After taking the lead in the international e-sports competition, I was extremely Bullish about the game

Author:msfew , @msfew_eth

Internet Addicted Boy → E-sports Referee

I am msfew, a severe Internet addiction patient. Since elementary school, I have been constantly immersing myself in electronic games, using a notebook with less than 20 frames, and playing League of Legends with classmates.

Whether it was during my undergraduate class, during my internship as a programmer at Google, or after joining ORA (ora.io, World Intelligent Network) and becoming a member of AI Startup, I have never stopped playing for several hours a day, and even would rather sacrifice my sleep time to play games.

As I have a deeper understanding of the game industry, I realized some time ago and took the "E-sports Referee Certificate". After trying to score several events, through the narrative ability and multilingual advantages accumulated in the Crypto industry, I have leveraged the executive referee qualification of the top international event "Overwatch Global Championship".

I took the lead in front of the players and coaches of European and American teams and tens of millions of offline and online spectators in the venues of the Hangzhou Asian Games to ensure the fairness and smooth execution of the event. (I am looking at the camera in the picture)

(The main theme of this article is to open the game assets. For the part about e-sports referees, if you are interested, you can jump to the end to see the relevant content.)

Version abandoned: Blockchain game

2021-2022 is the pinnacle of blockchain gaming. It seems that after that, we have never heard of blockchain games again, nor have we heard of new giant blockchain game projects, but we have heard some sounds sporadically, including narratives such as full-chain games.

There have been many posts that analyze why GameFi fails (for example, from the perspective of gameplay and data indicators ), the success of narratives and tracks have their own advantages, but the reasons for failure are always the same: narratives/products/new traffic cannot support the price ("issuance of bonds <debt"). GameFi has always been the "Play-to-earn", "Rural surrounds cities", "new economic system", "new traffic enters the system", and there is no way to create or keep up with a new pace.

Capital began to vote with its feet, and the funds entering the GameFi field were getting less and less, resulting in fewer people entering this field. The quality of projects in the entire track was getting worse and worse. The projects that had previously raised a lot of money could not be implemented according to their original expectations, and the inflated narrative bubble burst, forming a vicious cycle.

The direction of game + blockchain?

How to save blockchain games? I think there are three main methods:

• Tokenization: Give up making those crappy low-quality games, stop installing, and try to combine blockchain with existing games directly.

• Full-chain game: It is still a full-chain game, but it is not for making games, but forcing infrastructure development through the demand for making games.

• Add new technologies: For example, adding AI to the game to further make the game more fun.

Game Asset Tokenization

After this cycle of influence, 100% of people in the currency circle are no longer disgusted with asset-to-tokenizing anything. This cycle is not short of good narratives, so the game is neglected.

But in fact, traditional Web2 games that have real consensus have been ignored. They are the real hotspots.

It is actually difficult to compete with traditional game manufacturers (for example, Riot received huge attention when it released a shooting game a few years ago) or traditional channels. In other words, these games themselves are unwilling to take the "hard path". Of course, if a game itself has a crypto-native mechanism, then it is a product that sells coins. In fact, it is understandable to think about token as products.

Instead of thinking about how to carve on dog shit , it is better to choose high-quality themes from the source.

Good games and good assets

Just talking about the assets in popular games themselves, they are very good tokenized themes. Because of the advantages of three aspects:

• Natural Attention :

  • The speed of trend formation + the scarcity and inreplication of events themselves: Once a good game issues coins, it is a one-time event. There are only a few good games, one less is posted.

  • Consensus scope: Most people in the Crypto market are very recognised for high-quality gaming.

  • The financial strength of the crowd: Players and traders who play the game are willing to spend a lot of money to invest in the on-chain assets of the game.

  • In addition, the attention mechanism of the game itself is different from that of meme, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. The meme propagation mechanism is rapidly and rapidly fading. There is rarely a meme that can survive for several years, while the spread and attention of the game are continuous, which is more like a stage that is fast at the beginning and then up.

• Same mental model:

  • The game assets themselves have mental models of Crypto assets. Taking CSGO as an example, Play-to-earn (box drops) + randomness (buyed Golden Dog) + jewelry series and single items (NFT). At the same time, traders also prefer the "gambler style" to understand that they are speculating. Of course, many gamers do spend a lot of money just to buy props based on luxury goods logic.

• Loser Business:

  • One of the easy-to-be-spray is that if you want to invest in loser business in the future, the game is a growing loser business. In the future, more fresh blood will enter the system. You can't trade coins, but if you don't play games, it's really a weird person.

Didn't people know these principles before? Why are they issued now? I think it is mainly because the current situation is different, the infrastructure is ready (the trading platform itself, various "brokership companies"), and the view of tokens and on-chain assets is becoming increasingly accepted.

