AllenZ(hobo)

There has been a lot of discussion around OTG over the past few days. First, I want to say this clearly: I have deep respect for what OTG has achieved. Without question, it is one of the most complete and most playable games in the Web3 gaming industry today. Getting a game to this level is already incredibly difficult. But the problems they are facing right now are also very real. For most people on the outside, before they truly understand a game’s core loop or what makes it special, visuals are always one of the easiest things to recognize. That is why so many games are pulled toward the same direction: better graphics, bigger production, more visual spectacle. But the tradeoff is brutal. The more you push visual quality, the more you usually sacrifice hardware accessibility. And once that happens, most players can no longer truly participate. They can only watch from the outside, comment on the graphics, comment on the concept, comment on the hype — but never really enter the game itself. This is one of the deadlocks Web3 gaming has been trapped in for a long time. Small games and pixel-style games have low barriers to entry, and sometimes they spread quickly. But they often struggle to sustain enough depth, enough content, and enough ecosystem complexity over the long term. Big games and AAA-style productions look much closer to what people imagine as “the future.” But they also come with much higher technical demands, much harder optimization problems, much longer development cycles, and far larger capital requirements. And the truth is: strong visuals alone can never guarantee a game’s success. At the end of the day, a successful game still depends on two things. First: is it actually fun enough? Does it make players want to spend more time in it because the gameplay itself is enjoyable? Second: does it have a successful monetization system? Can it effectively convert player time and engagement into revenue, and then use that revenue to support the development of better and more continuous content? If you cannot do both, then great graphics only make you a product people notice — not a game people stay in. And Web3 raises the bar even further. Because a Web3 game is not only required to be a good game. It is also required to be an economically balanced and sustainable game. That means it is not enough to simply make something fun. You also have to solve whether the in-game economy can hold, whether asset values can be supported, whether players actually create value for one another, and whether different roles in the system can find a meaningful place. A traditional AAA game has a much simpler victory condition. You sell the copy. The user pays. You have already won a large part of the battle. But Web3 games do not work that way. You cannot say a game has won just because it operated for a while and generated some revenue. If the economic system cannot sustain itself, asset prices fall. If asset prices fall, expectations collapse. And once expectations collapse, the entire ecosystem becomes unstable. So a real Web3 game is not only about getting players to play. It is about creating a system where players provide value to one another — through trading, cooperation, competition, support, specialization, and participation — until an actual ecosystem forms. That is also why we have seen many small games succeed in the short run, including some with genuinely decent gameplay. But the core pleasure of many small games is usually narrow: they present a challenge, then ask you to solve it, or pay to accelerate the solution. At the core, that model is usually still based on selling stats, selling shortcuts, or selling numerical progression. And any game whose core monetization depends on selling power or selling numbers will struggle to build a truly healthy ecosystem. Because the economy has not truly formed a supply-demand ecosystem. And once assets that lack a complete supply-demand relationship begin to circulate, the death spiral arrives quickly. If you want to build a real Web3 game ecosystem, you need several difficult things to exist at the same time: You need a large number of users. You need players to naturally form trade and ecosystem activity inside the rules of the game. You need interaction, conflict, cooperation, and support between players. You cannot rely on selling raw numerical power as the core business model. You cannot just be a single-player copy-selling game. And at the same time, you also cannot make the hardware barrier so high that most players never get in. That is when you realize how difficult this balance really is. You need to balance visuals. You need to balance user experience. You need to balance hardware accessibility. You need to balance gameplay depth. You need to balance economic design. You need to balance monetization. And once all of these are placed on the table together, compromise becomes unavoidable. That is exactly why we eventually made one of the most painful but, to this day, one of the most important decisions in Bladerite: we gave up the PC-first direction and fully switched to mobile-first. And this was not because our early numbers were weak. In fact, our initial distribution test was very strong: 20k players 45% D1 retention 40% D3 38.3% D7 13.3% D14 These numbers told us very clearly that the game had real appeal. Which is exactly why the switch was painful. But over time, several things became increasingly clear to us. First, the PC / console route naturally limits entry. The higher the hardware requirement, the smaller the accessible audience. And once you enter that arena, players immediately compare you to the best games in the category — not to other Web3 games. They will not lower their expectations just because you are a Web3 project. Second, cheating and scripting are far more destructive than many people think. We spent two months fighting cheats and scripts, and in the end we had to admit something difficult: for a young team building a competitive PvP game on PC, anti-cheat can become almost a second product you are forced to build. And what it consumes is not only engineering time. It consumes player trust. It consumes retention. It consumes community morale. It consumes the quality of the competitive environment itself. Third, after deeper market analysis, we realized that more than 85% of the audience we truly wanted to serve was on mobile. And not only on flagship devices. It also includes mid- to low-end hardware. At that point, the question became very simple: if these are the players we truly want to serve, then we cannot just build a game that looks more impressive. We have to build a game they can actually enter, actually run, actually enjoy, and actually stay in. That is why we chose mobile-first. Not because we lowered our ambition. But because we moved our ambition back to reality. Real ambition is not pushing visuals to the maximum. Real ambition is delivering a great experience, deep gameplay, and a functioning economy under real-world hardware constraints and low barriers to entry. At the end of the day, games are not made for spectators. They are made for players. And a Web3 game will never succeed simply because it looks exciting from the outside. It succeeds only if players can get in, want to stay, form relationships with one another, and participate in a system that can sustain itself over time. That path is extremely hard. But that is the path we chose. #gamefi #Web3‌‌