Introduction

The world of gaming and GameFi enjoyed an impressive development in the last decade. Both the number of users and turnover of companies has had a significant growth.

A relatively new sector in the gaming space is GameFi, with this term we refer to blockchain-based games that offer economic incentives to players. This is actually one of the fastest growing segments in the video game industry. With around $10 billion in earnings, this new industry has already a significant impact on the global gaming market. 

Tokenomics and sustainability

There is some  concern about the sustainability of blockchain-based games in terms of tokenomics. The reason being that many games are betting on explosive growth in the user base to support the rewards that keep the players active. 

A core issue is that a good design of the game tokenomics is critical both for the future of the game and for reduce the investors' risk. The tokenomics  should keep the game from running into an economic crash. 

In order to reduce risks, it is also essential to continuously refine the game tokenomics. 

Today, while Web 3.0 gaming is sought to have an inspiring long-term future, the industry still has some tough challenges to face. This is in part due to the difficult step from free2play to play2earn games and models, and to the complex ecosystem where assets are freely swapped and wealth transferred. 

In Play2Earn games, complexity dramatically increases when developers have to deal with new paradigms like utility assets, AMMs, Liquidity Pools, DAOs and volatile market conditions. In such a context, game economy systems and mechanics are hard to design. As a consequence of that, many people have failed trying to design and run them.

However, with the rise of Play2Earn games, the game economy is now at the centre of the game’s whole experience. Failure to properly design and test the economy could result in the game failing even before the launch. 

In fact, when the economy or progression system of a single-player is out of balance, it has a direct impact on player experience. Also in the case of Free2Play games, having a bad game economy impacts the chances of players spending money or watching ads. ​

The complexity of such an environment would call for support from some automated tool to design and assess the game and tokenomics model.

Machinations

Machinations is a browser-based tool to design and balance game systems. Game designers can work collaboratively on their game systems, simulate outcomes, tune parameters on the fly, showcase their ideas internally or to investors.

Machinations.io is the only platform  that allows also to design and predict game economies and systems for free2play, and play2earn games. The platform ecosystem includes also a game economy health monitoring service for blockchain games.

This service allows to verify game economies based on large-scale simulations prior to launch, and continuously monitor and predict and alert on trends based on live players and market data after launch.

- How it works

The platform allows to map game systems in an interactive diagram, set parameters that define resource flows, and carry out real-time analysis of the results in easy to read charts. 

It allows to simulate outcomes for 1 player journey or stochastically. 

More technically, Machinations uses a Turing-complete visual language based on 5 Resource, 9 Nodes and 2 Connection types that can be used to model any game including their tokenomics. 

It uses a game-centric framework & language. The diagrams themselves are dynamic. You can instantly visualize the flow of the design and anyone involved in a task can have a clear vision of what is going on.

The system provides users also with the power of multiple simulations, whose ultimate goal is to identify weaknesses in the game design.

The system allows also integration via plug-in with Unity and other upcoming platforms like Binance and OpenSea. The integration with Unity allows easy data import/export from the system to efficiently perform data analysis and model tuning.

- Who can use it

The tool can be used by many company profiles: game designers who want to reduce iteration time, producers in order to save on production time and predict KPIs accurately, consultants who need to efficiently communicate their ideas to clients, developers who want an easy way of “translating” game design to code. 

But it can be very useful also for analysts who want a tool for rapidly predicting KPIs and outcomes.

Such a tool can improve the productivity by at least 50%. 

Conclusions

The gaming space is still growing very fast also thanks to the spread of blockchain-based games. The complexity of such games has pushed the development of software tools that can support gaming companies in designing the game and its economy. Machinations falls in this domain and equip Web 3.0 game developers with the tools and insights to build and maintain healthy game economies allowing to design, test and tune the game tokenomics. If you are looking for professional guidance, then be sure to check out the Tokenomics Consulting offered by BrightNode!

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We use Machination for Tokenomics validation

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