This morning I was pointed to this post from the 0xGames Team discussing their hard decision to shutter operations. Thank you @enjar for the tweet!
The 0xGames team offers a fair amount of detail into the reasons behind their decision to close shop and this is a learning opportunity for those in the industry. First of all I want to say that being good at businesses is hard, building a business model that can scale is no easy feat, and finding product market fit is something that the majority of entrepreneurs fail to achieve.
I don't doubt the 0xGames team will be back in some shape or form in the future and wish them all the luck in their next venture. That said I would like to highlight a few key points from their post that I think can be valuable lessons for future entrepreneurs in the blockchain gaming space.
Etherium Not a Viable Blockchain for Crypto Games
Ethereum blockchain is poorly suited for games
Surely this is something that a number of game development groups must be coming to terms with.
Ethereum is the darling child of crypto, with it's large and ambitious open source development communities how could this not be the blockchain to build games upon? The network simply can't scale, as a result it's too slow and expensive. One of the primary value adds of crypto gaming is asset ownership. As we know assets only have value if they can actually be exchanged.
It's too expensive to exchange assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Maybe this will change in a few years time, but that doesn't help those building games today.
Make It Easy To On-Board Game Develpors
We spent a lot of time connecting EOSIO, but failed to contact its developers and therefore did not receive support from them.
The 0xGames team recognized the short falls of Ethereum and we're slow to pivot to a multi blockchain interoperability model.
The problem appears to have been compounded by not reaching out to the EOSIO development team. I think it's important to point out that the 0xGames team is taking ownership of this issue and hasn't criticized the EOS group for this.
A good question may be does the EOSIO group have an easy to access development portal? If you're looking to potentially adopt their infrastructure is there an easy on-boarding process, an SDK, or robust documentation available?
I think this is an area that HIVE should consider pursuing. We've already suggested that an SDK should be built to allow streamlined adoption into a modern game engine.
The bottom line is, let's make it easy for game developers to discover and implement HIVE. This could be in the form of a dedication development on-boarding channel on the official HIVE discord, with a dedicated contact person to connect with. Streamline it!
TRON's Reputation as a Scam
Then we connected Tron, the developers of which were quite friendly at first and promised both marketing and financial support. But in the end, the Tron team turned out to be scammers – marketing support was minimal, and they still owe us money.
TRON is a trap involving a group of scammers.
Sorry you had to find this out the hard way, as many people have. Again I think it's important to note that the 0xGames team is making a point of letting people know they feel they were taken advantage of and ripped off by the TRON group.
TRON has a reputation as being mostly scam project and for this reason we have steered clear of Dapps built on TRON and ran far away from STEEM when it was purchased by Justin Sun and the TRON foundation. Run,..run far away.
Game developers, you have been officially warned by the 0xGames team that TRON is not a viable option for Dapp development.
ROI vs Marketing
But even worse was the fact that the audience of blockchain games did not grow as our investor expected.
From the sounds of it their investor was ok with the team focusing on marketing instead of first finding a model that produced ROI. The team found some marketing success but when they weren't able to generate ROI the investor got cold feet, can you blame them?
If you don't have a model that generates ROI why would you attempt to scale, they had this backwards, thanks in part to the influence of their investor that encouraged this behavior.
As a result when the marketing results dry up for any number of reasons the team is left worse off. Money has been spent, growth isn't being achieved, and you still don't have a business model that can generate ROI. At this point you're really up shits creek without a paddle.
First find product market fit with a product and model that can generate ROI, then scale it. In that order. But like I said earlier business is hard and I don't pretend to be an expert or make this sound easy because it's not.
On the plus side this tells me that crypto games need marketing opportunities and audiences to connect with and this can't be ignored. When a game is ready to scale it needs networks available to connect with it's target audience.
This is the avenue that Battlegames is pursuing. Currently we have a dedicated Hive blog, a Publish0x blog, a Youtube Channel, and our https://hiveblockchaingaming.com website. In addition to this I am pivoting my Hi5's twitter account to focus on blockchain gaming and am now sharing administrative duties with the Hive Blockchain Gaming telegram account.
