[Original] Free to Own (F2O), the next GameFi model you can't miss

The summer of June 2022 is the season of Free Mint NFTs. Under the leadership of goblintown.wtf, free NFT projects have been launched one after another, creating miracles in the current bear market. However, this rosy picture cannot last, and NFT collectors and enthusiasts are slowly getting tired of it. Just imagine, there are at least 20 to 30 free items to choose from every day, and you can mint them as you like for only one lit fee. Under the banner of "no roadmap, no commitment, or even nothing", the vast majority of these free NFT projects can be said to be unfinished, unpolished, and useless JPEG digital images.

Although many free projects will eventually become a scrap of paper, we can't overwhelm everyone with one shot , after all, there will always be one or two projects that stand out every now and then. The protagonist of this article is the best example: "DigiDaigaku", which has caused a sensation in the city recently, is an NFT avatar project that focuses on "two-dimensional wives". The project was launched on August 10th. Although the anime style NFT is nothing new, the background of the project party this time is not small. DigiDaigaku is not like our common avatar projects. It not only has actual game functions (not yet launched), but also is funded by well-known individuals and venture capital companies, such as Paradigm, FTX, Coinbase, etc. The project party is a Web3 game development company called Limit Break, which was founded by a group of Web2 senior teams who have been in the field of mobile games for many years.

Company founder Gabriel Leydon hinted in a tweet on August 4th

DigiDaigaku was released secretly with no pre-sale promotion. Its official twitter account (@DigiDaigaku) had no tweets at all prior to the project's release, and the first tweet featured an anime girl holding a lollipop, with a simple "hi" emoji as the comment. This really looks like a typical "rug pull" operation.

However, for those NFT enthusiasts who carefully researched and discovered the inside story, they seized this opportunity. The floor price of DigiDaigaku started to soar from around 0.3 ETH, and reached a high of nearly 2 ETH in the first day of trading. Since the project party did not make any follow-up, DigiDaigaku’s buying momentum gradually calmed down, and the price fell back to 1 ETH after the hype on the first day. A week after the launch of the project, founder Leydon held the first AMA on Twitter to discuss topics related to game companies and NFT projects. Since then, the price of DigiDaigaku has slowly but steadily climbed. On August 29, the company announced that it had received $200 million in development funding from venture capital. This good news caused the floor price to soar 10 ETH in a single day, creating a rare miracle in the history of NFT.

Source: NFTGo

So what new innovations has DigiDaigaku brought to the NFT circle? That is the new Free-to-Own (F2O, "free to own") model. According to Twitter user @0xRyze, who is also a game developer, he believes that F2O includes three levels. First of all, the community is free to play to begin with. Unlike many current blockchain games, such as Axie Infinity and STEPN, players need to purchase game-related NFTs before starting the game; the second point is about ownership. Leydon has said that the developer builds a large pool of players who are interested in the game and want to own a piece of the property. These players are the pre-launch advocates for the game. Since they already have game-related assets, they all want the game to be successful; the last point is the "NFT factory". Initial NFTs will be "factories for future NFT assets," meaning they can be used to generate more NFTs in the future. These features do sound puzzling at this stage, as Leydon has temporarily opted not to share his full plans in order to avoid others copying them. Will DigiDaigaku succeed? Honestly, no one knows. But as an NFT enthusiast, I sincerely hope that Limit Break can live up to its name and break the boundaries to create an interesting and fun blockchain game, not just focusing on financial investment attributes and rates of return.

As for the author's personal opinion, I think that free things are not necessarily without quality. The "free XX" model is indeed feasible, the premise is that someone needs to pay for love, that is, the so-called "whale" players. In order to maintain the quality of the game and continue to create interesting content, a sustainable revenue model is crucial. If no one is willing to pay for the game, early investors are bound to be unhappy. Not only that, but who will pay the programmers? It can be seen that charging transaction fees alone is not feasible. Binance CEO CZ shares the same concerns as the author. He tweeted, "If everything in the world is free, why do we need to work so hard?" Maybe some people thought he was jealous, but what he said was true. Nevertheless, I still look forward to the future development of DigiDaigaku. It's just that you ask if I will buy collections at a price of 11 ETH (about $17,000) in the current bear market? Most likely not.