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<a href="https://twitter.com/shahafbg" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Shahaf Bar-Geffen</a>, Chairman of <a href="https://uncaged.gg/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">UnCaged Studios</a>, creator of <a href="https://www.monkeyleague.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">MonkeyLeague</a> October 2022Co-Author: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/raz-friedman-a511762/?originalSubdomain&#61;il" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Raz Friedman</a>, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of UnCaged Studios.Co-conspirator: <a href="https://twitter.com/jeremystormsky" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Jeremy Parris</a> of <a href="https://delphidigital.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Delphi Digital</a>This is the final instalment of a trilogy on web3 gaming. You can read part two <a href="https://medium.com/&#64;MonkeyLeague/the-blueprint-for-building-better-web3-games-e025cbbc5cbb" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">here</a> and part one <a href="https://medium.com/&#64;MonkeyLeague/what-went-wrong-with-gamefi-aba3df905d24" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">here</a>The basic premise of a web3 economy is that players own their game assets. Furthermore, the word assets implies yield. When designing game assets, every asset should have a yield that is generated from value added and not from value extracted. Incentivizing users with tokens to play a game may be a good bootstrapping approach but has a limited lifespan.The game’s economy should grow to a point where players can only extract economic value if they have added other forms of value to the game. Value extraction needs to be net-positive. A good web3 game should avoid being pay-to-win or be-paid-to-play.Another important aspect of a sustainable economy is having a well-established monetary policy with the ability to both inflate and deflate the economy. In a game based on ownership of digital game assets such as NFTs for players and cryptocurrency as an in-game currency, inflating the economy too fast will cause a crash in asset value, demotivating the game participants. However, not growing the economy fast enough will create a surge in the prices of assets which then causes a high barrier to entry.Composability, Governance and DecentralizationIn line with the separation between the game and the metagame, players’ governance should be more established over the metagame and less over the game itself. When considering the game itself, we believe it’s the developers’ role to produce the IP and be the ultimate decision maker in creative development choices. In fact, we believe that high production value content would be better developed centrally by a small group of creators.However, when considering the metagame, the developers’ role becomes laying the foundation from which the economy of the game can, over time, flourish, and become emergent without their direct involvement. Players should be able to govern and make decisions on aspects of the game economy that influence them as participants in the metagame’s economy. For example, players should be able to decide how often elections for land owners take place or whether to open up APIs for certain third party developers.When thinking about composability, the game developer needs to design assets and smart contracts in a way that allows both players and other builders to continuously build upon the ecosystem. As a studio, we have considered the fact that we would want to build multiple games over time, strategizing from the beginning how we could connect them to the greater ecosystem of games that will be composed around them.When designing the MonkeyLeague ecosystem, we constantly asked ourselves what aspects of the economy we could decentralize and what aspects could be composed into other pieces and built upon.Different Players Play Different GamesWhen building a web2 game, the role players take is simply playing the game that’s catered and delivered to them. However, when thinking about a web3 game, the economic ecosystem can be vast enough that different players could play different ‘games’.MonkeyLeague is an esports game with a vast economic ecosystem with interconnected roles around it. This means that you can take the role of an esports player, where you rank up and play for rewards, or you can take a more passive role and play the game as a landowner (in MonkeyLeague, a Stadium owner), buying, building up, and selling properties that generate yield. You can also play the game of breeding, scouting for promising MonkeyAthletes in marketplaces to breed and sell to other players.The economy should also serve those who play various economical games, like traders, breeders, liquidity providers, promoters and more. Much as it is in real sports, where only a small percentage of those who are involved in the sport’s business are professional players.The economy around the game should be inclusive to all types of players. As elegantly phrased by <a href="https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-future-of-crypto-gaming" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Delphi Digital</a>, “Soccer, at its core, is not a market game⁠ — it’s a game of skill on the field. Its path to monetization starts with people caring for the sport itself, then taking metadata from the most meaningful games, and playing metagames with it.”Identify what would excite people about your ecosystem and build a web3 construct to support it for different types of players.SBTs: Identity and Social StatusSoul Bound Tokens (SBT) are non-transferable tokens that are kept in a user’s address and can be used for identity, status, credentials, and governance. A whitepaper was <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id&#61;4105763" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">published</a> by <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id&#61;3112539" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Vitalik Buterin</a>, <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id&#61;1186331" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">E. Glen Weyl</a> and <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id&#61;5235379" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Puja Ohlhaver</a> in May 2022 (though the concept was first introduced to us by <a href="https://twitter.com/Jeremystormsky" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Jeremy Parris</a> of Delphi Digital a few months earlier, under the name NTST). To