Come take a dive with the Jellyfish on his hypothesis of what could come next week. Hint: ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
Happy Friday R/Superstonk, Jellyfish back at it with you with a hypothesis
Before we go any further, this is not financial advice and is all pure speculation. I am 100% ready to be proven completely wrong when GameStop drops what is actually going on.
The Game:
Minecraft
Who is involved:
GameStop
Astro Gaming
Minehut
Microsoft
IRL Merch to pair with digital NFTs:
Moose
The Event:
Moonjam
Who brings what?
Gamestop: GameCoin (GC? For short?) and a GameStop powered E t h e r e u m-based digital marketplace for NFT transactions.
Astro Gaming: Esports marketing and gaming peripherals partnership with GameStop
Minehut: The infrastructure service provider to power the Minecraft multiplayer servers that are guided by GameStop smart contractsโtaking the role of server operators.
Moose: Real-life merchandise products tied to NFT creations.
How I see this going down:
GameCoin (GC?) isnโt an NFT per se but the governance token of the Moonjam platform, a GameStop powered E t h e r e u m-based NFT marketplace and metaverse leveraging Minehutโs infrastructure to power a Minecraft NFT gaming and metaverse experience in association with Astro Gaming for Esports and gaming peripheral tie ins.
Moonjam will be a blockchain-based GameStop-powered Minecraft metaverse that allows players all the power in choosing how to play the game with in-game rewards powered by smart contracts. This could be distributed as a Minecraft in-game currency, GameCoins?, or a combination thereof?
There will be an achievement system recorded on the blockchain, (taking the place of "advancements" in the Java Edition of the game, and "trophies" on the PlayStation).
The game world is composed of NFT objects "blocks"โrepresenting various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and rocket fuel, redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. I believe the core gameplay could revolve around picking up and placing these objects to build a rocket to go to the moon?
Players have the ultimate power in how resources are allocated in this world. Players can "mine" blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things (creating a new item/NFT with unique attributes) that they have ownership of and can choose what to do with: hold, trade in the marketplace, sell for Gamecoin, use Gamecoin to buy other resources to add on to what was previously built? The options are really only limited by the imagination as the game world is virtually infinite.
This solution-driven by smart contracts programmed to fairly and provably power the procedurally generated world as players explore it, using a map seed that is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation--July14 4:20pm PDT? JULY 20 | 2PM EDT | 11AM PDT ?
For the Minecraft user experience, this allows seamless interoperability between future games and removes any barrier preventing players from traversing to locations.
I believe the in-game time system follows a day and night cycle powered by GameStop smart contracts.
I am sure this will touch all modes of gameplay, but I want to focus on multiplayer and the private server audience.
For most of its life, Mojang has allowed private Minecraft servers to exist with few if any, caveats. But in June of 2014, Mojang started cracking down on private servers and limiting what made them unique.
While Mojang/Microsoft is well within their rights to protect their brand and enforce their EULA, the changes have potentially damaged the community, perhaps irreparably, until now?
Part of the reason for the popularity of private servers is the inadequate nature of official offerings from Mojangโplayers want the power to create. For example, their multiplayer platform, Realms, tries to allow this, yet it has yet to catch on in the way that private servers have, given how easy they are to set up, modify, and maintain in comparison to private servers. This community is willing to do the work to build what they want to see, they just need the bricks!
Thatโs only one part of private server popularity, though. In many ways, Mojang/M$ offloaded the responsibility of community management and development to independent actors. Private servers have worked hard to foster and maintain the community that made Minecraft such a phenomenon, and nft.gamestop.com will allow them a real stake in these communities they love!
The largest of these private servers provide a home for a competitive player base that prefers fast-paced PvP to Minecraftโs more idyllic survival mode, with the most popular modes such as Walls, Skyblock, and Factions being a combination of combat and building.
The exact number of players playing Minecraft primarily or exclusively through private servers is difficult to quantify, but itโs significantโI have read Hypixel alone tops 10 million unique accounts. This dwarfs axies stats that I covered previously (just to give you a sense of the scales at play here).
