Fren Pet: A mining game disguised as a pet

MT Capital

2023-11-24 15:00

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Original title: "MT Capital Insight: Fren Pet - A mining machine game in the guise of a pet"

Original author: Severin, MT Capital Insight

TL;DR

·Fren Pet's pet can actually be understood as a mining machine, which continuously mines a portion of the expenditure of all players in the field as income.

·Compared with friedn.tech, Fren Pet has made more designs in terms of product vitality and user retention, but Fren Pet's wealth-making effect is significantly weaker than friedn.tech, which may become a hidden danger to user growth.

·Base and Fren Pet complement each other, and it is expected that more FrenX will become popular on Base in the future.

On November 17, Base's official tweet about Fren Pet quickly ignited the community, and people flocked to this electronic pet game on the chain. A wealth effect myth surrounding the electronic pet game has also quietly begun.

Core gameplay introduction

In Fren Pet, players first need to spend 100 $FP to mint electronic pets. Afterwards, players need to spend $FP to buy various foods in the store to reset the pet's death time, avoid pet death, and increase pet points. Each pet can get a free spin of the roulette wheel once a day, and has a chance to get points, shields, insurance and other props. Each pet can harass other pets every 15 minutes, with a 40% chance of defeating other pets and receiving 0.5% of their points as a reward. In addition, players can also join the dice game between players to gain higher points with greater risks. Finally, the pet's points will determine the distribution of the ETH reward pool. If the player chooses to receive the reward, the pet's points will be cleared and the game will end.

Fren Pet's Fomo design

Whether in terms of gameplay, UI design, player interaction experience, or server quality, Fren Pet is not a high-quality game, and can even be said to be a shoddy game. After being reposted by Base's official account, Fren Pet even caused server overload due to excessive traffic, causing the game to be interrupted. At this stage, Fren Pet still relies more on its Fomo gameplay design to attract new players.

source：https://twitter.com/frenpetonbase

Gameplay:

· Not Free to Play but Better Than Free to Play:The premise of Fren Pet is that players need to spend 100 $FP to mint a Tamagotchi. However, every time a new player enters and mints a pet, Fren Pet will return the 100 $FP mint cost paid by the previous player. From the perspective of currency standard, this is equivalent to Free to Play. However, from the perspective of U-standard, as long as there are continuous players entering and spending in the game, the price of $FP will be expected to rise, and players will benefit from the minting behavior, which is equivalent to Give to Play. This will increase the willingness of players to participate, stimulate old players to mint more pets, and encourage new players to actively enter the market. (Now it has been changed to only cost 10 $FP to mint a pet, and the $FP spent will enter the multi-money contract and be distributed to long-term active players to encourage user retention)

source: DEXTools

·Guide players to consume more frequently and at a high rate to expand economic benefits:Food has two attributes: survival time and point income. Generally speaking, the more expensive the food, the higher the point income, but the shorter the survival time. This requires players to make a trade-off between survival time and point income. Moreover, points will be linked to player income. Therefore, if Fren Pet players want to get as many ETH rewards as possible, they need to buy relatively expensive food with higher points. But at the same time, the survival time of this kind of food will be relatively short. This makes players who want to get high returns frequently buy relatively expensive food, contributing a lot of turnover to the game. In this process, the player's investment cost will also increase, forcing players to continue to buy food to avoid the cost loss caused by the death of their pets. The design of a maximum survival time of 2-3 days for food will also increase the interaction between users and the game and improve user stickiness.

source：<https://dune.com/browse/dashboards?q=frenpet>

· Give users low-cost future income expectations and encourage positive social diffusion: Each pet has a chance to spin the roulette wheel once a day, with rewards ranging from 1 point to 2,000 points. It is also possible to get special rewards such as shields, or nothing. The free roulette wheel gives users low-cost future income expectations and takes advantage of the players' love of lottery draws, encouraging players to continue to participate in the game and increase the frequency of interaction between users and the game. Moreover, the free roulette wheel will also encourage users to spread positive social connections. When users draw high rewards, they tend to post and share on social media, which will also bring more new traffic to Fren Pet.

·Use the gambling nature of users to enrich the gameplay and improve user stickiness:Each pet can harass other pets every 15 minutes, and there is a 40% probability of stealing the house to get rewards. The winner will be able to get 0.5% of the loser's points. This mechanism will encourage gambling players to constantly launch attacks to win points rewards from other players.At the same time, more rational players will also choose to improve their pet points, and through a passive defensive posture, passively obtain the challenger's failed points with a higher winning rate. In addition, Fren Pet has also introduced a more gambling dice game, where players can use a paid ticket of 100 $FP to win a reward of up to 500 $FP.