After talking about the advantages, one problem is that the game assets themselves are limited to the game's upper limit (of course this upper limit is very high), and cannot be spread infinitely like a pure meme (for example, the old man and the aunt will know Trump, but they will resist their understanding of the game). At the same time, of course there are regulatory and IP restrictions.

Finally, we return to the original point of view: in the game track, we should try to issue assets to good games/good assets, rather than creating junk assets. This is also the lesson learned by AI and the last cycle of the game (everyone builds launchpad, launchpad builds more junk assets, but it is not actually working).

Take CSGO jewelry as an example

CSGO jewelry is a typical example of a game asset because its model is simple enough (much simpler than the previous GameFi cycle that everyone is most popular with Fantasy Westward Journey) and its popularity is enough.

Previously, off_thetarget , Gink5814 and I have published content related to CSGO jewelry.

CSGO jewelry in simple terms:

• CSGO is a shooting game with many weapons (AK, M4, pistol, knife, glove). The game itself is very popular.

• The original skin is ugly (compared to the skin), you can purchase weapon jewelry skins through unboxing or secondary markets.

• The accessories correspond to → Weapon type (main weapon? Knife? Gloves?) → Specific model (AK, M4, Butterfly Knife) → Wear degree and pattern; it corresponds to the NFT track (PFP? U card?) → Specific series (Punks, BAYC) → Specific small pictures.

• Players have very high motivation and demand for buying accessories, and even have an official Burn mechanism like the game platform's account ban.

I think the risk of CSGO jewelry now lies in the fact that the price is far ahead of value, and the traffic growth of the game itself is actually likely to decline, but due to the existence of narratives such as "being a landlord" and "gear bricks to move bricks", a lot of pure capital and speculation traffic has been attracted:

• Being a landlord, that is, buying jewelry and renting them out, if the jewelry continues to rise, then it is good (but there is still a risk of being bought out if it rises), but if it falls, the yield rate is even worse than that of Yu'ebao... So it may not necessarily have good returns if it rises or falls.

• The feeling of moving jewelry bricks is to find dumb money as the exit liquidity of the entire system, allowing them to calculate the exchange rate difference and buy cheap US dollar cards, but the source of these cards and the mechanism of locking positions for 7 days make people worry if they crash, whether they will be the last wave...

• The spread is too violent, usually in QQ group WeChat group. With the order of "teacher", everyone collectively raised the unit price...

In short, CSGO is a narrative that perfectly fits our "popular Web2 games" in the chain. We have two directions, which can combine CSGO jewelry with blockchain to achieve "on-chain" game assets: 1) Sell shovels; 2) CSGO on-chain funds.

1.Selling shovels: Use Crypto thinking to make CSGO jewelry trading tools

Any area involving transactions is always the one who sells water and shovels who can travel through bull and bear without risk . Bloomberg, Uniswap, law firms, audit companies... are all giants that stand still and ignore the market.

In Crypto, assets and narratives will change (ICO → VC currency → DeFi → GameFi → Pure Meme), and the trading methods will also change (CEX → AMM → NFT → TG Bot → On-chain scanning terminal), but the demand for better, more complete and faster trading tools will never change.

In terms of technical limitations, both Crypto and CSGO jewelry have some strange limitations:

• Crypto: The transaction method of AMM must be followed on the chain, and there are regulatory restrictions on the off-chain.

• CSGO Jewelry: There is a cooling period limit in the trading mechanism, and the trading platform level adopts the pending order system like NFT.

Although both are tied up, they have actually made their own good trading experiences. Among them, Crypto's trading tools have actually developed faster and have been iterated many times. For example, in order to solve the problem of AMM fragmentation, aggregators such as 1inch appeared; in order to solve the problem of fragmentation of NFT platforms, platforms such as Blur appeared; in order to solve the problem of separation of transactions and wallets, DEX Wallet and TG Bot appeared...

Currently, the transaction of CSGO jewelry has these features that can be improved:

• "Sweeping Chain Platform": Analysis of KOLs and professional players' positions similar to Crypto Sweeping Chain Platform

• "Aggregator": All-in-one BUY ( View the base price of each platform ) and Sell (Analyze the orders of quantity and price of all platforms + Avoid oversell + Consider exchange rate and lock position) Functions

• "Exchange": AMM-like trading mechanism (not to buy, but to the platform or to the pool), to achieve real buying and selling in seconds

• “Derivatives”: leveraged trading, long and short selling, leasing and loans and other financial means and derivatives

As an industry originated from trading and developed by trading, Crypto has already gained rich experience in making trading tools under technical limitations. It is believed that it will be a dimensionality reduction blow for the trading platform of CSGO jewelry.

The strong never complain about the environment . If CSGO jewelry has a more mature trading platform and experience, everyone's position classification will be more diverse, and the volume and price will inevitably be healthier.

