dumped on were these organizations that raised a lot of capital in the end of the day from venture capitalists so they're stuck right the players aren't so badly off for the most part unless they decide to purchase their own axes and so there's this euphoria that happened last year right an immense amount of hope that we are able to bring all of like the global south out of poverty through this magical play to earn economics but if there's no value creation there's no value capture and if there's no value capture there's no value distribution so we created some value by growing a player base but that was it so um what ended up happening is those guilds did have an out these guilds created large player bases that would be directed towards any game they wanted and all of a sudden they became the most powerful vcs in the gaming space because if i'm a new game my problem is bootstrapping players if there's no player community there's no game to do so i go to a guild and i say hey you have a treasury would you like some upside in my game and in exchange you'll bring players to my game my game will become more valuable your upside will grow will rinse and repeat and so you will be able to coordinate players to create new um you know opportunities for new ips to develop that was very powerful position for guilds to be in and they still are in this position today which is part of the reason why i maintain a very large list of guilds to shill my projects to um oh cool there's a lot of lights now um so you can see some here yield guild ready player dow avocado merrick circle good games there's more black pool i mean there's a very long list of guilds that do this those that weren't overexposed to axes are pretty in the green and so they're doing so pretty fine um these guilds that shill are ultimately part of the marketing arm now of web3 gaming right that's the value add that they bring to a game and that's how they're able to capture value because there's something created but there's more than guilds that chill um there's guilds that show guilds that show are and i'm also using axi here's an example for some aesthetic unity guilds that build a different kind of value which is spectacle so if you're familiar with web 2 games like dota 2 for instance there's plenty of spectacle there's this giant tournament every year called the international it has like a 40 million dollar prize purse it's held in a giant stadium players from around the world watch it i pay 15 for the pleasure of having to be able to watch it in game browser or not in game watch the tournament and what happens is i pay money to watch pro players that money then goes into the prize pool and to the devs and so we have a sort of sound economic system value created through spectacle value captured through tickets right and then the game developers get to share that value with the players these pro players are playing to earn right this promise that we thought web 3 could only do obviously exists in web 2 already the thought here is that we can maybe get a longer tail we can start paying players who aren't as elite as the pros of dota 2 because maybe they can produce enough spectacle themselves in their own ways whether they're twitch streaming or just doing small tournaments we feel that maybe there's a kind of friction reduction that comes from tokens and decentralized finance that you can basically get a thicker tale of prose playing your game and build community through that kind of spectacle so i was lucky enough to host an axi tournament that was funded by ftx as well as alliance down a few other people and the guilds that were in charge were hygge and lurkin which i'd never heard of before but like are going to be hosting four more massive axi tournaments this year and then the guilds that won were guildfy and meditate and so these are guilds that have not maybe not as many players as you would imagine but they have more pro players and so the value they're creating isn't the same kind of marketing of like player growth for a game ip but um this yeah this performance right this virtuosity that people want to see in playing this game and there's actually something i wrote my master's thesis on was how pro video game players are performers they they play a game like you would play a piece of music and an audience is interested to see the creativity players bring when they play those games in the way that musicians might play music so that's that's part of what's going on there okay and then the last kind of guild i want to talk about are guilds that ship um these are developer guilds and i would have loved to talk about axe infinity today and and keep real nice aesthetic through line through my presentation but actually it's really hard to build on axe infinity right now the ronin wallets are like not hard easy to use ronin itself is very centralized there's free transactions on the chain because like that's how centralized it is for now they're opening it up they're building builders programs they just you can apply to be a builder now they're looking for new things for their economic model but uh it's just like the smart contracts aren't verified the client isn't open source this is just like impossible to build in that space for now but dark forest is uh my favorite web 3 game it's a fully composable on-chain game on the gnosis chain it looks a lot like galcon it's like you have little planets and you attack other planets and as the more planets you have the more ships you have the more planets you can get um and it's like this forex space strategy game uh and in dark forest the client is open sourced uh the the contracts are clearly variable and validated and verified and and the team wants players to build uh and it's very clear because