Game Design Lessons from VBA: The NBA of the Metaverse
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I didn’t grow up with fantasy sports. The concept of pretend-drafting real athletes always seemed…creepy to me.
However, like many kids my age then, I did have a baseball card (or at least, the soccer equivalent of baseball cards) collecting phase that lasted a good few years. I still have a few Ronaldo (no, not the one you’re thinking of) cards that I can probably sell for a quick buck to last through this bear market when Bitcoin revisits $100 should the pundits have their way.
What I didn’t know at the time - being a pre-teen and all - was that both the fantasy sports market and the trading card market would grow into $20 billion markets EACH.
A few smart teams have already realized that NFTs - by allowing users to truly own their in-game characters - offered a natural way to combine two $20 billion market. However, adoption for Web 3 fantasy sports remains inexplicably lukewarm: today, one of the more well known fantasy sports games in Web 3, Sorare, has a meager ~150,000 unique players (edit: previously we cited a 17,000 number from NFTstats.com)
This has not stopped investors from betting on the space - and not just crypto natives who have already pledged to live and die by the proverbial, non-fungible Web 3 sword, but NBA team owners and executives at gaming household names.
Fast Break Labs is the latest team to court money from a coterie of power players behind names such as Brooklyn Nets (owner Joe Tsai’s Family Office), Sacramento Kings (co-owner Aneel Ranadive), Riot Games (co-founder Marc meril) plus the clear odd one out, yours truly.
On June 23rd, Fast Break Labs launched the test run version (season0) of VBA to a small community. With one of the stronger teams and backers, VBA’s curious game design choices are worth exploring for those keen on building - or investing in - sustainable Web 3 games.
Team & Vision Behind VBA
VBA’s premise is simple: players take the role of General Managers (GMs), who collect unique NFTs of basketball players and pit them against each other for games to win rewards.
The interesting thing to note is that unlike most fantasy sports games, VBA deliberately chose not to use the likeness or names of any existing NBA teams. Instead, each character is entirely fictional and custom-designed.
This was a deliberate decision on part of Fast Break Labs, who wants to create a standalone IP franchise. Co-founders Charles Du (CEO) and John Wu (CTO) are not strangers to building popular consumer products. Previously, both of them were at Meta as a Product Manager and Software Engineer respectively, while the other 12 members of the team have built successful products at large corporations like Adidas, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Bloomberg and Fox Sports.
VBA’s playable alpha, VBA season0, started on 23rd June and has approximately 890 registered team owners.
Moneyball, for Basketball, on a Blockchain
To get started, players need to register a VBA account with a Solana wallet (like Phantom) and/or email address. To begin competing in the VBA, GMs must have 5 VBA players in their team.
VBA Virtual Players
VBA players are represented as NFTs on the Solana Blockchain and GMs can obtain random players via Player Packs or purchase revealed players on the secondary market. VBA has planned to release 3,672 season0 Player Packs, which will contain a total of 28,000 unique players. 1,672 packs have been released so far and the remaining 200 packs will be issued in late 2022. Assuming that each GM owns only 5 players, season0 allows for a maximum of 5,600 GMs concurrently.
Player Cost
As of 1st July, it costs about 2.6 SOL / $80 USD for a team of 5 players to begin competing in VBA.
VBA players each have their unique set of attributes – most of which determine how well the players perform in games and in turn, a GM’s profitability, while some are purely cosmetic and do not affect performance.
A GM’s goal is to put together a team with the highest probability of winning against another GM’s team. A player’s probability of winning is a function of its attributes. For example, the rarer a player, the higher their predicted base performance will be. The detailed description for each attribute is not relevant at this point but for reference can be found on VBA’s own whitepaper here.
Currently, the floor price of a player is 0.52 SOL / $15.60 and the highest price paid for a player was 35 SOL / $1050 just 12 days ago.
Gameplay
Season0 is VBA’s exploratory phase that builds towards a complete ecosystem. Season0 stars VBA’s playable game alpha with 2 primary game modes – Franchise Mode (live since 23rd June) and Arcade Mode (under development).
Franchise Mode
VBA GMs pit their team of 5 players against other GMs in weekly round robins (where every team competes with each other) to climb the seasonal ladder and become the best team in the VBA. Contest registration is free and will take place each week from Thursday 12:00 PST (19:00 UTC) to Sunday 18:00 PST (Monday 1:00 UTC)
Unlike regular basketball video games where you control and play as the basketball players, VBA’s season0 gameplay is a text-based game where the match is simulated and presented play-by-play via text.
Season0 tests a GM’s analytical skills as they have to optimize for players that have the best shot at winning, based on their attributes. GMs are expected to reconsider their lineup as they review the players’ performances each week.
GMs also have to plan their team around a salary cap, limiting the possible combination of players on their team. In Season0, each team has a salary cap of $18,000, and a player’s salary is tied to its rarity. This mechanic also maintains the game’s competitive balance by preventing GMs with a larger spending power from gaining an unfair advantage with their lineup.
Player’s salary and some possible combinations
Arcade Mode
Instead of weekly round robins that are free to enter, GMs enter players into various paid daily competitions – more on this to come later this year.
