Most of you guys have heard about Gods Unchained. It's a Ethereum based card game that utilizes NFTs to create a game where you are the owner of your cards and can trade them freely using the Eth blockchain.
Awesome on paper. The game itself is a slight clone of hearthstone but that should not take away from it's quality. All games are clones of other games in one way or another. Even the most successful games like Blizzards WOW were built on the ideas of older MMOs. Hearthstone a game built from the ideas taken from games like Magic the Gathering. Diablo from older ARPGs like Baldurs gate (Disregard the Diablo mention, seems i was wrong on this one).
The quality of the game is undeniable. It can easily compare to the AAA games in it's characteristics.
So what's the problem? Why am I writing this post?
The problem is the ease of use and market fundamentals that stem from Ethereum.
I keep on repeating, Steem is the blockchain with the highest adoption level in the crypto space considering it's MC. When @aggroed and @yabapmatt launched Steem Monsters they tapped into the large amount of users that Steem has. Tens of thousands of people got introduced to the game and the game grew. It grew consistently and at this time the game has around 3000 active players, almost 4 millions card market cap on a blockchain that's 500 times smaller in MC then Ethereum. Recently completed their second kickstarter that raised 250k USD. Consider that. Now let's look at GU.
At this moment a game that received 15 million USD in funding,(I repeat... It's 15 with 6 zeros) a large chunk from Coinbase, and it has between 500-1000 players daily.
Did the game fail? Does it suck?
Absolutely not. It's a full-fledged game with a true use case for blockchain tech. I'd even wager that it's core gameplay is superior to that of Steem Monsters.
That is exactly why I say it's the right game for the wrong blockchain.
Steem due to it's rewards system is by far, and I emphasize that, the only blockchain out there that at this time has a resemblance of a potential for mass adoption proven by the success of steemit being a top 800 website in the world with steem only having a 1.5 billion market cap during the ATH.
But could GU get the funding on Steem it got on Eth?
Absolutely not. Big money drives the market and if you want to build something of quality, like the GU team did, they had to go to the blockchain that can allow for that.
Unfortunately, their decision is what will be their ball and chain.
Today I tried selling 2 cards on GU. The total in price around 50 USD. I tried to cancel my previous trade price and to do so it took me 15 minutes for one card and 35 minutes for the other. To describe the levels of my frustration i would have to devolve into my Grinch persona. Even with lowest fees I payed around 7 cents.
That kind of fee might not seem like much but it's a huge stifling factor for the market.
The equivalent of a GU card on Steem Monsters that is of lowest grade goes for almost the same price, a few cents above, of a GU card in GU. (Remember, Steem has 1/500th the market cap of ETH)
Those cards are worth about as much as the fee you pay on ETH and you will wait for the max time and lowest fees to get the common card you want to not overpay.
Consider how bad that is for the card market and price movement. The price stabilization at card real in-game value will take months. Something that Steem monsters achieved in a couple days with the Untamed packs.
The Ethereum blockchain put the game in a state of snail pace and the games adoption is literally dead at this point.
The money is there, Devs might prosper monetarily, Eth has the attention of the overall market, don't get me wrong, I'll keep on enjoying the game but the game due to it's god awful base it's built upon will never reach heights in user number. Something any video game should strive towards.
There are too many hoops to jump through. Fees to pay, the attractive part of being able to own the card overshadowed by the fact that you have to wait unreasonable times to trade, pay fees, buy Ethereum, understand how wallets work, how fees work.
All of that when Steem Monsters gives you a steem account for free, let's you buy with a credit card and all you have to do is put in a 5 word password to access your cards and trade them in 2 seconds and earn $ every single day.
You know what else is funny?
Due to steem being what it is reward wise, and due to a steem whale @acidyo that's invested in GU, you can earn more from playing GU and writing about your experience on Steem then you can earn by playing Gods Unchained.
Steem does more for the GU players then the game itself because the game had to be built on Ethereum to get funding.
Even looking at the numbers of OCD Guild players on GU, a significant chunk of the 500-1000 daily players are actually Steemians.
While Ethereum might have the money behind it just doesnt have users.
You can pump the price of a cryptocurrency as high as you want but you can never convince the user to use it if the experience sucks.
CONCLUSION:
It is a undeniable truth that big money is holding crypto hostage. It is also an undeniable truth that big money doesn't care about adoption rather only cares about the need for new investors to buy up their bags. That will keep crypto in a perpetual state of stagnation simply because everyone dismisses the need for a quality consumer experience.
Do I want a part of it if it's a pain in the ass to use?
