Dragalia Lost was a free-to-play “gacha” game, and was a huge success. In their first year after launch the company generated over $100m from micro transactions, selling items from loot boxes and merchandise soon after that.
However, Ninentendo recently announced that the game is to be discontinued, three years after launch, and that the servers hosting the game will also be shut down.
Dragalia Lost gone forever – the ephemerality of Web 2.0 games
Games more sophisticated that Pac Man require more of an Internet-based community. Nowadays, games like Call of Duty, Fifa, and Grand Theft Auto all have very strong components that require there to be game servers running constantly, and the communities who play these games want their expensed time to have been worth it.
When a developer or game designer can choose to simply turn a game off, or to alter a core component that could have been immutable (indeed, the community would prefer it), then it poses an existential threat to the entirety of the ecosystem.
The team at Nintendo have decided that later this year, Dragalia Lost will be completely shut down, a decision that has left the community in disarray.
Vitalik invented Ethereum for this exact reason
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, was not always interested in decentralised systems that lacked a central point of failure.
In fact, when he was younger he used to play a lot of online games, and enjoyed them a lot.
Until, one day, he realised the limits of not being able to own his own assets in the digital sphere, and what weak property rights someone has when playing Web 2.0 games.
After the developers of World of Warcraft decided to weaken one of Vitalik’s favourite characters by removing his “beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell”, Vitalik was distraught.
“I cried myself to sleep … and on that day I realised the horrors that centralised services can bring.”
It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Vitalik, co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and Ethereum, recognises the importance of owning one’s own assets and in-game items, and that there are severe limitations to using others’ servers.
Smart contracts without admin keys can’t be tampered with
Front ends can easily be tampered with or taken down. Only recently, this has been shown to be the case for a whole range of projects. Curve, for example, suffered a front end attack in which malicious code was inserted (fortunately it was patched quickly), and projects who find themselves at odds with the ire of regulators can suffer even more so.
The front end to Tornado Cash was recently taken by down force, and this has been hugely problematic for users.
However, it is worth noting that on the back end, the code still functions perfectly as it should.
There are no admin keys to Tornado Cash, meaning that nobody could ever stop the code from running as it should – it is likely that Tornado Cash will continue to exist forever, and the longer it exists as a tried and tested solution for obfuscating funds, the more liquidity it will attract and the more effective it will become as a tool.
The Tamaverse: an immortal metaverse opportunity?
One of the most popular P2E games that is currently taking the cryptocurrency community by storm is Tamadoge, which has now successfully raised well over $10m for its presale.
Tamadoge is not only a meme token, but an entire P2E ecosystem, metaverse, and community.
Just as with the Tornado Cash smart contracts, nobody could ever completely shut down Tamadoge or stop the game from operating. Once the smart contracts are deployed, the P2E ecosystem can theoretically operate in perpetuity.
The Tamadoge team, to ensure that their community support and believe in them, are demonstrating their long-term commitment to the project with the team’s vesting schedule, which releases over the course of 10 years from the IDO.
Relevant news:
Tamadoge - The Play to Earn Dogecoin
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- Listed on Bybit, OKX, Bitmart, LBank, MEXC, Uniswap
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