like when you start you're like oh my god this is so manual and i have so many moves to make and so little time i need to script this so you start building scripts to play it and then the person who won round 6.2 realized that transactions by the client were being broadcasted serially and so he just like removed some awaits in the code and then all the transactions happen in parallel and so like way more optimization on clients and so what players are doing in order to win is actually making the game cleaner better ux better ui faster experience and we're reaching almost this point where games aren't played by humans anymore they're played by robots and players are there just to maintain them um but as until we figure out ways to stop robots from being able to play and so in the last patch that was announced like two days ago robots will have a less of advantage over humans um but anyway so dark force dow that's dow i started uh when like last year just because i wanted to win this game and i didn't have enough time to do it myself so i just tried to sucker a bunch of people to play for me um they they built a smart contract that allows players to aggregate all their players together into one meta player on chain we called it the astral colossus as far as i know that's the first time a game has been played by a collective through a unifying smart contract we created a new round for dark forest where we asked our community to vote on rules changes we forked the contracts we reproduced a whole new version of the game where you could destroy planets for the first time that was pretty cool and you know we have other competing um guilds in dark forest like orton gg which beats us actually every time because they have way better engineers than us and it's frustrating but we have better vibes it's cool so these kinds of buildings out of the game right we're literally like writing code more code than the devs ever wrote in some places right and that's free labor so to speak now this game has no token uh they're really like trying to delay uh as much as possible the sort of value capture and the when token and like token number go up part and just keep a vibrant community but they do hand out nfts at the end of every round they hand out nfts to the players who won and nfts to the players who built um and those have some kind of market value on speculation and that's fine and they keep saying like these are worth laughing don't even like think of a price for them but like meanwhile you need a hundred thousand dollars to buy them so there's a kind of value capture and reward being done there that's quite interesting um it's fully player based like this wasn't a play to earn game until we wrote the marketplace uh dark forest team and some helpers uh dark force dow team and some helpers so that you could trade assets in the game like that's really cool right players building in this composable way the way we hoped ethereum would be so at one point axi will probably get try to get there and have more composability and these guilds will produce value and they'll be guilds of builders instead of the guilds of pros or instead of guilds of like retail players um so the added two extra ones here um salad and ancient eight these are axi guilds but who are building like guild infrastructure so they're they're building meta tools and meta things around guilds and i want to mention them um briefly uh how's my time four minutes great um so the the possibility space um is quite large and what i want to make sure everybody like has as a takeaway from this talk is that if players aren't adding value if they aren't laboring to create more then there's no way you can pay them right that's just a fundamentally unsound mechanism and web3 games got a really bad rap for the normal games industry and there've been lots of videos critiquing this entire field because there's been this like false promise like we all forgot how money works it's like bit connect all over again and the ico craze where like 4 000 apy forever i love it um but like obviously that can't happen right um and so what i'm hoping to see um grow in this space are more guilds to coordinate more players to create more value and to try and find ways to fix what we couldn't fix in web 2 so like when a skyrim modder creates an entirely new world for players to explore and offers it for free and everyone gets to benefit as players and bethesda sells more copies and that like original player sees nothing well that makes no sense right and that's a clear place where web3 would would work and bethesda tried to fix that by like offering a couple bucks here and there but the entire market for that failed because there's there's no way for web 2 to pay an upside that's like one of the biggest changes i see so like blizzard bethesda whoever they're not going to give you stocks right they're not giving you equity in the company for having built this game yourself and so your alignment is always like misaligned on that front and what's awesome about web3 games is if we do get to governance tokens and we like axey with axs you can start seeing all of a sudden a reward mechanism where players and builders get to capture upside in this asymmetric way and so i think that's like a really fascinating angle for game developers to think through and and why we have something worth talking about here in the first place and why we shouldn't just like stick to the web 2 strategy of building games so yep that's me well robinson you can follow me at danger will robin and if you are building interesting web 3 games or any interesting web three protocols in d5 or dows we would love to get an application at alliance.xyz from you we launch cohorts three times a year thank you very much have a great day