Every MMORPG uses some form of in-game currency that players use to purchase items from each other and to receive items or services from NPCs. The game developers are ultimately the central bank in these "economies" where they control the money supply, inflation, and deflation. Inflation occurs in these games when monsters drop the in-game currency as loot when they are killed. Inflation can also occur when an in-game event concludes and rewards the top performers with prizes which can include the currency. Deflation occurs when players spend their currency on an NPC, since the NPC is not a real actor, the money spent is essentially burned. The game developers determine how much currency is dropped, how much NPCs charge for their items and services, and how many events should occur to reward players. These are just a few examples, but the general idea is this is its own economy with its own currency.

In this post, I'll describe how an MMO can function with satoshis as the currency. I think that if implemented right, a game developer can actually benefit from using sats in their game rather than making a worthless in-game currency and charging users subscription fees. We'll call this game "Satoshi's Realm" (or SR for short), but understand this is just a general idea to allow me to build more ideas off of. I have mostly played fantasy-style MMORPGs before, mostly Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online, and Final Fantasy XIV, and a few others just not with as much time spent in them as those three. If you've played those games, you'll likely see the inspiration from them described here. My hope is that these general economic mechanics can be applied to any type of MMO where sats can be used as the in-game currency.

In order to use sats as the currency for an MMORPG, there are a few things that must be thought up differently. For example, the simple act of killing a monster. Monsters in most MMOs drop loot which includes items and in-game currency. This is strange since I have never seen an animal carrying any currency before and I don't know why a monster would hold on to items. Monsters in SR don't typically "drop" anything. You'll only have their carcass to skin and gather resources from. That's a key element of SR, gathering resources to make something valuable that other players will want to buy, a proof of work.

As for a wallet, I think this would work much like Stacker News. Each player would have an in-game wallet, consider it a hot-wallet, where their actions can spend and earn sats instantly based on their in-game actions. Upon account creation, they set up a new wallet just like SN's user-registration process, and can top it up with sats, withdraw sats, etc.

This raises the question: wouldn't this make the game pay-to-win? Not necessarily, due to the proof of work mechanics of the game. A key factor with SR is that all items, armor, weapons, potions, food, and anything else are only created by players, not NPCs. If someone were to show up and be willing to spend a lot of sats on everything, yes, they would receive that instant gratification of buying the best armor and weapons available. However, they would also be contributing to the game's economy by doing so, since they would be paying another player for the items they purchased.

For example, a player who is only paying their way to the best armor and weapons will have to continuously pay other players for new gear, upgrades, and repairs. While a player who participates in gathering and crafting can upgrade and repair their own gear, as well as upgrade others' for a fee, provides a natural incentive for that work to be done. So while it's always possible to buy the best gear available (at the market price), it's also possible to make that gear for yourself as a player by doing the work.

Satoshi's Realm would heavily incorporate gathering resources and turning them into in-game items, like armor, weapons, potions, etc., in order to allow the player to use them for advancing themselves as a class or to sell to other players for the same purpose. In SR, we'll have classes, jobs, and skills that each player can gain experience with to advance their character.

Classes are your typical MMORPG roles, like tanks, DPS, healers, support, etc. These are mostly up to the game developer in order to balance in terms of abilities. Classes are used for PvE (Player-versus-Environment) and PvP (Player-versus-Player) generally to fight monsters or each other, respectively. This is ultimately what drives players to advance in the game, as "levelling up" their classes allows them to participate in more events, fight harder monsters, etc.

Levelling up one's class increases their health, power/mana, endurance, and attributes related to their specific class' needs (strength, dexterity, magical ability, piety, etc.). I won’t go into any more detail for classes since I want to focus on the economic aspect of Satoshi’s Realm.

Jobs are the crafts that are available in SR. While a player could only be a single class at a time, it would make sense for that player to be able to have multiple jobs simultaneously. For example a tank class would likely want to be a metalsmith and cook, since they rely on those jobs to function as their class. An archer class would need woodworking for their bows and arrows and leathercraft for their armor. It should also be possible for a player to gain experience in all jobs, regardless of their class.

Jobs are meant to enhance the experience of playing a class in that a player could be entirely self-reliant, or sovereign. By providing their services to other players, they could even end up earning sats for themselves, simply for playing a game.

Levelling up one's jobs makes them better at their craft. For example, armor durability is higher when created by a job with more experience in that tier of armor than one with less experience in that tier (tiers being linked to a class level requirement, outside the scope of this post). There is also the possibility of failing to create an item out of the raw components, which would decrease as one's job level increases.

Skills are separate from jobs and classes, which need to be levelled up as part of fulfilling specific functions. For example, cutting down a tree increases the wood gathering skill, where the higher this skill, the more wood can be extracted. Skinning an animal increases the skinning skill, where more of the monster's carcass can be recovered with higher skill. Increasing skills give you more or better raw components to work with as you craft for your job, providing you better results.