However, just because private servers are free to create and run doesnโt mean that itโs cheap or easy to do so. Most servers donโt make their costs public, but of those that do, a review of the monthly expenses of a โmodestโ server like Minecraft Middle Earth shows that they can cost in the thousands of dollars. For many owners, running a private server is a full-time job. Some of the larger servers employ a full staff of developers, artists, and managers.
This is the OPPORTUNITY!
This is where the partnership with Minehut and the use of GameCoin (GC for short?) and a GameStopโs NFT marketplace powered by E t h e r e u m will be a paradigm shift. I imagine GameStop and Minehut have worked up a cost-effective solution that removes server maintenance burdens and headaches from communities and the NFT marketplace offers a chance for a robust secondary market to come alive buying, selling, creating, trading everything from users earned resources, cosmetic upgrades, in-game items, etc.
Revisiting history, the largest private servers enjoyed a cordial relationship with Mojang. They had implicit or explicit permission to charge for services and use Mojang assets. Over time though, this relationship has deteriorated.
In June of 2014, just before the Microsoft buyout, Mojang flipped the community on its edge.
In a blog post titled โLetโs talk server monetization,โ they clarified the Minecraft End User License Agreement (EULA), but it made many common server practices, like allowing players to buy in-game currency, explicitly against the rules.
Then in 2015, Mojang hired several โbrand enforcersโ who started cracking down on EULA violations. Some servers that were previously in good standing were caught up in the purge. Some servers have turned to extreme measures, distributing cracked launchers or running bootleg versions of Minecraft to avoid being targeted. Others have simply decided not to update and continue running increasingly outdated versions of Minecraft rather than try to meet Microsoftโs expectations. But for other servers, regardless of their legal standing, switching their funding models would mean shutting down entirely.
โWhere once you had a free market (and, to be fair, a more mature user base) you now have a walled garden with very strict limitations on how you can maneuver,โ says Barnier. โLimitations that may change without your consent. I would be very surprised if Minecraft saw a resurgence of great multiplayer server mods like the initial releases of MineZ, Dungeon Realms, and others.โ
A lot of Minecraftโs older player base must feel Mojang/Microsoft have left the people that made the game popular out in the cold. These are the people who put in countless hours nurturing the community, creating content, and building it brick by brick so that Minecraft is still as popular as it still is today.
This is horrible for this community morale and RC and GameStop knows this and is going to capitalize on it!
We have talked about this before:
Does this lay the groundwork for Microsoft to make amends to the private server community?
We covered above how Minehut and GameStop can alleviate server management and game economics issue, but that still doesnโt get them around the EULAโunless the โcommercial elementsโ in this agreement are just that?
If this is the case, I believe we are just days away from players being able to trade Moonjam NFTs, stake their in-game coins for weekly rewards, โplay to earnโ, being able to participate in governance voting for what happens next, and more?
As I have previously covered, the gaming-NFT economy has boomed in recent weeks. With a 30-day trading volume of $185 million, Axie Infinity has surpassed NFT heavyweights including NBA Top Shots, OpenSea and CryptoPunks to become the worldโs current biggest digital marketplace, as ranked by their average daily volume over the past seven days, according to DappRadar.
Even more impressive is that Axie (Gaming) has generated more revenue than Aave, Compound, Uniswap, and other decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols over the past 30 days, data tracked by Token Terminal shows. Stated another way, Curve, E t h e r e u mโs biggest DeFi protocol by total value locked, has generated only one-tenth of Gamingโs 30-day revenue.
We know Axie Infinity generates revenue from axie sales, land sales, axie breeding fees, and marketplace feesโcan you imagine with me after everything we have covered above this being applied to Minecraft?!?!?!?!
According to Dapp Radar, NFT sales rose to $2.47 billion in the first half of 2021 โ a staggering 17,900% year-on-year growth from the first half of 2020.
Are you ready? Buckle up!
