Why did the gold mining studio feed Warcraft but "killed" all Web3 games?

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Author: Lao Bai, Consultant & Former Partner of ABCDE, Amber Group

Some time ago, I tweeted, saying that my son was crazy about recharging to Roblox to buy Robux and stealing other people’s props, lamenting that this game is much more awesome than Genshin Impact’s card draw and Bubble Mart’s blind box, the real god of krypton gold, which resonated with many old irons, and that article was also the most traffickristen recently

The next day, I suddenly thought - why does Roblox such a krypton gold game seem to have no “gold mining studio” in it? Or if so, why has it had almost no impact on the game lifecycle? Just two days ago, @j0hnwang also turned out the Roblox article he had written before, and said about this, I had collected it before, and I went back to read it

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John’s point is - Roblox treats the economic system as part of the game. Crypto games, on the other hand, see games as a cover for economic systems. It is believed that centralized economic mechanisms help build a more controlled gaming experience.

This makes sense, Web3 games are not fun enough and are also something that everyone has criticized before, but this round of Web3 games has actually greatly improved the playability, and the economic mechanism is also very centralized, but the result is not different, there must be other reasons

Then I thought of World of Warcraft and Kaito, some time ago when X blocked the Kaito API, I said the following

"Once behavior can be scaled, it will definitely be industrialized

Starting from the “Chinese Farmer” of Web2 World of Warcraft, to the script of Web3 X2Earn and the gold mining studio, now the mouth is brought by the inevitable “AI batch numbering, multi-person matrix mouth mouth”

So lip flicking is not played bad by smart retail investors or KOLs, it is played by the attribute of ‘reproducibility’, this is not a problem of Kaito a project, it is basically the ultimate fate of all incentive systems."

What is the secret of World of Warcraft and Roblox? Why can’t the studio kill them, why did the U.S. server first appear in Chinese Farmer, Warcraft gold inflation, players complained for a while, but then slowly accepted it and became a fixed ecology in the game?

There must be something that Web3 games don’t have, and it’s not just a centralized economic mechanism

Let’s talk about World of Warcraft first

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1. Gold is not “endgame value”

Lao Tie, who has played WOW in depth, should know that gold coins are basically not linked to your status in the game, and your achievements, rankings, reputation, etc. cannot be bought directly with gold coins. The player who picked it up at the end was also directly bound and could not be sold for money

So gold will save you time at most, but it won’t make you jump to a core player. At that time, many domestic page games were completely the opposite, RMB Krypton gold R seconds and seconds, which was actually a bit similar to the current Web3 game style

In essence, in World of Warcraft, all “meaningful things” - top equipment, achievements, titles, dungeon contributions, etc., cannot be bought directly with gold coins. So although the action of gold mining can be scaled up and led to the industrialization of the first batch of Chinese Farmer, it has never been able to dominate the core experience of the game. In other words, this “industrialization” is limited to the “marginal layer” of the game

2. Official “Absorption rather than Confrontation”

Blizzard made a series of actions after the appearance of the gold mining studio, and it was very smart in hindsight

• One is official control - you are allowed to buy gold coins with real money, but the price is regulated by the system, and there is no free financial export, turning the underground black market into an official currency exchange
• The second is to add various thresholds - such as daily, weekly, and various CD locks… No matter how high your level is, you have to wait honestly for time to dilute the advantages of industrialization
• The third is to add more “meaningful things” that cannot be bought with gold, just like the guilds, group books, and social prestige mentioned above… As a result, there were gold groups and GKPs later, but the first kills of various dungeons were completed by various top unions first, and it was absolutely impossible for the gold group to do it, so gold mining was always a “second-class citizen” in World of Warcraft

As for Roblox, the logic is slightly different

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1. Encourage creativity rather than repetitive labor

If you look at the article I quoted in the Roblox article before, you will know that the most profitable thing in Roblox is not the repetitive labor of brushing resources, which is not very oily.

What really makes money is making maps, designing gameplay, operating communities, etc

These are difficult to replicate on a large scale by the studio, no matter how many resources you brush, you can’t brush a gameplay that is popular with children (but now with AI, is it possible to “batch design” this thing)

2. The internal cycle of the economic system is closed, and the exchange of assets is not free

This is a bit similar to what John said, you buy Robux with a credit card very quickly, but in turn, Robux is not so silky to exchange for cash, there is a threshold, delay and proportional loss, so arbitrage and brick moving and other methods are not easy to use here

And most of the money in Roblox flows to the platform commission, and the various head creators and in-game consumption mentioned above are a closed-loop economic system, and there is no overflow

Of course, whether it is World of Warcraft or Roblox, Fun+ has many people to play, and there is no doubt that it is the most important foundation that forms their base

On the other hand, what is the real reason for the collective death of Web3 games?

Recall that aside from the factor of whether it is fun or not, perhaps the original intention of the design of the chain game at the beginning was destined for today’s results

Almost all blockchain games allow “repeatable behavior” + “freely withdrawable assets”

In the era when the Web2 game system has long been mature, this will inevitably make the final players of blockchain games become capital + scripts, not humans

In other words, as long as Play and Earn are linked, this will definitely be the result

Whether you are Play 2 Earn, or the later improved Move 2 Earn, or Play & Earn, it is a change of soup and not a change of medicine, and there is no essential difference

It’s a bit like an impossible triangle in a game, where you can only achieve two corners at most between fun, speculators can make money, and studios can scale

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From this point of view, Web3 Game is not a matter of team quality and capital scale, but from the bottom genes, it is impossible to be “fun”

Is it possible to chain in World of Warcraft? Does it make sense?

I remember the time when the chain was on fire, we often enjoyed a scene, that is, the chain in World of Warcraft, what would happen?

It is not the game on the chain, but the economic system in World of Warcraft, including gold coins, props, mounts, etc., is all on the chain, so that these things can be freely traded, freely withdrawn, and financialized

Now that I think about it, I was very naïve at the time, and once I did this, WOW was destined to be destroyed by the system

The underlying axioms of World of Warcraft’s success

• Meaning untradeable - most valuable things, top gear, achievements, titles, … Almost all of them are bound, non-tradable and non-transferable, and these things represent what you have done, not what you have
• Progress does not equal wealth - your time investment, operation skills, and teamwork are the foundation of your life, and gold coins will make you feel more comfortable at most, but you will not be able to cross classes
• The player is not the asset owner, but the role-player - this equipment is played by me/exchanged for DKP, this boss is the first kill in our union in the world, this role is my 10 years of hard work… Once this becomes “I bought it, I invested it”, this emotionally bound character will be relegated to a skin for an asset account

If you have to talk about chaining, what is really worth chaining in World of Warcraft is these things - such as the first kill certificate of a certain boss, the history of the union, the timestamp of your achievements, and the testimony record of world events… What is on the chain is not assets and value, but memories and traces

What makes World of Warcraft great is precisely because its most important thing can never be sold

From this point of view, “chain games must die”

Not even blockchain games, we used to treat blockchain as a hammer, looking at everything like a nail, and we had to knock it over. As everyone knows, there are too many things in this world that do not need to be “financialized” at all, and the meaning of their existence is to be experienced, remembered, and told