Big Time Phenomenon The Superficial Carnival of a Few, the Secret Battle Between Project Parties and Exchanges

Profound Conflicts The Hidden Struggles between Project Partners and Exchanges in the World of Fame and Illusion

When blockchain games truly become AAA quality, has there been a significant change in the main gameplay, participation barriers, profit distribution, and underlying operating models?

“They are the ones having all the fun, and I have nothing.”

For most people, this statement perfectly describes the recent hype surrounding the AAA blockchain game, “Big Time.”

After the success of SocialFi projects like Friend.Tech and Star Arena, the market is now eagerly anticipating GameFi to lead the next wave of excitement.

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From the performance of the secondary market alone, it seems that Big Time has smoothly taken the baton: with the token listing on OKX, it opened at 0.01 and reached a staggering 20x increase at its peak.

However, if you observe social media, you’ll notice the embarrassing situation that market participants have faced in contrast to the skyrocketing prices: “Can’t get in, can’t get out, low liquidity, high costs.”

Can’t get in: Many players who didn’t participate in the early stages are begging for an activation code, and the game’s hardware requirements have discouraged some low-spec gamers.

Can’t get out: Players who were already gold farming discovered that withdrawals require KYC and strict rule adherence, resulting in waiting times for verification.

Low liquidity: Players who choose to participate in the secondary market face lower liquidity, and early attempts at trading orders have not been smooth.

High costs: Aspiring gold farmers later found that the cost of acquiring in-game items for gold farming kept rising.

At the same time, while we are easily captivated by the hype of price increases, we often overlook the interests and conflicts among different market participants and the significant changes in gameplay, participation barriers, profit distribution, and underlying operating models when blockchain games truly become AAA quality.

Big productions, the same old taste

There is no denying that compared to other blockchain games, Big Time has significantly improved in terms of production quality and visual presentation.

If you have watched game livestreams or personally tried it, you can feel that the game’s overall presentation is comparable to traditional MMORPGs. Smooth graphics, seamless animations, well-designed character growth systems, and equipment elements… everything is getting closer to high-quality game productions.

From a player’s perspective, the core loop of the game revolves around experiencing character growth: accept quests – battle – obtain resources/equipment/experience/skills – level up and grow – obtain better resources/equipment/experience/skills – challenge more difficult quests.

In this core game loop, the old flavor of blockchain games is still present – you can play for free, but there is a pay-to-win barrier.

Free players can experience the same content during the game, but they rarely have access to the pay-to-win part. Due to the lower drop rate of NFT items in normal monster fights and regular dungeons, regular players need to invest a lot of time to grind and have a small chance of getting drops.

At the same time, free players do not generate Big Time tokens in their game actions because they lack the investment in NFT items.

For paying players, everything points back to that familiar old loop: investing computing resources and planning token output.

According to the official introduction of the game and the information provided by first-class cabin research reports, a player who wants to pay-to-win needs to make the following purchases:

• SLianGuaice NFT, which is like a personal space to place NFT and items related to pay-to-win;

• Hourglass, this item is required to generate Big Time tokens;

• Time Crystal, this item is consumed to create the aforementioned Hourglass;

• Time Guardian NFT, which is like a pay-to-win “condition” creator. When the Hourglass is depleted, the Time Crystal is used here to recharge it.

All the items above have clearly marked prices and are traded in the market, and there is a design for repetitive consumption and purchase.

For players who are solely focused on pay-to-win, whether it is a AAA game is no longer important. It’s more like solving a math problem: racing against time to calculate the optimal input-output ratio and be the first to dig, offer, and sell.

A carnival for a few, barriers for the majority

It is well known that Big Time is not a new game. It has been around for 2 years since its first release. But why has it recently gained so much attention?

On October 10th, Big Time started its preseason tournament. Besides being able to earn token rewards by playing the game, participants can also receive future airdrop rewards for the tokens. Coupled with the token being listed on exchanges, its popularity naturally skyrocketed in the short term.

However, participating in the game is not as simple as it seems.

The game is currently not open to everyone, and pay-to-win requires a certain amount of capital investment and understanding of the rules.

Even if you don’t want to pay-to-win and just want to experience the game, you still need an invitation code from a few streamers and KOLs. As a result, while the game’s popularity soared, many ordinary users were desperately seeking admission tickets in various places.

This situation seems more like a marketing strategy, which has created a scarcity effect and further fueled the popularity of the game. It has a strong momentum of “hungry marketing”.

At the same time, early players who have already entered the game have made substantial profits. Twitter has shown KOLs sharing their specific investment and return on investment in participating in Big Time. Combining with the investment returns calculated by other players, you can basically recover the investment in 1-2 days (Note: as of the time of writing, Big Time has modified the in-game drop mechanism. The actual recovery time may be longer).

I have to say, this frenzy of investing, recouping the investment, and generating profits easily reminds people of the blockchain gaming trend a year ago. But the difference is, this time the frenzy belongs to only a few people, while the threshold belongs to the majority.

In addition to activation codes, if you want to participate in the pre-season competition, you either need to directly invest funds to purchase the SLianGuaiCE NFTs and passes in the game, or you were an early player of Big Time.

The former means there is a financial threshold. With the promotional effects and the impact of token appreciation, it is foreseeable that the price of SLianGuaiCE and passes will skyrocket;

while the latter means there is an experience and time threshold, not everyone has had a deep connection with Big Time before.

In addition, one thing that many people are not aware of is that the term “AAA” has actually brought about a significant hardware threshold.

