Your shit's locked for 12-24 months because you believed in the promise of web3 p2e f2p blockchain nft insert buzzword here blah blah gaming. Will it come true? Let's see if Aurory can survive The FUD Files.
I'm not trying to be cold water on the hype. I'm just making sure this new web3 gaming industry stays honest throughout the entire building process. After all, they're honest about taking my fuckin money then, aren't they?
Inflationary Tokenonomics
Aurory, like all the other web3 games that started building around the time of the first Axie debacle, kept their token price from tanking by promising huge APRs for staking your shit.
They paid this "interest" through inflation of the game token. It's a mirage in most cases, and in Aurory's case, it was a mirage as well. If you just sold your tokens around the high, you could buy back more tokens today than you could if you staked/farmed those tokens and received the rewards. Bottom line: It is more profitable to sell out and buy back in than it is to follow the path Aurory wants you to take to uphold the token price to make it look successful.
Nothing in the tokenomics does anything to counteract this. If the game doesn't provide burn mechanisms for the huge amount of tokens holders have accumulated while staking, you can expect even further price drops as the game continues development. And no one wants to play a game that they've lost 50% on. Look at Pegaxy — nobody gives a fuck how far production gets on that piece of shit. It's done, at least on the web3 side. They might rebrand as a F2P and con some traditional gamers into it by putting in on the app store and completely foregoing the game's NFT P2E roots.
Make no mistake — when analysts say a game "has to be fun" or the "fun factor outweighs the tokenomics," they are saying the EXACT same thing as "the game better have token sink features that players value more than selling the token out to USDT." Economics and "fun factor" are the same thing, not different.
So far, I haven't seen anything in Aurory that would make people want to put $AURY tokens back into the game rather than sell out to $USDT and salvage what's left of a dumpster fire.
Change in the Industry Meta
The P2E meta is changing, and the new investors Aurory needs to hold up its economics may be completely diverted by newer, freer games.
The major reason for the high entry costs of games like Aurory was because the Aurory team needed to raise money to build the game. More accurately, the team needed to build a rapport with retail so VCs would feel comfortable investing their funds.
Now, bigger studios that don't need retail money are coming into the blockchain gaming space. They are bringing AAA experiences that don't require the gamer to buy in for thousands of dollars. The new gamers that are entering web3 will come in through this portal, not through Aurory or games like it. What does that mean for the investment of the original Aurory retail dumb money? Unless Aurory adds F2P options that can compete with the likes of what Ubisoft is coming with, Aurory won't get the new players. Which means the old investors don't have anyone to sell to. Which means losses. And like we already know, nobody likes to play a game where there is no chance of getting back their money.
Aurory said from the beginning that its genesis NFTs would have no utility. That's fine for folks who got in on the botched launch and paid like $300. The folks who got in after and didn't read the fine print may have paid in the mid five digits for a character that really serves only as a marker that "I was here first." Doesn't really ring the same bells when the floor price is 80% down. That makes the hatching of Nefties, which right now still cost around $30 per egg, like rubbing salt in the wound.
The Bottom Line
So what we have here is a fork in the road — will Aurory prioritize new gamers and tank the prices of all its assets to the chagrin of its original investors? Or will it find a way to make those investors whole? It doesn't look good, but they still have a chance. It really depends on how greedy the team gets with their take home pay and what their morals say. And games like this, the ones that led the hype cycle of the P2E craze, will set the tone for how web3 moves forward in the next run.
Bottom line: Definitely do not invest if you haven't already. Wait on the sidelines and see what happens.
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