Gods unchained is a prime example of a blockchain game that was built because "big money wanted to appease big money" which will make the game unable to break the constraints of mainstream relevancy because investors don't care about adoption, (and picking ETH was a must) making the game constrained by the limitations created by the inefficiencies of Ethereum, making the user jump through hoops to play the game at a level of reasonable satisfaction.
Investors only care about their bags being sold for a higher price when user experience is a side thought.
Just a few thoughts as always.
What is Guldurs gate? You probably meant Baldur's Gate? :) And that was just a regular D&D RPG, not an Action RPG like Diablo.
Gods Unchained are very much chained, you can't effectively sell cheaper cards without selling them in bulk. I don't even know if there is an option to sell them in bulk.
I changed it the sec i got home, I wrote this on my phone. Haha. :)
Diablo was based around all those games, streamlined to what we got.
I got Wirts leg before Diablo 2. haha.
I figured it was something like that :) Yes everything is basically a copy from something else, Starcraft stole everything from Warhammer40k universe, Warcraft 3 stole from fantasy Warhammer universe, there is very little originality out there. Also Diablo was released 2 years before Baldur's Gate, different game genres all together. Both actually started their own niches, Diablo started hack&slash ARPG genre. Baldur's gate started D&D RPGs like Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights and similar titles.
Then i was wrong about Diablo. Ill just ignore you on that, pretend i didnt say it. haha. My memory seems to be hazy going back 20 years. Gaming history might be more your forte. :D
No worries, I had an itch I had to scratch. Profesionalna deformacija :)
You can sell in bulk. I think its 8 cards atm. Thats still a major pain in the ass.
I pulled my hair out waiting for the transaction to complete today. The reason i wrote this. Im a crypto enthusiast, gamer, i played LoL to diamond league, Splinterlands to diamond every week almost, i hold crypto, i know crypto, I played Vanilla Wow, you can slap me around with BS all day long but i wanted to pull my hair out when having to relist 2 cards today.
You can hardly expect any normal player to do the same. They would just middle finger everything and move on.
Yes, imagine you want to sell 30 different cards and at the moment you place them someone undercuts your price and you effectively lose a lot in transaction fees. That is not sustainable.
Bought a heap of packs of GU, played a few games. Too confusing and takes too long for me so decided to start playing steemmosters instead.
A heap of untamed cards purchased and a lot of reading /playing in the last few weeks and now my son also wants to play steemmonsters.
Credit to @acidyo for getting me into steemmonsters through GU promotion lol
SM is much easier to get into and a game only lasts a minute or two if you watch through it, which i almost always do.
Its the nature of the games that is different.
I bought GU genesis cards in October 2018 for 2 ETH.
Tried the game a few times but just didn't click for me. So I decided I will just hodl the cards and hope their value increase.
The market opened like a month ago.
Meanwhile I have been building my packs on SM, buy, sell and played the game all the time. It is also a web based, no installations etc ... soon we will even have mobile :) .... GU seems a bit more nice on graphics though.
Yeah, even trading on SM is fun because you can flip the cards, try and make some money that way.
Ill probably hold GU cards as well since most arent even worth the fees. Ill prolly just sell a few of the more expensive ones.
This. THIS!
I'm still completely baffled with the wasted potential of GU. Like, when building and testing the market they gotta have tested the experience of using it, right? How does waiting up to more than half an hour feels good or makes sense at all? And that's combined with tx fees.
I recently need to use bitcoin for some reason. Waiting more than 40 minutes for transaction confirmation feels like hell. It reminds me how much i take for granted the speed of this chain.
#sbi-skip
I mean after you used STEEM, how in the hell can you go back to Ethereum or Bitcoin. Its just too big of a pain.
I have one $30 dollar card on GU im trying to sell for 15 days now.
I place it to be the cheapest constantly by at least 20% and it just wont sell. I have never once waited for any card at the lowest price on SM more then 2 days to sell and i sold hundreds of them. The only ones that take time to sell are where you combined dozens of cards.
You cant really make a booming market when youre stuck at 30 minute cancellations. That slows the market tremendously and price discovery instead of taking 1 day will take probably up to a year.
Then ofc you just need the one card and the card being gold or diamond does nothing in GU. Its just a skin when golds offer tangible benefits in Steem Monsters, for one having a higher base BCX, then DEC gain is increased for golds.
All brilliant ideas.
Ive been looking at the GU player numbers and they are constantly falling every day. Each week they lose about 10 players on the same days while SM is growing consistently.
Ethereum sucks to use and it will hurt the game a lot.
But ok, ETH has NFTs and hard consensus, steem only has soft consensus. But do you really need that level of ownership? If GU shuts down your cards are instantly worthless regardless of your ownership. The game isnt really on the blockchain.
SM provides a "high enough" level of ownership while having STEEM as its base chain with all its benefits.
