Due to different starting points, I do not agree with the three core arguments in this article. I want to honestly share my thoughts, keeping real as emphasized in rapper culture.

Valuing theory & philosophy

Valuing theory and philosophy is the first step in building a rigorous decentralized application, especially in the emerging field of fully on-chain games, which has not yet been validated by the market.

The exploration of theory and philosophy essentially involves constructing a logically coherent worldview before building the application itself. Such a worldview can serve as a directional guide to advance the project in the long term. Humans are highly sensitive to logical coherence, and by valuing theory and philosophy, we can construct and enrich a pure narrative. This narrative can foster stronger consensus and build a more stable community. Few teams are able to persist with their thesis and develop their projects according to their own principles, and I personally believe these projects are worth paying attention to.

In reality, we have awkwardly observed that some projects, due to a lack of relevant work in the early stages, tend to adopt strategies that involve selecting popular keywords from the market and trying to associate their projects with these keywords to increase traffic. However, the market trends change rapidly, and the project’s narrative can create internal tensions at different times. This internal tension can lead to a lack of recognition and long-term confidence among project participants.

Goodbye GameFi

The GameFi era seems to be a nostalgic period cherished by some friends, and this mindset can be traced back to certain discussions within the Austrian School of Economics. I believe this issue can be explored from two perspectives.

On one hand, I agree that we need serious thinking and discussion about the economic models within games. If we have ample time, we might also explore and learn from the technical and design concepts of some projects from the GameFi era. However, frankly speaking, I believe the value of doing so is less than directly studying and learning from classic DeFi protocols or reading political economy books, materials on ecosystems in biology, or the three-plate theory proposed by tw@thecryptoskanda. Due to the lack of transparency in projects, we cannot conduct a complete analysis of GameFi-type games. We might identify certain elements and think they contributed to the success of some GameFi projects at certain stages, but these could very well be traps carefully constructed by the project team .

On the other hand, from a marketing and promotion perspective, GameFi has already been heavily branded with a distinctive era imprint. Whether it’s developers, active players in the fully on-chain game community, other users within the web3 industry, or the broader social groups with potential hopes for mass adoption, the GameFi label is no longer likely to attract their attention.

Stay fully on-chain from day one

The foundation of fully on-chain games lies in intrinsic crypto-native principles, such as decentralization, censorship resistance, immutability, and rule enforcement. Fully on-chain games represent a pioneering attempt by the crypto community to build larger decentralized applications. I agree that such pioneering attempts often require breakthrough thinking to propose imaginative ideas. Just as blockchain technology must navigate trade-offs among decentralization, security, and scalability—known as the “impossible triangle”—fully on-chain games also need to make choices and trade-offs among various factors. However, we should have a fundamental baseline consensus: at the very least, in terms of application design, we should strive towards crypto-native principles and work towards building larger decentralized applications.

If you decide to build a fully on-chain game, limited blockchain space, high latency, and a lack of development tools are challenges you must face or solve from the start. Do not evade these challenges; it’s a question of whether the difficulty is front-loaded or back-loaded. Maintaining smart contracts plus centralized services plus front-end may not necessarily be easier than maintaining smart contracts plus front-end, and you also need to consider the development costs of later migrating centralized services to the blockchain, including architecture design and code refactoring.

If you decide to build a game that combines blockchain and off-chain technology solutions, please honestly tell everyone that you are working on a semi on-chain game or semi off-chain game.