As a community we believe fiercely in gaming as a blockchain use case and look forward to helping blockchain games connect with a larger audience and grow their user base. 👊
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🕹️ Follow @battlegames for Gaming News, Curation, and Community.
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As a "risk averse entrepreneur" (an oxymoron maybe?) I have never understood why people seek investment before at least building and growing a working system/game for a few years first.
The beauty of the internet is that you can learn everything you need to build something yourself or at least find a few like minded individuals who would also like to do the same. The promise should just be that the project is a gamble and there will be no income unless it succeeds.
The old adage still rings true today - "it's better to do one thing well than lots of things badly" and it looks like they lacked this wisdom.
So who wants to buy some planets?
P.S. HIVE is the best chain to build games on period! If you are thinking of building DO IT! NOW!! Want some advice? Contact me in the Rising Star discord and I will happily give you my time if you are going to help our chain grow.
They also seemed to have spread themselves thin with all the games they had. Some that played OxUniverse including myself were hoping a major update was going revive the game and make it a lot of fun that was on the roadmap.
Instead it appears they put what little time they had left into trying integrate the Matic chain on ETH that claimed to fix all the issues ETH was having. That was done with a second universe in the game players could use that I never understood or wanted to try since you had to pay ETH fees to get there and move tokens over there as well.
Agreed, it does look like they over extended.
The move to Matic would have been a last ditch effort to rid themselves of the problems with ETH. Transitioning to a second universe sounds like a lot to ask of their player base!
Edit: Thanks for the tweet 👊
Interesting read, was not aware that they shut operations.
Indeed, ETH is simply not viable as a gaming blockchain!
It's really unfortunate, as they had a number of games in development and we're even working on an 0xFramework platform to be able to publish in the future, similar to what @simplegame is doing here in HIVE.
Others fall and we still remain. We'll be rich one day. I'm certain of it.
In the grand scheme of things HIVE is still high risk. At this point we still don't know the direction the chain is going to go, which niche they will pursue. I sure hope it's gaming and NFT's, right now the only competition is WAX but more will come soon enough.
That is my biggest concern. It's important to try and make games chain agnostic just in case the worst happens but it would still be a sad day.
I've tried a few eth games but never stuck because of complications and expense involved in playing them. Compared to what I have tried on hive there is no comparison at all and I hope that more developers come to see that going forward.
Tools are very important as if you can cut out the work and complications involved in building on this chain it suddenly becomes a lot more attractive to build on if there is a head start.
Thanks for the tweet! And yeah we're on the same page in terms of making it as easy as possible, and therefor as attractive as possible for game developers to onboard with a chain such as HIVE.
Awesome, thanks for the tweet!
I think HIVE offers many opportunities for Game Developers to market their product to an already existing crypto/player audience.
Splinterlands is the shinning star of all Blockchain Games and still nowbody talks about it or acknowledges the success it had so far.
It is almost like many Crypto Developers are purposely ignoring HIVE and its enthusiastic Crypto Users.... I really don't understand why and I only hope that at some point users and Developers realize what a gem Hive and its community is.
Everything is the way it is for a reason.
What is the reason?
I have never understood that either.
Excellent analysis.
Yet more evidence that Tron, and anything Yuchen Sun is involved in should be avoided.
0xGames didn't mix words there, they're doing the blockchain community a solid by letting everyone know TRON is a scam.
This is a very good analysis goes on to show how underrated HIVE is. We really need to onboard some developers before EOS get improve their developer outreach.
For sure HIVE is under rated. I think an expanded developer on-boarding portal could be an asset, especially if a portion of it could cater to game developers.
Has anyone tried to contact Ivan On Tech to offer a game development course? That would be an awesome way to onboard game devs.
It's also good to keep as many account creation tokens claimed as possible. We could get a massive influx of new users when the bull market arrive.