dCrops as a GameFi

As I was doing some reading about GameFi and I came across this article that nailed the subject to a brief and concise form. There’s a link within the article that leads to analytics and worthy mention of how Splinterlands is doing for the past 270 days. That tackles a lot of the issues surrounding GameFi 1.0, why a lot of projects fail, the tokenomics involved, and possible remedy to keep the project running long term. That article deserves its own stage so I highly recommend you reading that first before proceeding below.

If I were to compare other crypto projects related to farming sim, dCrops has less features and hype to compete but how it still remains alive when more than half of the P2E projects die out within the next 30 days post launch is amazing by itself.

Roadmaps and white papers are nice but these are just promises that can be compromised to achieve a result.

During the developing stages, a lot of snags could come up behind the scenes that some quick fixes or drastic measures need to happen. I don’t think it’s in the developer’s best interest to screw up and not deliver what they told their audience (unless they really planned on not delivering the expectations set from the start). DCrops ALPHA launch did not have a smooth start as many of the basic UI experience were being patched up weeks after the game became functional. BETA had some delays but there was a marked difference in how smoother it was this time when changes were implemented.

I know some people are really into read first the white paper before sinking your money into it for good reasons. I treat any whitepaper/roadmap as just a guide taken with a grain of salt. Remember, whenever someone is giving you a sales pitch, they want your money and they’ll tell you what want to hear. This applies for all games in the GameFi space.

At the time of this writing, I’ve already added a lot of my in-game holdings right after BETA packs became available during pre-sale. I’d love to see the game a success during the next bull-run, I’m sure majority would want that when they entered the game too. But the current status of the game is far from ideal.

DCrops suffers from the pitfalls of having 1 cat developer and an outsourced marketing firm to run the game. There’s just so much work to be done by one 1 dev in the background handling both front and back-ends. You think finding another dev to handle the front-end would be easy since the game has been up and running for more than a year? Wrong, from what I can gather, it’s hard to find devs that are into blockchain development, game development, know the Hive ecosystem, and interested in the game all in one. We are currently at crypto winter which makes the recruitment process even more steep.

It’s amazing that @scriptkittie was able to still run the project mostly solo for more than a year with the power of cat food and coffee. More than half of the cryptogames promising the P2Earn die out after the first month even more a few months thereafter. Those countless times people nagging the cat at discord to do this and that are paying off nicely. The stress of getting the game to run can be solved by more stress from the community, who knew this was the key? Kidding aside, I think it was always a wise move for a dev not to use hype marketing for any improvements coming to the game.

We’ve seen how much this often happens for new projects, hype things up to drive in more external money into the ecosystem and then have the bubble burst right on everyone’s faces once those expectations fall short. Dcrops has improved a lot but these improvements are done subtle to the point that these are easily missed.

The 15 Day Seasonal Cycle

At the time of this writing, the only means to get more CROP is through planting seeds and selling the harvest for shares from the seasonal reward pool every 15 days and buying from a secondary market from other players. The seasonal prize pool decreases around 0.5% per season from the first 500,000 CROP token max pool. CROP has been stable for several months now.

This mechanism reduces the liquidity of CROP in the market. There aren’t many buyers or sellers on both sides so this kept the price relatively stable at 0.002$ for a long time compared to the ideal peg of 0.001$ (to be removed). This meant that there are more incentives to hold CROP.

One good incentive to stock up CROP is qualifying for the daily Hive airdrops when one’s CROP power reaches 20,000 by holding CROP tokens, in game assets, and packs. While players can earn Hive by selling CROP as soon as they earn it, they can still earn Hive by just keeping the token on their wallets.

The mechanisms to take out CROP from circulation are sinks available in game like re-rolling quests, purchasing boosters, and buying packs using CROP. A possible addition to the game is an internal NFT marketplace which will charge a CROP fee for transactions made.

DCrops Being Built on Hive

GameFi 1.0 relies on a steady stream of outside money to keep the ecosystem running as the early adopters make their partial exit while keeping some positions to maximize gains. Those that are late to the party pay the price. The struggle is trying to keep player interest and the rewards sustainable. Earning CROP by itself isn’t the only incentive to get involved in the game as holding CROP tokens can help you earn more Hive.

If one’s focus to earning from the game is based on the internal mechanics of the game, then they are missing out on ways to maximize their income potential. Because the game is built on top of the Hive blockchain where people can blog about their interest, earn Hive and reinvest for more passive income, trying to maximize your dCrops journey through the blog to earn model is one way to incentivize players to stick around.

Around 30% of the funds raised are set aside for the player reward pool, the Hive generated gets staked and used for curation and the game’s community updates can be another avenue to generate income for the community reward pool. This means even if the game can still thrive even when there isn’t a constant influx of new users as long as the income stream the community accounts receive is greater than the amount distributed out. Relying only on Hive’s first layer reward mechanism is just one of the many possible ways the game can sustain player interest. dCrops can still engage in community collaboration with other projects on Hive that can equally bring value to each other’s tokens.

Games on Hive are alternative frontends to the blockchain where an increase in player retention can lead to more chances of exploring other games existing within the ecosystem.

Right now, the community account may not have the resources necessary for onboarding new players given how new accounts would require resource credits to function. The upcoming HardFork26 changes to the resource credits may fix this. The sign up button is requiring user to go to another website and ask for free account creation tokens (which may or may not be available).

The more clicks you require people to make trying to figure out the game, the more chances of exhausting the player's interest on first impression. Account creation requires one to go to another website to sign up a Hive account. If dCrops can have a means to secure it's own account creation services, that'd probably lessen the time it takes to get started for an average player that just wants to try the game out.

DCrops community in a nutshell

The community has been cat friendly and still supportive despite the slow updates and cryptowinter. It recently saw a surge of new landlords (game’s equivalent of whales) in the server. Since pre-sale ALPHA phase, I’ve seen the same names still active in the game which goes to show I’m with the same players that have seen this game during the rough and good times.

There hasn’t been any update of increasing the daily 0.25% Hive airdrop reward from the reward pool. It may change if CROP power had some governance functions in the future. I’d rather just see things progressing on a slow and steady pace than have the game market itself with quick hype.

I think it’s the relationship between the game’s dev and community that matters as both did shape the game to the way it is today. It’s unlikely to see grand changes happening to the game anytime soon given how almost everything is done by 1 cat but I don’t really mind the slow pace.

If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta