Why Alien Worlds stood the test of time when other Web3 games failed

Alien Worlds has been the leader in daily unique active wallets (dUAW) for several years. Since its launch in late 2020, it has been ridiculed as ‘not a real game’, ‘clicker’, and ‘play-to-earn fad’. However, the player base has provided no evidence that this opinion is widely accepted. Indeed, web3 gaming is a field with an absurdly high death rate, but Alien Worlds seems unstoppable even during a brutal cryptocurrency crash. Why is that?

Typically, there are countless reasons why games fail, but there are only a few reasons why they succeed. But what’s interesting is that web3 has added an almost entirely new category called token economics. It was through thoughtful and well-executed token economics that Alien Worlds was able to continue building over the past few years when many other projects fell flat. But token economics isn’t the only one that deserves all the credit.

I would like to briefly mention that this article is ‘sponsored’ as I was paid to write it. That said, the whole idea of ​​this article is one I’ve had on my to-do list for a while, so I pitched it to the good folks at Alien Worlds and they nodded. This analysis and opinions are entirely my own.

Token economics: the lifeblood of Web3 games

You might be fooled into thinking that complex gaming economies interacting with fiat money are new, but that’s not true. web3 just changed it. All popular multiplayer games over the past few decades have interacted with money beyond microtransactions. Every major multiplayer game has an economy that revolves around selling the game’s currency, game assets, boosts and accounts, even if it’s against the game’s terms of service.

MMORPGs have fought back against some of this the only way they can: by selling in-game currency directly for fiat. This officially prices the game currency and makes the economy legal. This means you can measure your in-game earnings against their fiat value. This is incredibly difficult to pull off without blowing up the game’s economy, but games like Eve Online have proven that this is possible, and few games take economy more seriously than Eve Online.

For web3 games and the metaverse, a magnifying glass is placed over the game economy. Despite not being fundamentally different from Eve Online’s economy in a practical sense, the tokenization of game currency increases the speed at which it flows from person to person. The way we look at the economics of web3 games is distinct for one main reason. This means that even people who don’t play games can invest in tokens like any other cryptocurrency. In fact, there were phases during the last bull market when Metaverse tokens outperformed almost everything else.

So what does this have to do with the success and longevity of Alien Worlds? everything. Most developers of popular web3 games are not financial analysts or economists, but their sudden interest in games has them managing tokens with significant market capitalization. This is where countless games have failed, sometimes quite dramatically. December 2021, We covered Web3 games. It saw soaring popularity and corresponding token prices, but an innocuous oversight by the developers killed the game, with the tokens losing over 99% of their value in a matter of hours.

You don’t have to be an economist to understand how tokens can break a game. If you have too many tokens, their value decreases and earning them in the game is not a reward. If there are too few tokens, their value goes up, but they are too difficult to obtain in-game and there is no reward. This is the Goldilocks porridge scenario. But there are a lot of factors that come into play here like parentheses: trust, reliability, growth. Alien Worlds ticked all the boxes perfectly. The best evidence of this can be seen by contrasting Alien Worlds with other popular web3 games.

Alien Worlds is a steady boat on stormy seas.

Alien Worlds is well-received for its popularity, but what’s even more impressive to me is its stability. If there’s an industry more turbulent than cryptocurrency and Web3, I wouldn’t want to go near it. This segment cycled from euphoria to despair, with world firsts and disasters all over again, making it seem like I was getting older.

Most coins are now down more than 90% from their all-time highs, and the NFT art market has fallen off a similarly steep cliff, taking with it any vague indicator of “interest.” Within web3, most projects, no matter how iconic or objectively successful, have a graph like this:

Of course, Axie Infinity is an extreme example, but it is far from an outlier. Other successful web3 games have similarly shaped graphs, like this one: splinterland, highlandsand even excellent Free from the chains of the gods. This is not a criticism of these projects or an indication that they lack quality. It’s just a sign of the times. But what this highlights is how impressive Alien Worlds’ metrics are.

I freely admit that I cannot explain with any certainty the success of Alien Worlds. No one believes it can be done. However, there are areas where Alien Worlds clearly surpasses most of the industry. Here are some key success stories that help explain the anomalies of alien worlds:

Token Price =/= Popularity

The game considered by most to be the originator of Play-to-Earn (interestingly, we’ve never seen Alien Worlds use this term about itself) has done the unthinkable. It decouples the token price from user activity. That is, even though Alien World’s token Trilium ($TLM) was -60% last year (Solana -51%, Polygon -43%, Avalanche -55% — gaming tokens have taken a big hit). The UAW and deal numbers are as follows: ~ no In other games, we’ve seen all of these metrics rise and fall along with the game’s token price.

growth

In an era where many web3 games simply ran off the runway or had to be reduced to bare bones; Alien Worlds has released a major update to the game.has been released Galaxy Hub Grant Program, pioneered in-game DAOs. Very few people in the industry can do this.

partnership

Partnerships with Alien Worlds are growing, and we recently saw a crossover with Space Misfits, one of the oldest web3 games, and Colonize Mars, another hero of the WAX ​​blockchain. One of the other exciting partnerships coming in is the Galactic Hubs program mentioned above. There are projects coming to Alien Worlds that you can work with and receive grants for. This may have been a good plan in a bull market, but right now it may be a life raft for web3 projects.

Community development

Overall the web3 community is a bit too fragmented for my taste, but it’s nothing if not passionate. But when the “to the Moon” tweet stopped seeming reasonable to even the most evangelical crypto brethren, much of the community surrounding the web3 project simply disappeared. That wasn’t the case in Alien Worlds. even alittle In fact, this community has one of the most loyal communities I’ve ever seen. One obvious reason is that Alien Worlds is investing in its community, both financially and effortlessly, as the game continues to grow. This is what I call a green flag!

consistency

Maintaining consistency in the most inconsistent industry on the planet is no small task. Most web3 games seem to surge with content patches, marketing efforts, and community engagement, then fall into silence for a while. I have some sympathy here. That’s difficult when the value of your coffers is much lower than it was two years ago. But Alien Worlds is like clockwork, having all of the above. Being consistent strengthens the trust you have in your community.

final thoughts

Alien Worlds is a unique case and cannot be avoided. Alien Worlds ruling the roost when we were at the height of our rise wasn’t that interesting to me. It was as accessible and cohesive a game as players could get. But when the industry caught fire and meaningful revenue generation from web3 games evaporated for all intents and purposes, the expected downward trajectory of player activity and transactions surprised no one. And yet, as blockchain’s remarkable transparency shows, Alien Worlds continues to buck the trend and continue on its path without going down in flames.

If you’re looking to build a web3 game, or web3 project for that matter, I recommend modeling most of the basics on Alien Worlds. It takes something special to get to the top, but it also takes something awesome to stay there.