Tokenomic

It has been almost three months since the Bunicorn game's launch. There are golden lessons and insights we have learned along the way. Big applause to our community for your trust and support. And aiming to make Bunicorn metaverse long-lasting, we are willing to step up and pioneer in changing the user's perspective on NFT games. We invite all members to take a look at our new plan for the Bunicorn Game below and share with us your thoughts.

Firstly, let's examine the differences between a traditional gamer and a P2E gamer regarding playing motivation.

Regarding the traditional game, people play a particular game because they like it. Players invest their time and probably money to fulfill their desire for conquest and victory. Thus, attractive and challenging gameplay is the key to attracting new players and maintaining a high retention rate. Players get involved emotionally and gain recognition for their victories in the game, ranks on the leaderboard via different quests such as expanding their farms, clearing all the checkpoints, defeating enemies, and so on. Regarding the P2E game, people tend to focus on the earning side and are less likely to pay attention to the game content. When the game ages, the majority of players will find an optimum (or minimum) in-game setup, stop at that state, and play, while tokens are generated indefinitely. Secondly, we will look at the in-game economy of a traditional game vs. NFT game models.

Regarding the traditional game, the platform owner sells content to users and gets revenue mainly from membership/subscription, online advertising, and IAPs. Players can earn money by becoming pro-gamers to compete in tournaments, streamers, or selling items on the secondary market. For NFT games, there are mainly two types of “earning” models.

• The first type is called Play to Earn games, where players need to buy initial NFTs to join and earn tokens minted from the game forever while playing. The platform owner will get revenue from selling NFTs, in-game features such as breeding…, and the commission from the marketplaces. Moreover, the game owner needs to create as many token utilities as possible to create more buy demand or burn tokens effectively to reduce the supply. The second type is somehow referred to as “metaverse,” where the actual income of players is the NFT assets, not the token itself. With this model, players join the game to build a virtual world together and possess the NFT with the hope that the NFT value will increase in the future, but there’s no way to mint tokens and sell them every day.

• In a traditional game, the player almost has no ownership of the game, and the platform owner owns everything. With the “metaverse,” the ownership starts to be shifted to players, and this is almost a risk-free model for the platform owner as well because the value here is in the NFT itself, and they don’t need to worry about token inflation. The platform owner is able to generate most of the revenue from characters and lands NFT sales. The more content users create in the metaverse, the more value this virtual world will be.

Apart from the NFTs, the P2E model is players invest time and money to build a “team," complete quests, and earn winning tokens minted from the game. This partially gives players a portion of the game’s revenue. The rest of the revenue still belongs to the platform owner.

P2E games attempt to convert more people to investors/users and create more types of content and utilities for tokens at the same time. However, when the game peaks, the market starts getting saturated. It happens when the gameplay cannot be further exploited/developed quickly, the current users reach their maximum investment amount and stop spending on the game, and/or the number of new players decreases over time. Some approaches to pull up the token price, such as buyback and burning, are temporary solutions that rapidly erode the project's resources. Eventually, as a result, token price is about to go down due to the infinite minting mechanism being larger than the demand to purchase tokens for playing and upgrading the squad.

This kind of economic cycle happens to almost every market/product, including traditional games as well. So the goal is to make the upward period as long as possible and be able to recover after the crash. However, compared to many traditional games that lasted for more than 10 years, most P2E games are now in a very early stage to see the whole picture.

Bunicorn Card game is originally a click-to-earn game with simple content. Still, gradually, we will transform our gameplay into a different one that is more attractive and long-lasting. We are fully aware of the existing situation as there are some mistakes in the original design, such as consuming too much gas fee or the snowball oracle pushing us to go much faster. But yet, we’re still trying to overcome the issues at all costs. Therefore, in order to address the root of the problem, we would like to propose an improvement for the Bunicorn Card game. We aim to achieve the following goals:

• Let players take full ownership of the game, from generating the NFT to sharing the revenue. The platform owner only takes the commissions from in-game trades.

• Gradually reduce the supply of the reward token instead of infinite minting.

• Attempt to change the player’s mindset when playing a P2E game.

• Build up the groundwork for our upcoming metaverse.