InfiniGods Game Economy Breakdown

Let's break down the InfiniGods game economy.

Read on to find out how the economy works and what risks to watch out for as a player, investor, or game designer.

Games Overview

InfiniGods is focusing on creating a variety of casual games:

1. Infinimerge: live merge puzzle game

2. Infinitowers: tower defense game with its beta coming in March/April

3. Un-revealed project coming later this year

Asset Types

Followers are a type of in-game powerup in these games, for example spending them as wildcard pieces or to refresh powers. Essentially, followers are the game's utility token.

You can earn followers through daily Infinimerge levels and placing high on weekly leaderboards.

After accumulating a certain number of followers, you can load them into an Ark NFT and mint it. This converts them from an offchain asset to on-chain, but as NFTs of different follower amounts (also split into 4 different cultures). Ark buyers can redeem them for followers.

Elder Gods are NFTs with unique abilities that enhance gameplay across all titles. They're the gen 0 collection and there will be other, less powerful, immortals.

Economic Risks

There are some potential economic risks to consider:

1. Poor control over inflation rate of tradable followers

This could lead to a pump and dump of follower value.

The team's method to address this implementing a floor price through a WETH Ark minting cost.

But this doesn't solve the problem, it just means that if a follower inflation pushes price down to the floor, the surplus would grow and make it difficult for the price to recover.

Developer revenue would also be impacted as follower trading volume and minting fees would drop significantly.

I'd like to see some tighter inflation controls on at least tradable follower supply at the overall economy level. Also implementing a follower price ceiling to limit speculation and keep pricing attractive.

2. Pay to win components

Elder gods give sizeable gameplay advantages that are currently only available to those who buy the NFTs (as opposed to just increasing frequency of benefits).

3. Overly financially-focused userbase and positioning

The current structure of 1 level per week with limited plays and a focus on follower rewards does not have the depth required to attract mainstream users who will spend followers without financial motivation.

I'm sure there will be more depth coming with more levels & new games, but it will require a big shift in marketing strategy too. The early incentives are aimed towards those in it for the money. The first community partnership was with Wolf Game, which is also financially focused.

4. Excessive friction on purchasing followers

Gamers can't buy followers directly, they have to get routed to opensea. There it can be difficult to figure out what NFT they need to buy and at what price with liquidity fractured by denomination, culture, and eth/matic options.

Tied to risk #3 mainstream gamers buying followers with no expectation of financial return is key for the sustainability of the economy, so it needs to be easy for them to do so.

Otherwise it's just zero sum with everyone motivated by earning.

I applaud the attempt though as hiding the price through a fractured NFT market (vs liquid token market) reduces the issue of people negatively reacting to market price fluctuations.

But I think it's more important that follower buyers have a smooth buying experience than it is for sellers to have a rough selling experience.

This could theoretically be improved through UX streamlining for buyers while retaining the same structure.

Conclusion

The community-owned powerup model has promise as there is real demand for that, but they're not currently well positioned to attract the right audience and they need to improve their control over follower supply.

They have a very strong team though, so I do see potential for them to re-position in future phases and capture non-financially motivated spending.

If you want to learn more, I highly recommend listening to this spaces where I dig into Infinigods alongside some big brains from WolvesDAO https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1OyKAVAzMjaGb?s=20

If anyone from the Infinigods team (or other web3 builder) wants to chat about how to mitigate these risks, my DMs are open :)