Yes this is FUD if you want to dumb it down to an acronym, but it’s warranted and I would appreciate if people didn’t shy away from acknowledging it, if possible.
In its infant form, MarsColony will be just another run-of-the-mill scarcity/hype product with simple contracts and “clicking simulator” functionality masking a high APR money printer. The LAND presale just shows how little people care about fundamentals and throw their money into projects expecting to become the next crypto whales. As much as it may hurt to hear it, almost everyone bought in with the intention of becoming a millionaire, and that’s pretty much it. We’ve seen this story time and time again, and atrocious copy-paste projects (cough HarmonyWhales, the million DEX’s that are about to open, etc) scream 2017-2018 ICO mania vibes.
The gold standards for ANY meaningful NFT game launching on Harmony today are games like Gods Unchained, Star Atlas, and to a lesser extent DFK and Axie. However, in a space that’s so rapidly evolving, even that may not be enough. By the time some of the promised roadmap features are ready to launch, AAA titles on other blockchains will be up and running or close - games built by companies with so many more resources working on them than the entire Harmony dApp ecosystem combined, and brand/quality clout already established.
Games like this are at high risk of becoming obsolete with newer, shinier things within a span of a few months. There’s nothing stopping Ubisoft from developing a AAA RPG with a DEX, in game cryptocurrency, cross-platform play with bridges/even single chain. The hardest part of that process would be to actually develop the game itself, not any of the underlying infrastructure.
DFK is one of the few games that stands out among others because it has some of the best tokenomics of any dApp ever released (I don’t say that lightly) and has really financially literate team members who worked out most edge cases and gamification scenarios. It’s very rare to see a game that has people who are DIVERTING funds from high APR LP pools into staking, heroes, summoning, and questing, which are all core pieces of the game.
I don’t see nearly the level of sophistication in the tokenomics here. You can argue that CLNY doesn’t need to be as sophisticated due to the game’s current simplicity, but the vision here is to create a complex virtual world and open slate for almost anything (although how much so is very much TBD).
Does this team have the scope, vision, and capability to build a ground-breaking game? I’m talking about things such as:
-
Full blown tokenomics to (for example), rent out land to folks who don’t have the capital to buy a plot but still participate in the game, or how expansion of the game leads to new rewards, etc
-
Cross chain expansion and interoperability finely detailed for those who are interested
-
The ability to introduce features that will be on several titles within the next year or so, such as a VR universe to explore Mars (and other planets), RTS/FPS game design on top of the base layer, land-holder relationships to build and expand in groups or guilds, etc? I haven’t seen, read, or heard anything about real ideas that set a game like this apart from any other re-skinned LP farm and DEX with click simulation building…And the challenges with introducing each one of these examples require a full second team alone.
Not trying to s*** on the project, but honestly curious if folks have thought through the question “If this game wasn’t released in the middle of the NFT and crypto hype, would people care?” I have not been convinced yet by any games except for the few I mentioned above that the answer is a resounding “YES”.
