Think back to the communities you’ve been genuinely excited to be a part of throughout your life. It’s likely these were groups formed on the basis of shared interests, right? That’s because we feel a sense of belonging when we bond with others over any particular thing we feel a particular Way about. I love games. I don’t get bored of helping to foster gaming communities.
That’s how I know that the current GameFi space is no breeding ground for gamers like myself and my enthusiastic peers: It’s a breeding ground for bots.
The main problem is structural.
GameFi projects seek to raise funds from the communities before they can meet with investors. To get past the initial stage hurdles, they sell NFTs and other cryptocurrency to raise enough money to keep building. They have a better chance of succeeding if they sell more. It’s easy to see how this makes builders inherently vulnerable to what a little bit of hype can do: It can, quite literally, make or break a project.
Related: 90% of GameFi projects are ruining the industry’s reputation
They accept their challenge, embrace the industry they love and, without realizing it, fall prey to empty hype.. They appoint influencers to spread the good word about their teaser trailer and how it’s going to result in a $200 million movie — when in reality, it might only have cost $10,000 to make. They exploit their fan base to make money. They offer gaming assets as giveaways, which often resembles multilevel marketing schemes and promises unreasonably lucrative returns.
This encourages a influenced and incentive-driven economy, which only allows projects to boast large numbers but fails to create innovative products. Take Star Atlas, for example: It’s been three years of promises and nothing has been released to the public.
Additionally, people who join forces because of an incentive instead of genuine interest can fail to create strong communities. Look at 90% of GameFi Discord servers, and you’ll only find empty conversations alongside a distinct lack of what could pass as sincere excitement. With more than 100,000 members but only four people who talk, it’s obvious that operators keen on projecting a positive image of their brand are hiring shills to make their communities seem more populated than they are.
This makes both builders and ecosystems fragile, as they are standing on very shaky ground: In the absence of reliable fans, everyone’s participation is for sale. Offer an influencer a better deal than the one they’re currently promoting, and they’ll have no problem jumping ship. Builders will often follow suit, and they’ll be ready to run once the token price has been raised enough to their satisfaction. The exact same scenario occurred when Squid cryptocurrency, which was not affiliated with Netflix but was hoping to make a profit from the series, reached $2,800 in price and crashed to nearly zero after it was revealed that it was a fraud.
Related: The rise in mobile gaming shares a lot with crypto gaming
In this case, scammers made away with $3.38 million — so you could argue that empty hype and incentive-based MLM-type schemes do work.
But don’t gamers deserve better?
True gamers — the ones who are loyal to their community and come together in the name of something they truly believe in — will stay as far as they can from these dynamics. People who love what they do, not the incentives it may bring, will have no reason to join the GameFi economy as long as this is the reality they’re presented with when they approach it. Those who have spent a long time building real communities have no reason to dupe their fans in the name of bloated numbers, and they know it’s a losing game (pun absolutely intended).
As interesting as the economic incentives are the psychological aspects of the dynamics. We are all humans. governed (as in, motivated and activated) by emotions: our “value system is made up of a hierarchy of emotionally created sensations that rank what is important to us,” which is to say, our brains are physiologically primed to look for emotional rewards, even more so than financial ones. You can think entertainment, dependability, and a sense that you belong. Gamers will just cash in on a game if they have no emotional attachment. They’ll earn what they can through gameplay, then withdraw their native tokens and move on to the next incentive.
This treatment will be most appealing to whom do you think? Who is most likely to benefit from this dreadful treatment? That’s right, bots.
Bots are specifically “programmed to take advantage of incentive structures to extract value, harming the game’s ecosystem,” and for blockchain games, they are a major roadblock on the road to widespread adoption. It’s not terribly hard to estimate how many bots a specific game might attract, as data companies can simply link any wallets belonging to the same person and cross-check the list. Jigger, an anti-botting company, analyzed more 60 games and services using this method. found 200,000 bots. Jigger estimates that bots represent 40% of GameFi’s total users. For some games (MetaGear X, AnRkey X and ARIVA), it rises to a stunning 80%, and for Karmaverse Zombie it is 96%.
That’s almost the total user base. And that’s unacceptable.
As long as this sorry state of affairs doesn’t improve, the GameFi industry will remain vulnerable to bots, scams, and hyped-up incentives that are unable to drive projects forward. It will continue. RealI am a fan of enthusiastic players.
This article is provided for information purposes only. It is not meant to be or should be taken as investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.