Date: 2 May 2024

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Games are tough to design, yet tougher to market.

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Core route of game design

Having games designed to solve a need in the market, takes tons of core development iterations, releasing the MVP will potentially take a year’s timeframe and has tons of burndown time for the developers. This will require multiple cross functioning teams to make the game applicable to the masses from design > system archi > development > testing. If the game is designed under more complex parameters with different goals and outlines to achieve, integrating 3D models, animations, movement, voicelines and more: having to set up the integration points between each added difficulty will increase. That is why most game companies operate on their B2C store that they have setup to cover the burndown chart of game development be it whether the users can purchase accessories using real-world currency.

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Web2 Game tokenomics

Game tokenomics can significantly improve on how users purchase and own accessories from these games. Take an example from Apex Legends (Shooter), from EA. Their game tokenomics focuses on providing a few different currencies and each currency only serves a specific purpose.
  • Free currency (Unlocks low-tier cosmetic items and legends)
  • Paid currency (Can be used to purchase rewarding seasonal assets and rare-tier cosmetic items)
  • Premium currency (Can be used to purchase mythic items which can only be earned via luck from opening enough boxes purchased directly from Paid currency)

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Issue

Problem with these tokenomics is that, it operates mainly to serve a specific purpose to enable retention-rate at the game, yet to cover the burndown of the team. But not satisfying all the users in terms of rewarding experience. A few applications however have games built on top of blockchain tokenomics. We can take a look at how games done referring to the section below:

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Tokenomics and gaming experience done on Blockchain.

Blockchain serves a specific decentralization purpose. Companies are currently on the lookout to serve scalability on their tokenomics be it with transactional speed and security. However, most of them on-chain tokens will be tied associating to real-world value. We can take the assumption of Arbitrum, a Layer 2 done on top of Ethereum’s Layer 1 to scale on their specific needs. Here we have games that have been released as a Decentralized Application on top of the foundation which is Arbitrum. In terms of tokenomics, we have games that can provide a new level of on-chain currency which can be treated as an asset towards Arbitrum, games like these will associate their currency, on-chain cosmetics and so much more with Arbitrum and all the asset purchases and trading can be done on top of the Arbitrum level. But to scale towards more users, we need to take in the factor that Arbitrum has to issue their platform and market it towards more users. We also need to take in view of major Launchpad done on the traditional platform, such as Steam, where they allow trading off-chain (which means the information and data is stored within databases).

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Designing Kumiho.ai

Nanopass started out as an NFT Project, leading users to collect and trade 5,555 tokens each associated with Imagery with different values of rarity. We pitched into a form where we want to associate rewarding the user base of collecting with a game where they vest into, which is further designed as Kumiho.ai Here we put our time into the whole architectural design of the application, enabling 3D assets done prior to allow for smooth animations, interactivity and also small-level of AI gamification towards the users. As OpenAI released their LLM language models into 2022-2023, funding for creating startup level of LLMs has decreased. Our initial idea is to create a special LLM for our gaming models which I have done the decisioning to go on integrating it in some form within the game. We kept the promise of having a burndown period of a year into development, I would say, time is not right for a release of such application. I had to make alot of drilldown approach into designing the application and aiming to release it for the stakeholder’s sake of capturing more funding. Kumiho.ai Link was then released as a companionship AI sub-game with values of on-chain rewards for off-chain tokenomics for the users to purchase apparels and room details for the users. Integrating LLM use case for the users to interact with different levels of emotions and personalities. We then can further take this application to the Vtubing level as well, using the same few models to create AI enabled response for Vtubing setups for Twitch. We’ve also collaborated with ElevenLabs to fine-tune voices and integrating parts of it into the system. We’ve also provided different admin, reporting and also configuration systems that allows for specific patches towards the application. But I would say the challenge was to find the sweet spot of tokenomics.

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Tokenomics

As stated, Nanopass was launched as an NFT collectible, issuing off-chain rewarding currencies for the users. These off-chain currency (FRAGZ) can then be ported as part of membership tokens within the game. The game is also designed with tokenomics that allows purchasing of different tiers of memberships and also apparels from IRL currency with payment gateway merchants.

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Future based of such MVP release

We may not have done a great job, or even have a good rep from the provenance searching market. Where ideas come and stay for a few days and then dissappeared into oblivion. But kumiho.ai serves as an MVP towards greater ideation for markets where we can tackle. Live Vtubing and also companionship LLM systems.