Game Design Lessons
While season0 is meant to be a simplistic version of the full game, Fast Break Labs has made a few interesting game design decisions that are at times at odds with the conventional “wisdom” of P2E games today.
We’ve isolated the few that are worthwhile to explore and generalizable for builders and investors alike.
1. My Money Don’t Jiggle Jiggle, It Raffles…
Unlike most P2E games which virtually print money to reward users, VBA does not have an uncapped, tradable token currently to function as the reward token. While in the short term minting reward tokens can lead to ostensibly impressive user numbers, they are rarely sustainable (see our in-depth quantitative analysis of StepN rewards here).
Instead, VBA rewards its users with an off-chain, in-game-only currency called DIMES, which are used as automatic entries into a weekly reward raffle that pays a prize pool in SOL. It is expected over time that the prize pool will come from revenues generated (via NFT minting, trading, or any in-game transaction rake).
GMs earn DIMES based on their team’s performance in the weekly round-robin competition (under Franchise Mode) or by completing weekly challenges. Season0’s prize pool is 2000 SOL (approximately $60,000), split across 20 weeks. Each week, 10 winners will be selected to win 10 SOL each ($300).
By not adhering to a pre-set inflation schedule and not enabling trading on DIMES, VBA “misses out” on overspending in inflationary rewards to onboard users, but avoids the issues associated with rapidly dwindling rewards from mercenary sellers of the reward token. VBA’s team also gets to decide on the size of the raffle per week and adjust according to market realities.
We believe P2E games over-index on “guaranteed” earnings based on pre-set inflation; VBA’s raffle based mechanism is likely easier for teams to manage.
2. Minimal Viable User Base
Unlike most Web 3 games, which typically prefer to build up their inital user base as quickly as possible, VBA caps its maximum eligible players in season0.
In season0, 28,000 VBA players will be released. Assuming that each GM only owns 5 VBA players (bare minimum to participate), this caps the limit of GMs at 5,600. The actual number of GMs is most likely lower as GMs can own more than 5 VBA players, and the number of active players will likely be much lower as we can expect a healthy portion of holders to be passive speculators as is common with NFT holders.
In P2E games like Axie Infinity and STEPN, there are no supply caps for in-game assets necessary to play the game, which allowed for monthly players to quickly balloon into the millions within months of launch.
In our view, limiting the initial number of users is unusual but a wise choice in initial runs as it allows the team to iron out potential kinks in gameplay and limit the exposure for early unpatched bugs. However, by doing so, VBA may limit the community mindshare it gains in the early days - and may potentially sour the relationship with early supporters should player NFTs fall drastically in value from onset on large future inflation. One potential solution may be to incorporate unique designs or traits for season0 NFT characters to reward those who supported the game early on.
3. Original IP vs. Recognizable IP
An interesting design choice made by VBA is to opt for creating its own, fictional basketball league versus leveraging existing recognizable IP as is common with most fantasy sports games in Web 2 and Web 3 alike.
While in the long term this decision may pay dividends as VBA and its community can fully control the rights to the game, in the short term this likely was a significant disadvantage. There is a reason why of 19 basketball video game franchises, 13 licensed NBA’s brand. NBA Top Shot, a collectable NFT series of NBA moments/highlights leveraged NBA’s IP and was instantly successful at launch, with the most expensive NFT sold for $387,000. Till date, there are about 1.1 million Top Shot collectors and a total traded volume of $1.1 billion. In contrast, VBA currently has < 1000 collectors and a $230k traded volume.
By leveraging new IP however, VBA is able to avoid direct competition with well-capitalized competitors. Popular video game franchise NBA 2k’s MyGM game mode is extremely similar to VBA’s sesaon0, with a sports league consisting of 24 international teams competing for a prize pool of $2.5 million. The recent competition drew the attention of up to 700k viewers.
Summary
VBA is an ambitious project trying to usher in a new paradigm of sports entertainment for fans. Fans are no longer consumers but can now create, own and monetize their virtual basketball team. The use of virtual players provides fantasy sports players the opportunity to pit their basketball knowledge and drafting skills all year round, while asset ownership powered by NFTs makes for a more immersive and equitable experience over traditional basketball video games. In all, VBA’s virtual basketball league is an exciting opportunity for fans and investors alike.
However, also recognize the difficulty for a non-NBA franchise to gain recognition amongst NBA fans - but this could be mitigated as NBA teams enter the VBA ecosystem in order to expand their outreach. The cap on the number of users could be limiting at first, but we have confidence that the meticulous and responsive VBA team could use their experience with season0 to build a better product before onboarding more basketball fans in the future.
Useful Resources
Links to related episode:
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3t80kkx
Apple: https://apple.co/3t82ukk
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3x5Ed0Q
VBA
Marketplace (Magic Eden & Opensea)
Community tool to track players
NBA
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what they really need to do is partner with or create a service that allows people to use the green screen and a combine-like exercise to create digital avatars that reflect their basketball skills in real life.
they can improve their skills in real life, and then participate in the combine again, or they can play through the game like MyPlayer on 2K and improve that way.
either way, imagine being able to play the game years later with your kids to show them what your skills were like in your physical prime. and of course, it's easy to see a great multiplayer interface would be very popular as well, and could double as a service to organize real-life pick-up games.