At the end of the day crypto users wont care about how much your game looks like Hearthstone or a AAA title, but they will care about ease of use and their consumer experience.
Well, the idea is maybe even when the game goes under someone else can build a new client for the cards because they are stored on chain. Idk.
The truth is that regular gamers don't care about blockchain and only cares about UX while crypto users don't care about how good the game looks and plays. GU managed to screw up both by building a a game that looks and plays good (expensive) on a shitty blockchain (horrible UX).
Many steemians complain that Steem has horrible UX and I agree with them when comparing to the centralized web but I have yet found a blockchain as convenient to use as Steem and I have tested quite a bit of them.
Steem is even better than the supposedly superior younger brother EOS because of the RAM, CPU, and NET headache. EOS is a joke right now. Hell, the Voice social media won't be launching on EOS mainnet because it's a complete circus. How much of a joke is the Steem blockchain if Steemit data isn't stored on mainnet because of resource problems?
Do you know any other blockchains with use case for everyday users that are at least around as convenient as Steem to use? I desperately want to diversify my holdings.
#sbi-skip
Would that really happen though...Them letting someone take their intellectual property. Maybe it could but the game would basically run on life support then and not last too long. No new releases could be made etc.
Well sure, although people are working on things like the guest accounts.
Every single time i ventured outside STEEM and downloaded a wallet or started using other blockchain dapps ive had a miserable experience.
During the big airdrop for Obyte on Steem i downloaded their wallet and i literally wanted to punch the screen. I still have around 20 USD in that wallet set to sell but its just so idiotically convoluted i just cant take the time to cancel the trade and move the funds to an exchange. Ill probably leave the Obyte to rot there.
Ethereum i told you about. I used Bitcoin 1 time to send some fiat from coinbase through @blocktrades. Never again have i used Bitcoin.
I used TRX once to buy the SM cards on sesameseed. Worked fairly well, still slower then steem but theres literally nothing of any value built on TRON. I bought maybe 100 USD of EOS a few months ago but sold it right away because theres really nothing there as well and as you said their RAM, CPU thing is just too annoying.
Cardano has nothing on it, ETC has 200 users total by their own metrics... I really dont know.
All these top blockchains are just "paper tigers" that offer almost nothing of value outside the base "its a blockchain".
I too am looking for things to invest in but looking at the market, what do you go with? Seriously. I could gamble on something like most do and hope it goes up but thats just a gamble and would have nothing to do with the blockchain being any good.
So i just dont know. Id like to diversify as well. All i have now is a couple thousand dollars in Steem, SM and a few hundred in GU cards and ETH because i play the game from time to time.
Let me know if you find anything good. lol
Well written, totally agree, at least with the part about GU experience. Wonder if those guys would be interested in STEEM integration...
They have been approached to at least create a blog here since there are a lot of steemians playing the game. The dev i asked was nice and said he would consider all options but i think one of the others was very dismissive of that idea. Probably hates steem for some reason.
It makes complete sense for them to create a blog here but if they dont even want to do that its probably unreasonable to expect them to go as far as moving their operations here.
Thanks for the info. Weird approach on their side :/
Completely agree with you! Also it's noteable that the gameplay itself in GU is completely off chain, while in SL it's at least partly on chain.
Shots fired.
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lol. Its not shots fired. Its true, at least for now. We will see how they decide to build their reward system.
You nailed it. Splinterlands needs marketing. Perhaps a new slogan along the lines of: "Splinterlands, a blockchain game that doesn't feel like a long distance call on an old payphone in 1956 and watching paint dry."
They are waiting for the mobile app to be released then the team will start more traditional marketing, I believe.
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lol.
The time will come when steem will get it's own GU and many others. Developers will start looking for the right blockchain.
Time will tell.
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Nice analysis and interesting to note how generous you were with the user base... i saw how they talked to you when you even mentioned Splinterlands... it was like a Mob.
But yes I'd agree with many of the points... It's true their game play is more refined on GU for sure.
However Game Play can evolve and get better and I know it's happening (slow as it may seem to happen)
BUT the foundations won't change and seeing all the features we've been able to do on Steem with the Peakmonsters.com market is amazing and how quick and easy it is to do... those developers would be crying with joy if they were doing the same markets here on Steem.
This is not a Knock on the game as it is very good nor a knock on their players for liking the game and they didn't have any choice in blockchain. But they're putting up with inconveniences that they're trying to tell themselves aren't so bad.
Honestly they should just do a market for GU on Steem. Heck we'd host a good programmer to do it on PeakMonsters and help them out. Save crazy amount on transaction fees etc. Card transfers would still be ethereum so that's gonna be slow but looks like there is still a need for a bid market or a USD market.