Dragalia Lost was a hugely successful free-to-play “gacha” game. In its first year of operation, the company generated over $100 million in revenue from microtransactions, quickly followed by loot boxes and merchandise sales.
However, Nintendo recently announced that the game would be discontinued three years after its initial release and the servers hosting it.
Dragalia Lost is no longer available – the ephemerality of Web 2.0 games
Games that are more sophisticated than Pac-Man necessitate a larger Internet-based community. Nowadays, games like Call of Duty, FIFA, and Grand Theft Auto have robust components that require the constant availability of game servers. The communities that play these games want their time invested in being worthwhile.
When a developer or game designer can turn off a game or change a core component that could have been immutable (in fact, the community would prefer it), it poses an existential threat to the entire ecosystem. The Nintendo team has decided that Dragalia Lost will be completely shut down later this year, which has left the community in disarray.
The reason behind Vitalik invented Ethereum
The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, was not always interested in decentralized systems with no single point of failure.
Indeed, when he was younger, he played many online games and thoroughly enjoyed them.
Until one day, he realized the limitations of being unable to own his assets in the digital sphere and the limited property rights one has when playing Web 2.0 games.
Vitalik was upset when the developers of World of Warcraft decided to weaken one of his favorite characters by removing his “beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.”
“I cried myself to sleep… and that day I realized the horrors of centralized services.”
It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that Vitalik, co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and Ethereum, understands the importance of owning one’s own assets and in-game items and that using other people’s servers has serious consequences.
Smart contracts cannot be tampered with without admin keys
Front ends are easily tampered with or removed. This has only recently been demonstrated for a wide range of projects. Curve, for example, suffered a front-end attack in which malicious code was inserted (fortunately, it was quickly patched), and projects at odds with regulators can suffer even more.
Tornado Cash’s front end was recently taken down by downforce, which has caused significant problems for users. However, it is worth noting that the code continues to function correctly on the back end. Tornado Cash has no admin keys, which means that no one can ever stop the code from running as it should – Tornado Cash will likely exist in perpetuity. 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: a never-ending metaverse opportunity?
Tamadoge, one of the most popular P2E games currently sweeping the cryptocurrency community, has raised well over $10 million for its presale. Tamadoge is a P2E ecosystem, metaverse, and community, not just a meme token.
Nobody could completely shut down Tamadoge or stop the game from running, just like Tornado Cash smart contracts. Once the smart contracts are in place, the P2E ecosystem can theoretically continue to operate indefinitely.
To ensure that their community supports and believes in them, the Tamadoge team is demonstrating their long-term commitment to the project through the team’s vesting schedule, which releases from the IDO over the course of ten years.