understand more about SBTs and their importance in the fabric of digital ownership, I suggest you <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/soulbound-tokens-the-basis-of-a-decentralized/id1438148082?i&#61;1000571232721" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">listen to a conversation</a> between Jeremy Parris with Glen Weyl, co-author of Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul.Competitive games, whether in web1, 2 or 3, offer players the incentive of making it to the leaderboards and with it the respect from other players. Web3 games, however, can offer the added value of immortalizing achievements in the form of SBTs, forever linking the achievement to the player.This only scratches the SBT surface, though. The fact that web3 games offer users the ability to self custody their achievements, ranks, status and more opens the ecosystem to a multitude of opportunities. It could be found in governance, where certain players have a greater say in a vote because they belong to a unique subset of players. It could be SBT gated features of a game that unlocks for players that have reached certain achievements or that offers subsets of players the ability to try a new game.Player earned statuses, or SBTs, could also lead to new types of advertising opportunities, where players could allow sponsors to target them according to their SBT stack.“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” — Fight Club’s Tyler DurdenWhile opting to remain anonymous in games will remain important, identity and status should be recognized and players should own their own “soul.” A player is not just the sum of their digital assets, but also the aggregation of their achievements, status, and credentials.Accessibility and Low Barriers to EntryWe have identified the main friction points for players wishing to enter the web3 space:<ul><li>The web3 tech stack and onboarding</li><li>Discovery of titles</li><li>Upfront costs</li></ul>As a lot of work is being done by builders in the space to ease the use of web3 technologies (MPC wallets etc), we believe that complexity will be resolved over time as technologies mature and as people become incentivized enough to deal with such complexity. Our focus, at UnCaged, has been in discovery and in making sure that there are no upfront costs for players to start playing.To solve discovery, one must be able to publish games where users are looking for them: app stores. To be able to publish on app stores and avoid censorship, there needs to be a clear separation between the game and the web3 metagame. In other words, your app store games need to simply be amazing games that people love playing even without connecting a wallet.Players who opt in to engage in the web3 economy around the game can do so outside of the app stores’ native experiences by using a desktop/web version of the game to connect their web3 wallet and then associate it with their native username. Because web3 monetization happens external to the game itself, much of the distribution friction associated with crypto games in app stores is avoided. This allows for a greater, more mainstream, discovery channel and opens up traditional digital advertising channels for players.Our other core focus in making sure the barrier to entry remains low is ensuring that there are no upfront costs to start playing the game. We simply call it “play-to-play.” Since the game itself is separated from the metagame, playing the core game is completely free. For those who do take part in the web3 metagame, we offer the ability to rent game assets at a low cost, price normalization of both rewards and resources, and deflationary mechanisms to cool off the economy when it overheats.Lastly, there’s the game genre itself. We have picked a high production value, casual sports game that is easy to learn and hard to master with mass adoption potential.We believe these are the core principles that will make for a better web3 gaming experience. We have incorporated them into MonkeyLeague to create a game that realizes the full potential of web3, capturing all of the upside without the downside.About MonkeyLeague:The first in a franchise, MonkeyLeague is a turn-based, web3 soccer game that’s easy to learn, yet hard to master.Build your dream team, win matches &amp; tournaments, and climb the League ranks!MonkeyLeague combines high-production-value, multiplayer gaming with Solana blockchain, NFTs, and decentralized finance to deliver an exciting, web3 game that’s easy to learn yet hard to master.Get on the MonkeyTrain:<a href="https://discord.gg/monkeyleague" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Discord</a> | <a href="https://t.me/MonkeyLeague_Official" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Telegram </a>|<a href="https://twitter.com/TheMonkeyLeague" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"> Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3zjOir54FuBt9cHplxaxuw" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Youtube </a>| <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/MonkeyLeague_Esports" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Twitch</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheMonkeyLeague" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Facebook </a>| <a href="https://www.instagram.com/themonkeyleague/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Instagram</a> |<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/uncagedstudios" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">LinkedIn</a>| <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MonkeyBallGame/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Reddit</a>Check out the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v&#61;5vLkr9w9RTo" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">MonkeyLeague Game Trailer</a>!About UnCaged Studios:UnCaged Studios is pioneering high-quality, fun-first Web3 gaming. Co-founded by seasoned Web3 and gaming experts, the studio has over a hundred years of combined experience designing and developing high production value, immersive gaming experiences with sustainable economies. Through its own platform, Game OS, the studio’s first release is an esports franchise called MonkeyLeague. Moreover, UnCaged leverages Game OS to co-develop with leading game studios by providing core technical functionality, infrastructure, and live operations Web3 services.<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/uncagedstudios" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Linkedin</a>

Reimagining Web3 Gaming: Introducing MonkeyLeague as Patient Zero

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