Hello and welcome to Dark Tunnels, a newsletter dedicated to exploring the emerging ecosystem of fully onchain games. Dark Tunnels is published by Always Scheming, a research consultancy focused on the future of interactive entertainment.

The following essay is Issue #12 of Dark Tunnels. This is our first edition of 2024, with many more to come. Thanks for sticking with us!

We as a community spend a lot of time talking about what fully onchain games uniquely enable. Whether its composability and interoperability, decentralization, forever games, or something else entirely, the web3 gaming community tends to aim high when it comes to communicating its value propositions.

However, I don’t think anyone will dispute that the vast majority of these aspirational goals are still a long ways off.

Rather than trying to reimagine gaming from the ground up, developers would do well to focus on implementations closer to established precedent. Not only does this help to de-risk the high cost of game development, but it also allows game makers to isolate the new ideas they want to test from the things they don’t actually need to change.

With that in mind, I’d like to present a battle-tested product framework that will hopefully aid in grounding the conversation in practical realities.

The approach is titled “Proven, Better, New.” Though this framework has been in use for many years, it was popularized in the games industry by Zynga in the early 2000s.

“When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he said they were trying to make everything 10% better but ended up making the product 50% worse.

We have to put our egos aside and realize it’s so hard to make products better.

You can make a new product with no or few ‘new’ ideas in it and it can still be great.”

Mark Pincus, Zynga co-founder

Let’s break it down:

• “Proven” is what already works for a given game genre. For example, in the Squad RPG genre we might say that character collection, long leveling curves, and idle or auto-battle modes represent established elements that developers would be foolish to ignore.

• “Better” is how a new game builds upon proven genre foundations. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a massive step up, but it does need to meaningfully improve the player experience. An example shared by Mark Pincus himself was the decision by Supercell’s Hay Day to utilize a swiping mechanic, as opposed to the tapping motion present in Farmville, the incumbent leader at the time.

• “New” represents the high risk/high reward changes that could attract new users to your product and away from your competitors…but might just as likely fall flat. These could be novel features, unproven platforms, or any one of the many high-minded “web3 unlocks” that are frequently discussed.

To show this framework in action, we’ll compare a fully onchain game to its non-web3 competitors.

Note that the onchain vs. offchain distinction is not a requirement, per se, as we could just as easily compare newer fully onchain games to their more established (relatively-speaking) predecessors. Where fully onchain development impacts the analysis is in the balance of “Proven” features vs. “Better” and “New” approaches, as we’ll soon discuss.

Regardless, I’m hopeful that this framework will provide some useful takeaways for developers in the fully onchain games space seeking to level up their products. I’d encourage teams operating in the space to carefully consider their own products through this lens. If anything, it should at least help to clarify your game’s value propositions and strategic pillars.

Proven, Better, New: Soccerverse

To walk us through a simple application of this framework, we will focus on a game with several well-known non-web3 comparisons: Soccerverse.

Developed by the decentralized gaming pioneers at XAYA (seriously — check the team’s track record), Soccerverse is a fully onchain take on the classic football management sports simulation formula.

In web2 versions of this genre, such as SEGA’s Football Manager or EA’s FC 24 Manager Career mode, players are tasked with managing a football club through simulated games and seasons. These simulations are typically based on real world footballers, clubs, and leagues, and allow players to manage all aspects of a team’s operations: from tactical decisions on the pitch, to roster management and contract negotiations, to navigating relations with the media and fans. [1]

As you might imagine, this is a promising category for a fully onchain game developer to go after. I’ve written previously about the Simulation Games Opportunity, but just to frame the conversation in greater detail, here are some numbers to put the market in perspective:

• The latest incarnation of the Football Manager series, Football Manager 24, hit 6 million players in just 59 days. For reference, it’s currently priced at $59.99 on Steam.

• EA’s FC series (fka FIFA) is regularly featured among the top 10 to 20 highest selling PC/console titles every year. This is in addition to FC Mobile, which surpassed $1B in lifetime revenue in 2023.

• Like its rival EA FC, Konami’s eFootball 2024 (fka Pro Evolution Soccer) has also crossed $1B in lifetime mobile revenue.

