Until today gamers have only known a world where they were denied the opportunity to have true ownership of their assets, in traditional games they were basically “renting” from the company that produced the game. If we think about it, even the games themselves have been subject to just disappearing, if the company decided to stop production or a game launcher delisted a given game. Summing it all up, game assets and even games have not been very democratic or independent so far — as opposed to sports for example, where you didn’t need football stadiums, fields or even famous teams for it to be played, if you only had the asset — the ball — you could simply go play with your friends. With gaming, you always relied on a centralized entity to provide the assets, platform and means.
Web3 promises however true asset ownership through NFTs, digital property rights, provenance, secondary markets for your assets, value accrual and payment infrastructure. All of this in an independent, decentralized way, thanks to blockchain technology.
This is the very first question we need to ask ourselves.
Perhaps the answer lies not in the actual need or want, but in the fact that even if they do not, we should not deny the opportunity from them. There are gamers who enjoy games as they are, playing in the flow state, remaining in the game’s “magic circle” and not caring about a potential market game that owning assets could bring to them. In case of true ownership, these players can basically ignore the fact that they now have the assets with them in case the game disappears or removes the platform (game assets would still have a form of collectible value), however players who really enjoy the investment and collectible aspect could go on basically forever as long as the blockchain they minted the assets on exists.
So we believe that at least the opportunity to truly own assets have to be given to gamers, it can be seen as an evolution of gaming, rather than a full revolution that rebuilds everything we’ve thought about gaming.
Currently only games with blockchain economies support NFTs that would give asset ownership to gamers. These games vary a lot and what’s even better, the same NFTs can be used for different games as well — just check out Axie Infinity and its creator program that resulted in various genres of games to be played with the same Axies you already have! One of the best ones we think is Axie Doll — definitely worth checking out.
Now we’re at a stage, where the ownership of the asset doesn’t only mean that you can access one game and should the game be “boring” or go out of business, with the same asset you can play more games as other studios could include those assets in their games! This means ownership of the asset unlocks not only investment and collectible opportunities but also more fun options to play with the same assets.
Plus there is yield generation. Current play-and-earn games mostly utilize NFTs to enable their token earning aspects, therefore with ownership of NFTs you have the potential to earn the game’s tokens while playing — and using them either in-game, hodling or as you might have learned from the play-and-earn games, you can sell and make some money from playing the game. Now the earning aspect of games are not necessarily contributed to the fact that NFTs are included, but in most cases they go hand in hand.
One of the most interesting aspects of ownership however from our perspective is the endowment effect that comes with the mindset of owning an asset. We have already observed how people appreciate what they own more than what could be “rational” through various studies in psychology or behavioural economics and now with assigning ownership to digital items as mentioned in the intro of this article, we can make it so gamers would really care about the condition, quality and status of their assets in and outside of the game.
This means that once a game allows upgrades, asset depreciation, secondary market sales, gamers potentially will start thinking more about how to make the most out of their assets, but also to best utilize them in-game — plus potentially increase their value on secondary markets.
There are three ways players can obtain NFTs they want to use in their games. The easiest one is of course purchase, they would go on the game’s marketplace or minting site, obtain the NFT and start playing the game. Purchasing the NFT gives you access to all the utilities the NFT provides, staking options, earning options as much as the game allows. Most of the time you need to pay the fee upfront, with no possibility of partial payments and such.
The second way of obtaining an NFT for a game is through a guild. Gaming guilds in the web3 world have made it their mission to provide NFT assets to players, who they can then start playing the game, generate revenue and split that with the players. In this scenario the player has access to the asset, but no true ownership as they’re renting those assets for a profit share. The model works really well in scenarios where the game’s economy is still in its infancy, does not contain economy sinks nor upgradability, because in those scenarios guilds need to implement more complex solutions for their rental.
The third way of obtaining an NFT is through collateralized rental platforms, however in most cases the utility of the NFT is not transferable. We are already seeing platforms rising where the NFT’s utility is kept, borrowing time is limited and there’s zero collateral, but the question of providing full ownership still remains — plus the questions of what happens if the game adds more complexity to its economy, how will rental platforms handle that?
With our guild being laser focused on player’s needs, we have heard many times that players would ultimately want to own the assets they are playing with. Or they would love to re-lease it, stake it — basically besides playing the core game, also playing the market as much as they can. So we started thinking about why we shouldn’t allow this?
So we entered the rabbit hole and started building a wallet that is game agnostic, can contain NFTs in a secure way for the owner, comes with programmable fees so we know the user will not be able to “not pay the dues” of a rental, moreover transactions could be whitelisted so if the game’s economy becomes more complex, the player can be part of that too, without having to pay heavy prices to the owner — or the owner can basically subsidize further spendings in the game.
On top of this, we can introduce a fee for the NFTs that the user can ultimately pay and obtain full ownership — with this we introduced partial payments, therefore a user can start playing a game, generate income and put all of that towards paying for the NFT that they rented.
In an optimal scenario, a gamer should be able to basically get any NFT, with full utilities, take advantage of the complete ownership of an NFT, pay for it in partial payments after the NFT has been acquired — and do so for any game they like.
In the future, game developers could also take advantage of such a solution, as gamers could pay back for the rented NFTs using the game’s native token, providing a form of protection to the game’s economy, meaning that potentially less of the in-game tokens will find its way to the market, causing an inflation. This however remains our question as we go, hopefully we will get to test it with our partner games.
As a guild we are well positioned to create the foundations for a play-now, pay-later business model, as we already have access to users’ on-chain and off-chain activities, therefore can better set fees for obtaining the NFTs ownership — not to mention the fact that AMG DAO has one of the biggest user bases in Central/Eastern Europe, which means we’ll be able to promote this tool to our users, giving them the first touch point with the metaverse.
Ultimately we feel like this natural evolution of gamers becoming the first workforce in the metaverse and investors in their favorite games is best supported by such a wallet solution, because this way they will feel incentivized to being part of building the web3 ecosystem.
AMG is a decentralized autonomous organization, bridging the gap between players and web3 game developers, bringin the next billion users into the metaverse.
AMG acquires non-fungible tokens (NFTs) used in blockchain-based games and acts as a trusted party advocating for games in the metaverse, thus bringing more people in.
We are leveraging strong partnerships with games developers and Yield Guild Games to launch our organization to the forefront of the Central/Eastern European gaming market.
AMG DAO has been building a game focused crypto wallet, guild management and other tools to keep contributing to the ecosystem, in order to aid the creation of games with sustainable economies.
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