Hold your horses, degen.
Before you get all shut-up-and-take-my-money on me: unfortunately this MOD coin is not a real thing; just an idea I had, although I actually am kind of surprised that it does not exist yet. This is a concept that has been floating around my brain for years and I'm sure I've hinted at it in a dozen other posts on a dozen other topics, but surely this one deserves its own.
The theme is fairly simple:
Is it permissionlessly possible to monetize someone else's game? I believe the answer is a resounding yes, but again we'd think if that was the case something like this would already exist. Why? Because gamers put in a lot of hours creating content for free on their favorite games. Doesn't it just make sense from an economic standpoint that all that labor would be very easy to supercharge with monetization?
Passion project energy is simply stronger.
When someone works because they want to work (even if they aren't getting paid) the work that they end up doing is simply of both higher quality and quantity by orders of magnitude. The classic example I've given once or twice in the past is that the mountain bike was not invented by a corporation but by biking enthusiasts. On the gaming side of this equation the entire MOBA genre was created by some dorks in their basement using the Warcraft 3 map editor (then rejected job offers from Blizzard and created Riot Games).
Constantly reminded that NFTs are waiting to strike.
It's only a matter of time before NFTs tokenize the ownership of most digital assets. It's simply a better and exponentially more secure & trustworthy way of doing it. A year or two ago on April Fools the developers of Factorio joked about incorporating NFTs into the system. It was a good (and mostly obvious) joke, but also the concept of incorporating NFTs into a game like that is not a joke (even if the creators of that particular game haven't the slightest clue what's coming and can only see the scams and bear markets).
These developers think that if NFTs are going to be added to their game, they are the ones who have to sign off on it. Yeah I can't wait to see the look on their faces when that bubble gets burst. Crypto doesn't need to ask permission; we can just do it. #disruption
How does that work?
Well a diehard sub-community would get together and create a token, then somehow emissions would be distributed to those who created mods (content). Rating the quality of content of this nature is highly subjective, just like blogging is on Hive. Although I suppose it would be significantly less subjective than a blog post because a huge overhaul mod that could be played by anyone has a certain level of objective undeniable value.
So we might get to thinking that maybe we should pay emissions to mods that get downloaded and played a lot, but then depending on how that metric is actually measured it could easily lead to a Sybil attack with one person downloading their own shitty mod a million times and fleecing the reward pool. Luckily sandbox games (the easiest ones to mod) can cost like $20-$60 so actually buying that many unique accounts is completely infeasible.
So how does Hive do it?
Ah well we pay out inflation in several ways:
- 10% witnesses
- 10% dev fund
- 65% reward pool
- 15% interest rate on HP
- 20% interest rate on HBD (separate from Hive inflation)
Since something like MOD coin could exist on the second layer there's no reason for emissions to pay block producers. This essentially leaves viable ways to distribute inflation via manual upvoting or through a dev-fund governance structure in which mod operators receive an income for a set amount of time. Personally I think this dev-fund way of doing it makes a lot of sense for big overhaul mods that might require full-time work and upkeep.
Actually I don't like sandbox games much.
It's funny because the games that are easiest to mod... ah well I never really liked them that much, although I have been warming up to them recently with Minecraft and Factorio. Traditionally I prefer games with defined objectives that can be won so I can move onto the next defined objective, be it a quest or a mission or a raid or achievement or whatever else.
The funny thing about this sentiment is that sandbox games can be modded to have defined objectives and campaign missions, which is certainly something I'd like to see more of in the future. In fact I would pay for that. I know I would. As good as some of these sandbox mods are most of them are still sandboxes in the end where we're left to our own devices... which I find weirdly dissatisfying sometimes.
What is the business model?
Where does the money come from? This is one of the biggest problems with cryptocurrency because the waters are constantly muddied by market sentiment, FOMO, and greed. It would be amazing if we could boot up a promising token without people getting overexcited about it and allocating too much of their portfolio right at the beginning. To my knowledge this has never happened in the history of crypto. Pump & dumps combined with the market cycle seem to create endless volatility.
"Investment"
The idea that we can put our money in early and the extract an exponential return later turns all of the tokenomics into a casino. That's almost certainly why crypto hasn't been accepted within the gaming community (and elsewhere). At the core, MOD should generate income from players paying to play the mods (or at least voluntarily donating to them).
With a token this idea is abstracted, because the emission rate grades on a curve and is predetermined. Emissions increase supply and reduce token value but we hope that investors and community members that want more governance powers will outstrip that dilution (which is never the case in the short term after a big pump has already happened and momentum will become a freefall).
But at least it's "free"
Indeed, all the mods would be free to play (but still also be paid for using crypto magic). Some would get nice paychecks, and some would not. Ultimately though I think the most interesting thing about all of this is that it's 100% permissionless. We could do this now on Hive and reward users for mods right now, and there's nothing the game developers could do about it. As long as we have a way to mitigate plagiarism and know who's mod belongs to who the system can work completely outside the constructs of the actual game itself.
Conclusion
I'm quite sure that one day something like this will definitively exist, but at the moment infrastructure is simply not good enough to accommodate bridging crypto communities and injecting them into games that the developers might not like (or even see as a threat).
Crypto is perhaps too small at the moment to strongarm much larger gaming communities in such a way. Of course something like MOD coin would be providing free value to these games by way of free content-creation paid for by a currency that exists completely outside the gaming ecosystem... So perhaps such a thing would be largely embraced because it's good for everyone. Such is the abundance mindset.