Clearly, there is a sizable market for sports simulation games. While Football Manager is the closest comp to Soccerverse’s management-focused gameplay, I think it’s fair to assume (based on the existence and popularity of various feature-rich management modes in each game) that EA FC and eFootball have also recognized the importance of this genre.

With all of this in mind, how might we apply the Proven, Better, New framework to compare Soccerverse with its incumbent competitors?

Where Soccerverse seeks to level up its approach is in providing true community ownership over players and teams. This is done via a persistent, shared multiplayer game world where “shares” in individual footballers and clubs can be bought and sold on the open market. While games like Football Manager and EA FC allow for some limited multiplayer management modes, Soccerverse is inherently multiplayer-only.

Of course, one might argue that a persistent, forced-multiplayer game world is not objectively “better” for all players, as some might prefer the solo management sim experience. This is a fair criticism, but it’s also a clear strategy that the XAYA team is taking in its approach to product development (and, in many ways, a natural outcome of the choice to build fully onchain).

Leaning into multiplayer means betting on competition, social gameplay, coordination, and open markets. The largely single player sport management sims that Soccerverse might be compared to can’t offer the sort of communal experience and narrative (very much akin to IRL sports!) that stems from a persistent shared game world. [2] There are interesting comparisons to be made with fantasy sports, too. We might just as easily benchmark Soccerverse against a game like Sorare, for example.

Soccerverse further leans into the affordances of fully onchain games by allowing users to permissionlessly integrate so-called “community packs.” These can be as simple as translating the game into a new language, or as complex as replacing all players and clubs entirely with new names, different player pictures, custom team logos, and so on. The XAYA development team welcomes submissions from the community for inclusion in the base version of the game, but anyone is free to use their own client as they see fit. Soccerverse is fully open-sourced, enabling a player-owned future for the game should the developers ever step back from the project.

Where Soccerverse really goes out on a limb (in the context of this framework) is in its open markets for player and club shares. While many web3 projects tout open economies and player-to-player trading as key differentiators against “traditional” games, these systems are still very much unproven at scale.

Soccerverse takes this up a notch by introducing web3 governance into the mix in the form of player and club DAOs. On one hand, this unlocks interesting new ways to engage with the management sim genre, such as taking on the role of a club-appointed Manager, or vying to become a Player Agent voted in by the shareholders of a given footballer. On the other hand, this is a major departure from comps like Football Manager or FC 24. The mix of web3 governance, financialization, and speculation will likely require much more education on the part of the game’s developers if they hope to reach a more mainstream audience.

Finally, it’s worth noting that we haven’t spent much time covering the “Proven” section of the framework. The graphic above is far from comprehensive and Soccerverse can definitely do more to round out its core feature set to be in-line with the competition. In fact, with so much focus on “Better” and “New” features, one could argue that the team hasn’t yet done enough on the “Proven” side to feel truly confident in its product strategy. That said, the game has a number of new features and UX improvements on the way, and I look forward to seeing how the game performs following those updates.

Notes:

1. If you’re interested in seeing similar comps in this genre from other sports, check out Basketball GM, EA’s Madden Franchise mode, or NBA2K’s MyNBA mode, to name just a few.

2. Of course, all this talk of communal narrative hinges on having a sizable player base in the first place…which no fully onchain game can really claim today.

In Conclusion

I hope that this simple exercise has shown the usefulness of the “Proven, Better, New” framework. In my view, Soccerverse skews fairly heavily towards “Better” and “New” — a balance that I suspect we would find in most other fully onchain titles, too.

I don’t mean to imply that this necessarily dooms the product’s long-term prospects; after all, its only a snapshot in time and products can always improve. Rather, this exercise is meant to illustrate just how easily fully onchain games can stray from proven foundational approaches by incorporating features or systems that feel as though they “should” be a part of a web3 experience, when in practice they represent major departures from genre norms.

Truly great products don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I think we can all benefit from a greater appreciation of what has worked in the past before we try to revolutionize the industry with new “web3 unlocks.”

Thanks for reading.