· Receiving rewards will clear your points, blocking mining, withdrawal and selling:The Ponzi model is most afraid of the first entrants to exit the game too quickly. Once the Fren Pet player chooses to receive the reward, the pet's points will be directly cleared. This mechanism will allow players who want to obtain lasting benefits to receive rewards as late as possible, so that players can continue to stay in the game, and to a certain extent, it will block the damage caused by players' mining, withdrawal and selling to the game economy.

Token economy:

· Invitation rebate encourages players to promote themselves:Similar to exchange rebates, 10% of the $FP used by players in the game will be automatically sent to the referrer, which will encourage players to actively promote and share their Fren Pet invitation codes, and obtain a continuous source of income from the consumption of new players.

· Token destruction creates expectations of future deflation:The total supply of $FP is fixed and 90% of the tokens used by players in the game will be directly destroyed, which will create expectations of token deflation and encourage players to hold and purchase $FP tokens earlier.

· Token rewards return to players to create expectations of future earnings:Every time a user buys or sells $FP tokens on BaseSwap, a 5% tax is paid. When the smart contract accumulates 1,000 $FP tokens from taxes, they will automatically be converted into ETH and 2% of them will be distributed proportionally to the players on the leaderboard, 2% to the developers, and the remaining 1% as a supplement to the $FP liquidity pool. The 2% reward return will serve as the player's future earnings expectation, motivating players to continue to participate in the game.

Fomo's game mechanics and token economic design have attracted more and more players to Fren Pet. However, this game is not expected to last, because the motivation for players to pay to play does not come from the playability of the game, but from the players' expectations of future earnings. And Fren Pet's pet can actually be understood as a mining machine, which continuously mines a portion of the expenditures of all players in the field as income. When the expected income of players decreases, rational players will begin to flee Fren Pet, causing the game to enter a vicious cycle of player loss, reduced $FP trading activities, reduced return rewards, reduced expected income, and further player loss. If there is no way to attract players to continue paying through the playability of the game, or to introduce positive external economic benefits, then Fren Pet will not be able to escape the ending of a mess.

Comparison with Friend.tech

Fren Pet and friend.tech have many similarities, and even the names are in the same vein. Fren Pet and friend.tech essentially rely on users' expectations of future income, guide players to self-promote through social fission, cause community fomo, and drive a large number of new players to enter. Early players can gain higher future profits after new players enter the market at a relatively lower cost in the early stage, thereby attracting user retention.

The difference is that Fren Pet has more unique small designs based on the game scene to improve the vitality of the product and user retention. For example, the pet feeding mechanism will guide users to continue to consume and bring lasting water to the application. Roulette draws and pet attacks that can be launched every 15 minutes will guide users to interact more frequently and enhance users' willingness to retain. The design that rewards will cause points to be cleared can also delay the early exit of early players.

However, Fren Pet's pet cultivation model also limits the spread of Fren Pet's wealth-creating effect to a certain extent. Unlike friend.tech's Bonding Curve, which can reflect huge price fluctuations through simple Keys trading, Fren Pet's pet points increase and reward stacking require time to accumulate. Therefore, it is difficult for users to accumulate a large amount of wealth in a short period of time. This may also cause Fren Pet's narrative to be not sexy enough and not attractive enough to users, which becomes a hidden danger for Fren Pet's growth. So we expect that Fren Pet will not quickly attract a large number of users to enter the market through exaggerated wealth effects like friend.tech in the early stage, nor will it cause premature loss of users and collapse due to designs similar to Bonding Curve. Fren Pet is more likely to be in a tepid state for a long time.

Base needs more Fren Pets

Fren Pet’s popularity is of course inseparable from Base’s retweets. In fact, Base and Fren Pet complement each other. Fren Pet needs Base to gain more traffic exposure and arouse users’ fomo psychology. And Base also needs more Fren Pets to bring more funds, traffic, real users and income to the Base chain.

Fren Pet is similar to friend.tech. In gaming and social scenarios, each relies on users’ expectations of future earnings to guide users to conduct high-frequency interactions and trading operations. This will bring Base a more prosperous on-chain user ecology and accelerated on-chain gas revenue. At its peak, friend.tech contributed nearly half of the daily gas expenditure on the Base chain. Compared with friend.tech, which simply buys and sells Keys, Fren Pet has more high-frequency interaction scenarios in games, such as feeding and Bonk. While users frequently operate, they also pay more gas fees as real income for Base.

As L2s become more homogenized, Base has captured a large amount of active user traffic by diverting traffic to popular applications, and has taken a different development path from other L2s. It is expected that more FrenX applications with fomo attributes and high-frequency interaction scenarios will emerge on Base in the future, continuously supplying fresh blood to the Base ecosystem. FrenX may not necessarily bring huge wealth effects to users, but Base is indeed the winner behind the scenes who has harvested real money.