My Thoughts on Drugwars

I have been a closet Drugwars player for almost a month (25 days to be exact based on @bookkeeping stats). Neither did I share my battles nor did I openly write about it. Drugwars started out looking so promising and it was the fastest growing Steem dApp for a while. However, lately, due to a series of changes by the game developers, Drugwars seemed to have fallen from grace. Many players are shouting "Ponzi!" and "Exit scams!". So what really happened?

Source

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Ponzi?

So according to @bookkeeping, I "invested" 36.075 STEEM and only got back about 16 STEEM. That puts me at a loss of -20 STEEM or so. Am I then a victim of this whole Drugwars ponzi scheme? Let's flip the perspective a little and understand a bit more about games.

When we play games like Starcraft, Diablo or Final Fantasy, we have to pay for the game upfront, that is called the pay-to-play model. When we play games like Fortnite, it is free to play, but there are in-app purchases you can make to enhance your gaming experience, and that is called the free to play but pay to win model. Drugwars is a game in the second model. You can play the game for free but the experience is not as great. By spending some STEEM, your experience is enhanced.

With that in mind, let's reword the opening statement of this section. According to @bookkeeping, I paid 36.075 STEEM to enhance my Drugwars gaming experience and I got a rebate of 16 STEEM. I ended up only paying 20 STEEM to get the experience I wanted, what a steal.

You see, it is about the perspective. In my opinion, 20 STEEM (about US$6) was a fair amount to pay for this game. For the past 25 days, I logged in and spent about 20 minutes each day on this game. That is about 8 hours of gameplay already. Over here, a movie ticket is about $10 and a movie is about 2 hours long on the average. Hence, spending $6 to get 8 hours of entertainment is certainly worth it. Furthermore, the game is not going away, I can still continue to play it and squeeze more value from the amount I paid.

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Misrepresented Marketing

While I don't think Drugwars is a ponzi (unless they close the site and escape with the money tomorrow), I think they had poorly marketed their game from the start. I think their initial tagline was, "the drugs are fake but the money is real", or something like that. Which badly misrepresented what a game should be. A game should be for fun and for entertainment. It should not be an investment instrument. Because of how they marketed the game initially, it led to the stellar rise to popularity and subsequently the fall from grace.

Looking at my @bookkeeping stats again, I was making 1.71% "ROI" per day. That is an absurd amount of returns. That means that 1 year, I will be making at least 624% return (not compounded yet). Which totally doesn't make sense. Steem inflation is about 8.5% currently, so how are they going to make the payout model sustainable in the first place?

Hindsight is 20/20. There are many things that we can say they could have done at first. So I will give them the benefit of doubt. The question now is, did they have the intention to scam or misrepresent in the first place? That is something only time will tell.

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Moving Forward

In the most recent post from @drugwars, they mentioned about their commitment to continue developing the game. In an earlier post, they shared about their new FUTURE token and how they will be paying out rewards in FUTURE instead of STEEM. While that led to a lot of frustration among the Steem community, I thought it is a positive change for the sustainability of the game. In fact, that is the original model I thought they should have adopted right at the start.

Many frustrated Steemians probably missed out the fact that the FUTURE token, is a generic token that can be used across all the games that are developed by FutureShock. Much like any other projects on Steem that are issuing their own token, this move will provide the project team with more control of the economics of the ecosystem.

Only time will tell what is going to happen to Drugwars. For now, I am hoping that they bring in more advance mechanics to their gameplay. I like this game because it brings back memories of Archmage, a browser game which I spent so much time on during my teenage days. Hence, I really hope this game will turn out to be a success after they fix their identity crisis (investment vs entertainment).

Thanks for reading and do share your thoughts on Drugwars with me :)

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p.s. I called @bookkeeping to leave a comment so you guys can see my stats. In addition, I am running a content crowdsourcing campaign here for "Spring Cleaning Singapore". Please support if you have the time, there are some rewards to be given out :)