The Big Time official website shows that the minimum game configuration is a GTX 1060 graphics card and requires at least 50GB of hard disk space. For regular gamers, this requirement seems insignificant;

But for users in the cryptocurrency community, entry-level gaming graphics cards and a large amount of disk space usage may make their main work laptops feel constrained, and it may also amplify their obsession with memory cleanliness. They are usually cautious about not connecting to the internet or clicking on anything suspicious, but suddenly putting in a closed-source game client may inevitably make them overly suspicious.

This hardware configuration requirement has actually given the studios an unparalleled advantage, and ironically, their frenzy does not come from the joy of the game, but purely from the satisfaction of making a profit.

When a game creates barriers for insiders first, how can we start talking about mass adoption?

If the main goal of the game is not the insiders, opening Twitch live stream can reveal that the audience watching the game is not that big, so the current expansion of the game outside the circle may not be as satisfactory as expected.

Thus, we observe a clear sense of division: the game is popular, but only a few can play; token prices are remarkable, but there is a high entry barrier for people in the coin circle.

Optimistic plans for project parties, market makers, and exchanges

Can’t get in if you want to enter the coin circle, and can’t get out if you are already in it.

Although the current game can achieve a quick return on investment, cashing out the benefits from gold farming requires passing Big Time’s KYC audit.

According to feedback from some players, the current KYC process takes 3-5 days, which means that withdrawals need to be delayed (note: as of the time of writing, the KYC audit speed has been improved).

You earn, but not completely.

From an asset perspective, when a large number of gold farming tokens cannot be withdrawn, the source of mining and selling is restricted, which means that the selling pressure of BIGTIME on the market is indirectly reduced, which is a good strategy for project parties to maintain token price stability.

But after a few days of the audit process, the value of BIGTIME obtained by gold farmers may face rapid dilution, and the actual income may be discounted. At the same time, due to the increase in the price of NFT required for gold farming, changes in explosion rate rules, and more participants joining, the input-output ratio of gold farming is reduced.

So, would it be better to buy BIGTIME tokens directly without gold farming?

Just looking at the price, the token’s price increased 20 times within the first two days of listing, so short-term quick entry and exit is certainly a good choice.

But the premise is that you have to find counterparty and trading channels.

According to the research by blockchain analyst Yujin, BIGTIME is currently in high control by market makers, with 90 million circulating tokens. Under the premise of KYC audit delaying the withdrawal of gold farming tokens, the actual liquidity of the entire token is very limited. Based on the price at the time of writing, the overall circulating market value is about 30 million US dollars (data from Coinmarketcap website).

In this situation, directly buying and placing orders in the early stage may not be smooth due to insufficient liquidity, and concentrated liquidity may mean more control space for market makers, leading to rapid increase in price and making it more stable.

In order to buy BIGTIME, you need a little trick.

Currently, the spot liquidity of the token is the highest on OKX. If you directly search for BIGTIME in the Asian region, you will find that no results are found, and the spot trading entrance is closed.

The way to unlock the entrance is to obtain some BIGTIME from elsewhere and deposit it into the token receiving address of OKX.

BIGTIME opens during the mainstream trading hours in the Asian region, but OKX cannot find the trading entrance. Subsequently, BIGTIME went online on Coinbase during mainstream trading hours in the US region (Beijing time midnight) and the price skyrocketed.

The lucky players who caught the wave were indeed fortunate, but due to time and entrance issues, most players may have missed this quick surge.

At the same time, when the new coin brings traffic to OKX and Coinbase, Binance naturally won’t be idle.

In the evening of the 12th, Binance also launched perpetual contracts for BIGTIME. However, it is worth noting that there is currently no spot, only contracts.

This trading product release strategy of only launching contracts easily reminds people of Binance’s similar approach to the Blur token in the past.

At that time, there were also rumors about the view of the number one sister on the Blur token, believing that the fundamentals were not sufficient to support spot trading;

Today’s BIGTIME, with a high FDV, low circulation, and extreme control, Binance may also have similar considerations in not wanting to go spot in the short term. The specific decision details are unknown to us;

But one thing is clear with the decision to launch the contract at the near time point:

For players participating in mining but unable to withdraw, contracts are advantageous for shorting and hedging the risk of price decline when they can sell when withdrawing.

Where there is demand, there is a market. By not going spot and earning transaction fees and clearing fees through contract demand, they can also get a slice of the pie in the heat of the new coin.

Therefore, in the frenzy of Big Time’s launch, we can see that the project party, market makers, and exchanges all have their own calculations.

The KYC rules of the project party unintentionally achieved the effect of stabilizing sell pressure, market makers concentrated chips to create a price increase effect and control the market, one exchange took the lead in launching spot trading to compete for traffic, and another exchange attempted to be opportunistic by launching contracts and get a share of the pie…

When everything seems carefully planned and implemented, will you be the one in the market who happily makes money?

Tools, just tools

From being not fun to being fun, from the concept of 3A to actual machines, GameFi projects have indeed undergone changes in quality.

But its core economic model and trading techniques seem to be the same old tricks, with no fundamental difference from projects a few years ago.

In traditional markets, games, as widely consumed consumer products, often revolve around the core of game content;

However, in a game and competition involving studios, project teams, market makers, and exchanges, everything revolves around profits, and the game itself seems to be just a tool for profit realization.

After quickly obtaining sufficient financial returns through NFT pre-sales in the early stage, from a business perspective, refining and polishing the game is not a cost-effective deal;

Profits need to be realized, investment needs an exit, and a bull market requires waiting. What would you do in this case?

Therefore, we cannot approach blockchain games with an idealistic mindset, nor can we demand all gaming experiences from a player’s perspective.

In a game involving multiple participants, a tool-oriented mindset is still a realistic and reasonable choice – understand it, utilize it, and then preferably forget about it.

And if you still don’t understand why and choose to participate, I hope you won’t be the one being used as a money-making tool.

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