Dissecting the BigTime economic model: tokens aside, the game itself has already failed by half

Aiko (Twitter/X:@0x Aiko Dai)

Source: Folius Ventures

Editor’s note: Recently, the much-watched Web3 game BigTime has been launched, igniting a new round of gold craze, and “invitation codes” are even more difficult to find. As the first Web3 native MMO game, was BigTime a success? Can its operating model be borrowed and replicated by the Web3 game team? Does BigTime’s economic model stand up to scrutiny? And where is the final value capture of its tokens? Folius Ventures researcher Aiko posted an article detailing BigTime’s economic model, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily as follows:

! [Anatomy of the BigTime economic model: tokens aside, the game itself has already failed by half] (https://piccdn.0daily.com/202310/13111206/z3wkpc9iflciu907.png!webp)

Looking at the economic model is actually translation, translating all the “blind box”, “release”, “transaction”, “output”, and “drop” all translated: where does the money come from, where it goes, who makes money, and where the final value is captured.

Looking at BigTime’s current economic model, the experience is as follows:

**Only faucets are designed for $TIME, but there is no sink in the game at all. ** Basically, it is the logic of buying NFTs with cash to earn TIME dumping back in the secondary market, TIME has no strong consumption scene at all, and is only mined and sold as mining coins. ** The token has no sink and no cash flow to buy back, ** MC is about 30 million (2 million yesterday) in the case of a very small circulation disk, which is extremely mismatched with the valuation of 300 million/600 million in the primary market. Except for those who rushed to MEXC to speculate coins, everyone else is on their way back to the book.

• So where is value capture? All in OpenLoot, the first party sells fiat equivalent soft currency and blind boxes, and all future NFT transactions have a 5% margin, all earned is cash flow. Cash flow is indeed very important to the team, but the long-term value capture of the token cannot be missing. **This design has a lot of similarities with the In-app Taxation we wrote last year (that is, any production process is hierarchical and functional distinction + random numbers, mathematical expectations are full, and any mismatch between supply and demand caused by randomness is to promote transactions and tax draws), but in our design, we not only increase the frequency of transactions, but also design token sinks everywhere to capture value for tokens for a long time, unfortunately I don’t see BigTime pay attention to the latter.
• IAT is indeed likely to replace the original single and even coins + NFT, and is more suitable for complex/multi-level game ecology, but it also does make me feel how boring a game with only IAT is…
• The last layer, the consumer layer, unfortunately did not see BigTime’s attention. **All in-game items are still purely ROI-oriented miner logic, and even skin color levels are buff-related. Exterior values are taboo, and if you want to create a looking/ostentatious consumption-driven market, you must discard these values while rolling art. **Tokens aside, BigTime is already half the battle for the first Web3 native MMO game. **From the current design, it seems that it does not meet a little of everyone’s basic requirements for social driving and imagination of the open economy, just another legendary brush copy gold game. But whose fault is it? Limited industrial capacity and the founder who does not understand the game and insists on making games? As Rumor says, sell the game as a shell to a third-party trading team? The essence of impetuous profit-seeking and difficult to break the circle? So are we still looking forward to the web3 version of EVE Online? Do you want to continue to expect a Web3 MMO made by Dream Values? What will it look like then? Also, server issues and asset bugs shouldn’t be bugs at this stage of the game.
• There are many analyses on the market for this token launch operation, with mixed reviews. But what the Web3 game team needs to see more is that the BigTime team has been doing NFT sales in the past two years, including many pushes and door-to-door sales, and doing their best to put down their bodies to run the holder community, which may be the foreshadowing of today’s events. This operation is only useful for game projects with high popularity (too long to survive) & high product potential (so-called 3A) & released a large number of assets, and the reproducibility is poor, and BigTime has indeed played its cards and taken its own path. But here is a reminder that all game teams should return and pay attention to community users, and more importantly, do circle-breaking growth outside the stock.

I have analyzed Web3 games for two years, and now look at the case of BigTime, which can be analyzed from multiple angles such as first-level/second-level/gold players/gamers/game designers/game teams, etc., which is really interesting, and I have also benefited a lot from communicating with other friends in the industry, and there is not much to expand here due to space limitations. So I hate investors who talk about Web3 games as the era of the little bully, and can only see slices forever. The interesting point of Web3 games is that the ecological multi-party game, demons and monsters show their own powers, and in the end, there are really people who make a lot of money and leave the myth of wealth creation, leaving research themes for academia, and a large number of intricate social relationships and value evaporation, which is probably not understood by others.

Original link