The internal struggles and token drama make this a hard one to bet on at these prices. Esp. when you compare it to other ecosystems that have seen significantly more traction.

At a high level, I think the trends are largely the same, with the main difference being that blockchain games are more scalable when focused on a more Eastern audience.

You could say that fully on-chain degen experiences, like xpet for example, saw more traction in the East and I think this will likely continue in parallel to the interest in ordinals and the Bitcoin ecosystem.

I think it would go a long way if staking rewards were more closely aligned with game partner product performance.

Long term, the ability to gamify yields and staking to specific games is a cool idea to align incentives and reduce "freeloaders" riding the waves of the higher-performing games. Treasure attempted this but didn't quite accomplish it.

I'm bullish on the idea of TON but still waiting for them to execute on it. Distribution is still super hard on TG and monetization is also an issue.

Correct. Bitcoin is by far the most normie consumer friendly token (maybe par stable coins but a lot of misinformation circulating there).

Aside from the nan-rewards model highlighted in this report, sustainable P2E is like an oxymoron. I think Sorare has a good model. In general, any tournaments-based earning can be made sustainable without as much work as, say, an MMO like BigTime.

In terms of reading materials, I think there are some good Twitter accounts to follow on the topic but the truth is no one has figured out the playbook yet.

This is a great YT video on the topic. It's focused on Web2 but gives you a good idea of how much more complicated things get when using blockchain rails.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrf1cou_yVo&t=1s

Big Time had a solid foundation. The first hour+ of the game is a struggle, with a terrible tutorial, and there are still a lot of features missing, such as in-game group chat and P2P trading.

Anyone who said the game is ready for players either hasn't played yet or is lying to themselves. But it was shaping up to be a fun game (with 2-4 more years of dev).

bot players 100%

bot volume hard to tell

There is no clear value in bot trading for trading sake afaik but there is certainly a bunch of crap items listed so take that number with a pinch of salt (just image how many white t-shirts they have). That said, this is a problem for all UGC platforms and curation is becoming increasingly important.

On the topic of curation, I haven't seen anyone build it yet (apart from a few systems in games like Shrapnel) but UGC curation is an interesting area that blockchain could add value - increased transparency and effective value distribution

In traditional markets, the name of the game is to ensure a user's lifetime value (LTV) is higher than the cost per install (CPI). Seeing as Yuga isn't really doing any UA right now, they should, at the very least, ensure that these games are generating more APE revenue than the DAO is spending - but note that this still doesn't necessarily make them a "cash flow-positive business." I can only imagine that Yuga labs has a monthly burn rate of 7 to 8 figures.

It may have been an objectively simpler game but still performed better than HV-MTL in most metrics.

I'm most curious to see if this was because hypercasual game are better received by the "player base" or if it is just because hype/fomo peaked at that first game and the novelty has since worn off.