2 Player Mode: No Participation Trophies in Web3 Gaming
Gabby Dizon joined Simon Davis and Phylicia Koh on the 2 Player Mode podcast to discuss how setting player expectations early helps build sustainable virtual economies.
If there’s one thing that the Yield Guild Games (YGG) community understands, it’s that participation trophies are not enough in web3 gaming. Booting up a game without playing it as intended isn’t and shouldn’t be rewarded. Over the years, YGG has built up its community to provide value to its partnered roster of games and to the greater web3 gaming community through questing platforms such as the Guild Advancement Program (GAP). Now in its sixth season, GAP places a premium on rewarding dedicated players and those who demonstrate in-game excellence.
Recently, YGG co-founder and CEO Gabby Dizon joined Mighty Bear Games CEO and GOAT Gaming founder Simon Davis and Play Ventures Partner Phylicia Koh on the 2 Player Mode podcast. They had an in-depth discussion on the biggest developments currently happening in web3 gaming and beyond, touching on how gameplay plays a big role in setting expectations for web3 gamers across the industry. Through equipping their games with certain gameplay formats, developers can encourage players to engage their games as intended right from the jump.
The following is an excerpt from the 2 Player Mode podcast, where Simon, Gabby, and Phylicia discussed how different gameplay formats set different expectations for players in web3 gaming. Player-versus-player (PvP) game modes were highlighted as being an effective way to encourage players to spend meaningful amounts of time in-game, as rewards here tend to be tied to performance rather than participation.
Gabby was also quick to highlight exceptions, where some games have been able to effectively determine which of its players are deserving of in-game rewards by working off of an achievement-based onchain reputation system.
Listen to the full recording on X.
2 Player Mode: Pressing Play on PVP and AI in Web3 Gaming
Simon (29:56): What are your takes on PvP versus PvE?
Phylicia (30:05): That's a good question. When I look at the broader gaming context, there's flavors for everyone. There are definitely genres where PvE works better than PvP, because the audience doesn’t like that competitive angle to it, and you can build big businesses on it. Given where the web3 gaming audience is right now, I would probably lean more towards PvP as something that's going to be more engaging.
Knowing that you're playing against a bot takes out all the fun. I don't know who keeps kicking my ass in Mighty Action Heroes, but I wish I was playing against weaker bots. The fact that I keep getting my ass kicked by different people points to the fact that it's probably all PvP.
Gabby (31:06): When you're dealing with what is basically a virtual economy that has value, I do think that lends itself much better to PvP elements. One of the things happening with reward systems and play-to-airdrop systems right now is that you can't really expect to scale a system where everyone expects to get something just by participating in the game. If I have 1000 users and they expect to earn $10 each, maybe I can afford to do that, but when you're at a million users, I can't afford that unless my game is bringing in significantly more than that in revenue.
This is where PvP mechanics actually work really well. You reward winners, you reward higher skill, and you curb the expectation that everyone gets something. I think things get lost in the nuance of how to scale this, and I talk about this a lot with Luke of Pixels. How do you scale your player base, and how do you scale your reward systems?
Anytime you put value in a game system, it's going to be Sybil attacked, and it's going to be botted to death. People are going to set up very complicated farms. This is everywhere. This is in Pixels. This is in any web3 game. This is definitely in your favorite clicker game. If you want to scale these things over time, you need good systems for figuring out who to reward. This is something that we've been working on at YGG for the last couple of years as well, with soulbound token achievements for reputation. It's not an easy thing to solve.
However, just having PvP is very stressful, and this is why PvE exists. Having guild-based, group-based mechanics, where you're working together, gives a sense of, “Okay, let's do PvE together, let's do cooperative gameplay.” Then I can do PvP or guild versus guild. It might be that we’ll have our most competitive players doing the PvP gameplay, but we'll also have people who are good at crafting, healing or whatever doing the less stressful stuff. I think those mechanics work.
Simon (33:43): And if I were to play devil's avocado, the part that has never really monetized or done very well in free-to-play has been co-op. The only PvE game I can think of in free-to-play that has done well is Warframe. There are a bunch of PvP games that have boss modes, like Brawl Stars and a few others, but PvP games, by the very nature of their competitive elements, compel players to spend, monetize, retain, and compete. I think that's a challenge.
I think it's fine to have PvE, if it's basically leaderboards and the players are competing for prizes or to top a leaderboard, but essentially, that's still PvP. It's just that you're using AI as the interface. So my take on this is that PvE is not going to work in web3 for now, because it’s so nascent and revenues are so hard to come by.
Gabby (34:44): It's hard for me to imagine putting what is basically a real world economy around the PvE experience. I just don't see that.
You can listen to the full recording on X.
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