2. New Assets: CSGO Jewelry's On-chain ETF

The narrative of RWA and Crypto stock platform interconnection has become popular recently. I think the biggest problem with traditional assets currently on the chain is that their RWAs are not attractive enough and are mid-current assets that are neither up nor down:

• The yield is not as high as that of stablecoins, nor is it as security as a stablecoin (if stablecoins and US bond RWA are not considered RWA)

• The purchase process is complicated and requires KYC (the characteristics of crossing geographical restrictions without idealized RWA)

• Not as attractive as meme or other assets (few people in the currency circle want to buy funds such as corn and soybeans, these are basically garbage assets packaged and put on the chain to find exit liquidity )

There is something interesting in CSGO jewelry, which is the track index, jewelry index, original leather index, agent index, etc.... They are naturally divided into clear categories according to the track, and can continue to subdivide the series of specific weapons. CSGO is an attractive and excellent asset for RWA.

CSGO Jewelry has many advantages in making funds:

• Benefits of on-chain funds: The common advantages of on-chain funds are: data and flows are open and transparent, and a contract can operate at a low cost and can be unrestricted on-chain circulation.

• Capture the index of jewelry: There is no need to take risks to bet on single items, but to capture the benefits of the entire field. At the same time, CSGO jewelry has always had an index, but it cannot be traded, so many people can only watch it but not participate.

• Introducing game traffic: the logic of Mass adoption. Gamers may enter Crypto through this index fund, and the out-of-circle effect and ultimate ceiling will be good.

• Pricing consensus among young audiences : Young people, especially those in the currency circle, do not catch up with many RWAs, but will chase the assets they care about . CSGO jewelry is an example. Young people play games every day, and naturally feel inexplicably close to these things.

How to implement a CSGO jewelry fund? A simple idea of ​​a tool original leather index fund:

• 80% of the tool fund builds positions in various categories of knives, and 20% can be used as stablecoins to mine profits.

• To make everyone unable to feel the existence of Crypto, although it is an on-chain fund, it can still enter and exit the fiat currency directly.

• If someone thinks that simply capturing returns is not enough (there are many players who buy accessories purely for luxury goods logic), then holding a certain amount of fund shares can borrow accessories held by the fund for free; in addition, a certain proportion of jewelry positions can be rented on the trading platform.

• In case of evasion of regulation, we can use token standards such as ERC-7641 RevShare Token to package it from a fund into a token that can share the share value growth and lease income of assets in the fund.

Other directions

In addition to the general direction of asset chaining, there are two small directions: one is full-chain gaming, and the other is the combination of AI.

For full-chain games, the meaning is not to put the game on the chain, but to promote the development of underlying infrastructure through applications. Just like in the example of GPU, people simply want to play better and more real electronic games, which has promoted the progress of graphics, and the progress of graphics has driven the development of GPUs, and in turn, the new generation of GPUs has promoted the development of cutting-edge technology fields such as AI. The recent examples in Crypto are like the Crossy Fluffle mini-game made by MegaETH. It is not that the game is the core, but through these application needs, the underlying Infra is encouraged to be stronger, and demand forces development.

For the combination of AI, AI can exist as a neutral agent and perform some tasks completely objectively, so that the tasks such as e-sports referees at the beginning can be perfectly executed; at the same time, AI can also be used as a story generator, an infinite map generator, and a game asset generator...

Summary: GG, but no WP

This is why after I was a referee in international competitions, I watched the game assets on the chain and the game + Crypto.

It’s not because of how popular games or assets are now, but because we may finally figure out how to play.

GameFi has won and lost, but this time, the Crypto world has reopened, the playing style will be more mature, and the asset model and cognition will be stronger.

Stop being a NPC in the game, and be a creator of the new civilization.

A little insight as an e-sports referee

Here are some additional content, which has nothing to do with the text, for entertainment only:

• E-sports referees are actually not referees in traditional sports, and they basically do not need to make penalty for winning or losing the game. What they do is mainly to help players debug equipment or allocate resources.

• The essence of e-sports referees is actually the liaison officer on the field, communicating internally (to the players and coaches) and externally (to the referee and the event director team).

• Being introductory e-sports referees or introductory e-sports circle is actually very simple, which is easier than playing games to top the ranks. The hardest thing is to strive for individual competition resources. As long as you have the first one, it will be very simple.

• What is lacking is mainly people who know English and Korean. People with translation skills are actually very lacking.

• E-sports competitions must always be offline, and the players’ geographical location must be unified to ensure relatively fairness.

• Like Web3, e-sports is all active at night or even late at night, which is more in line with the biological clock of young people.

• E-sports will replace traditional sports, and the new generation will choose to participate in and watch e-sports rather than traditional sports.