Pain Points

The explosion of the GameFi ecosystem led by Axie Infinity, demonstrates that the market adjustment power of GameFi is not weaker than DEFI, NFT, and traditional digital assets. In fact, GameFi is a combination of these latest key industry trends combined; Blockchain + Games + NFT + DeFi + Metaverse + SocialFi, equates to GameFi. Yet, while GameFi is the next ‘Blue Ocean’ opportunity and biggest outlet in the entire blockchain industry, there are still numerous underlying problems.

Difficulties for games to enter into the Gamefi Space

Generally for new games to gain popularity and to flourish, there are numerous challenges that are in the way such as difficulities accessing traffic/players, development time/cost resource burden for developing necessary components for the games to be on the blockchain, and guilds outreach and networking.

Due to the fact of hype in the Gamefi ecosystem, games are generally not just only competing with traditional P2P games but also P2E games around the world globally, without sufficient marketing resources and plan, gaming outreach can be quite limited thus starting the game without with "the wrong foot" which could potentially limit the growth potential of games.

Key Components such as the marketplace, rankings, account login, social mining, wallets, etc. is what make a game P2E. Large amounts of resources and time are required to make sure these key components, whereas the time and money spent to do so could have been diverted to focusing on Gameplay, game mechanics, story etc. Thus blockchain games are less playable compared to traditional P2P games in general.

Due to blockchain games' being in its infancy, the games are not currently mainstream. blockchain game's success is tied with which game guilds they are collaborating with because guilds can provide numerous key resources mainly in the form of brand exposure and accurate gamers that have the time and resources to commit playtime to the games. Specific guilds can be unavailable or difficult to reach depending on where they are located.

Disadvantages of Web 2.0 Game Platform

Web2.0 allows users to generate content independently and publish it to the platform to interact with other users. This is an era of information interaction. Because of the network effect of Web 2.0, there are only a few game platforms left in each peripheral field in the market, and other small platforms are eliminated because they have no players and cannot compete.

The first problem in the Web2.0 era is that the game platforms are all operated by centralized entities where their goals are to maximize the interests of shareholders by optimizing profits in the expenses of the gamers. The characteristic of this mode of operation is that the contribution in economic transactions or production has not changed, but because the platform has special status or has some special rights, it constantly expands its own income and compresses the income of other participants.

The second problem is that the distribution is unfair. The reason why gaming platforms have such great value and network effects is because a large number of players participate in the creations. The platform's profits are opaque and unpredictable, and flow to major shareholders first (major shareholders may revise the platform's strategy in pursuit of higher profits). After the platform grows into a towering tree, not only does it not give players a reasonable distribution of profits, but it also earns more money from players. Those participants who depend on the platform to survive have no pricing power in the distribution of the platform's benefits. What's more, users do not have absolute ownership of the game assets of the platform, and the lack of game asset ownership means that players are unable to exist any value from the games that they play

The third issue is user data privacy. Players are neither informed nor understand the boundaries and uses of the private data generated when they use the platform services and have no decision-making power over these data, let alone the use of it to generate economic benefits.

As the largest game platform in the Web2.0 era, Steam has the largest number of users and games in the world. However, its centralized operation model makes both users and developers need to pay a large proportion of the share to the platform while realizing their own benefits. And for the assets of users and developers, Steam officially has the absolute right to interpret, so in essence, Steam is still an intermediary model of the traditional Internet, and users and developers as content providers are under the control of Steam.

Poor user experience, scattered user traffic

The current blockchain games industry is still in it’s early infancy stages, with numerous industry challenges to overcome, ultimately leading to a poor UX UI experience for users, and with poor UI/UX it created a high knowledge barrier for new entrants

GameFi-related information is severely fragmented. For someone to play a few games on different networks, it’s extremely clunky. There are many scattered blockchain games in the market, and everything is disjointed. Due to the dispersion of information and resources, each platform has its own lineup, each with its own bias.

As for the end-user, they have to integrate multiple wallets, work around different websites to access different statistics and game guide information, making it difficult to obtain accurate information in regards to the projects. If users are on a mobile phone or website they have to install multiple apps, plug-ins, different installers. As a blockchain gamer, it is already a complex, frustrating, and hideous gaming experience. But as a non-blockchain gamer, trying to enter the GameFi space, the learning curve is high and the whole experience can be terrifying; resulting in a major bottleneck towards mass adoption. So it’s all a bit of a mess right now, as there was no professional, one-stop GameFi platform aggregating key GameFi content and features together to provide the best seamless gaming experience. Until now.

Non-integrated Ecosystem

The "new generation" of blockchain games lacks a complete integrated ecosystem and cannot form an effective economic cycle of players → assets → development team → assets → players. This makes some of the blockchain games that have great potential ultimately "dead-born" and can't really join the market for players to experience. Many excellent game teams have developed competitive games and economic models, but their operating capabilities are limited, resulting in players always maintaining a scale of dozens or hundreds of players, unable to rapidly expand the player base, and unable to occupy a place in the GameFi sector.

Unengaged players cause GameFi to be weak in the later stage

The GameFi space is not as "universal" as we have always expected, and its concept and operations are still based on blockchain asset transactions. Understanding and entering the GameFi space still requires certain blockchain knowledge reserves and certain trading experience. This has led to many blockchain games that received positive attention with a good start declining after players cash out whilist no new users joining, This type of progression also happens to traditional gaming and is only solvable by a long-term marketing plan.

Pay to Play VS Play to Earn

The size of the traditional game market exceeds 200 billion US$, and continues to grow year-on-year. However, in the traditional social concept, playing games is essentially a criticized activity that consumes people's spirit, time, and money. Many gamers face criticism from their parents, spouses, friends while playing, and most users may even feel guilty about it.

Combining the above GameFi status quo, there is an urgent need in the space for a comprehensive platform that can help blockchain games to solve these current industry pain points. The platform needs to have a diverse focus such as traffic aggregation, game development, providing value to users, etc. In order to attract more capital investment in the space to continue to promote and grow the GameFi ecosystem as a whole.

Based on this, Formless came into being. As a pioneer of Web3.0, Formless users and developers have absolute ownership of the content and assets they produce. Users can fully operate their own traffic without worrying about being restricted or managed by a centralized platform. The platform brings benefits to users. Users bring traffic to the platform, thereby achieving a win-win situation and maximizing benefits between the platform and users.