The State of the "Metaverse" (NFT-based Games)

tl;dr - bloodbath is coming in NFT games so be careful where you park your value heading into 2022. Similar to 2018 with shitcoins, NFT games will make a massive comeback around 2024.

Otherwise, the rest is just going to be my ramblings! Quick intro - I'm a management consultant that's working with a couple of my close friends in the valley on proper NFT-based game worlds, so I'm deep into this space (we just started Charaverse.com if any of you are interested! :3).

Strategically, we hypothesize that there's material opportunity for game devs to build the future here. Tactically, the key component is that it needs to primarily be player driven and player governed (i.e., truly decentralized, or at least a decentralized simulation). This obviously goes against most conventional ways of thinking regarding building great games, but we don't care because it's only a hurdle for established companies :). A lot of current day meta-level examples circulating in the public sphere are severely scope-limited, which is natural given how nascent the space is. It's like you guys have been saying - gamers don't necessarily have problems with NFTs, but rather take issue with greedy corporations driven by a clear max-profit agenda. I actually tested with a sample size of 10 gamers, but if you do your own interviews and use RCA methods, you'll see some really cool themes. Trust is another 21st century theme that's more keystone than ever (especially here), but I could ramble on that for hours.

Coinmarketcap (which has a custom list for NFT Games @/view/play-to-earn) + NFT marketplaces (like Opensea, but filter out no/low-utility collections) are great places to get a quick daily breakdown. You'll notice that outside of the top 5 on CMC and a few diamonds in the rough, the vast majority of them still haven't even partially delivered yet. I'm sure a lot of you just came off the interest rates post that's blowing up, so with the anticipated downturn, you can expect the vast majority of these projects to either soft-rug/pause or under-deliver (similar to what happened with "shitcoins" in 2018). Combine this with big player activity (like Facebook changing their entire company direction, and Microsoft's recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard), there's going to be more macro-level downward pressure on projects solely built on hype and little-to-no technical expertise. On the flipside, this means that over the next 2 years, people with true technical expertise and proper ethics have the opportunity to build something that will change how we understand gaming today.

What we're trying to do with Charaverse is execute said hypothesis - games need to be FUN AND AFFORDABLE first; how did people ever think they could sustainably deviate from that?? VCs generally see this space as a fast cash-grab and run, which doesn't align well with our philosophy, so we made an idle game for our intro chapter to see if we can raise from a community (weebs unite)! We're going to be selling genesis passes for less than a AAA title with a generous supply cap, so the game is ACCESSIBLE. We've been told this goes against bread and butter pressure-marketing tactics, but we're building for long-term. Our goal is to put the economy and governance in the players' hands so it's truly a democratic free-market, so that's what we'll be giving to all Passholders in our intro chapter (on top of all the other games we're looking to develop).

I'd be curious to see if you guys have any non-standard takes on where this space is heading! Especially if anyone has a well-supported fad position to balance my optimism ^_^