Most players will naturally begin levelling up their skills as they go about the world killing monsters and interacting with their environment. To ignore these raw resources would be an opportunity cost that someone else will come along and take advantage of, since they can use them to level up their job, which earns them sats. Even if they don’t want to work on a craft for a specific job, they could still sell those raw materials to other players.

As a player levels up their class, the more advanced monsters they encounter that have more desirable raw materials. As well as the environments those monsters are in have more exotic resources around them. This means that advancing a class and skills compliment each other well. A player is incentivized to advance their class in order to gain access to the more advanced raw materials which are required by jobs at higher levels of experience.

A player could always pay other players to provide those raw materials for them. This creates a market where you could have classes that gain skills in retrieving raw materials, but only to sell those materials to crafters wanting to increase their jobs. You could also have players who only want to level up their crafting jobs, and will pay the market price for raw materials in order to stay in populated areas to sell their crafting job services to other players for profit.

Self sufficient players will be those that level up their jobs and skills along with their class. Meaning, as they kill monsters they're collecting the raw materials from them. As they explore the land around them, they're gathering roots, mushrooms, flowers, chopping down trees, digging for gems and metals. These players would not need to spend their sats on anything that they can't produce themselves and can provide their services to players which haven't put in the time and work to their jobs.

NPCs are ultimately the source of income for the game developers. NPCs should provide services that players are willing to pay for out of convenience. Any service that players can provide would be bad for the overall economy of the game if an NPC could do the same, even at a higher rate. Examples of this would be selling raw materials, performing armor and weapon repairs, and providing buffs and potions, because no work has been put into to produce those items. It's critical that those services remain in the players' hands otherwise the game developers turn back into a central planning entity where they attempt to keep prices above some market rate, or worse, set the market rate.

Revenue-Generating Services:

In PvP, it is possible for there to be incentives where a player doesn't have to lose sats when they die. As a player takes damage to their armor and uses their weapons, they need to perform repairs over time, based on the durability of their gear. This means a player cannot simply PvP all day without making use of a job, whether they repair themselves or require the services of another player.

There are two main types of PvP in Satoshi’s Realm, scenarios and open world.

PvP can have different types of environments to meet the desires of the players. For example, instanced scenarios where a group of a set number of players fight directly against an opposing faction's group of the same number of players. This would allow the two groups to place a deposit as a wager which the winning team would get to keep the prize pot. The game developers can even take a fee on these scenarios that each team has to pay to enter, another revenue-generating means.

Scenarios can be 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, all the way up to the maximum group size. Scenarios typically occur in a closed-off area, inaccessible to other players (hence an instance), and end after a goal is met or time runs out. Game developers are encouraged (and incentivized) to think of different types of scenarios to attract more users to them, since they can get repetitive if playing the same type of instance over and over.

I'm a huge fan of open-world PvP, where there are faction-controlled objectives to take. If we use an example of keeps and outposts, where keeps are large potentially populated areas and outposts are smaller fortified defenses, 4 outposts to a keep, we can add financial incentives to hold or take these objectives. Guilds can sponsor keeps to enhance their defenses while also boosting the skills of crafters, PvEers, and gatherers within its area. Outposts associated with a keep can be boosted by different guilds for similar effects. Sponsoring a keep and its outposts costs the guild money, which can accumulate as a reward for the opposing faction to take and hold the objective.

Boosting a keep should be desirable for a faction to do, otherwise no one will do it. By placing boosting incentives for crafters on top of enhanced defenses, it means more crafting jobs will want to congregate to boosted keeps since they can get better results there. However, those players would need to pay a small fee to the guild in order to receive the benefits, creating income for the guild when the players outnumber the cost to sponsor the keep.

Example Keep Boosting Workflow:

Taking a keep should also be desirable for a faction to do, again, otherwise no one will do it. The incentive for capturing a boosted keep is to receive the hoard of satoshis that have accumulated to it paid by the sponsoring guild. Likewise, defending a keep should be desirable because players don’t want to lose the enhancements given by the boosts since that makes their jobs more profitable.

Example Keep (or Outpost) Capture Workflow:

Different keeps can provide different types of boosts for players, and a faction controlling multiple keeps in an area can provide even further enhancements, creating the incentive to defend keeps and outposts controlled by your own faction and take the opposing faction’s outposts. Usually in open world PvP, this creates a “zerg” like group of players that stick together and take objectives. However, with only a finite amount of satoshis available for capturing an objective, it could encourage players to split into smaller battlegroups to take and defend objectives independently.

Guilds can appear somewhat like a small company in Satoshi's Realm. Satoshis paid by players wanting to take advantage of boosts near keeps accumulate in the guild’s treasury fund. Those treasury funds would be used to pay for sponsoring future keeps and outposts or upgrading a keep/outpost which is already sponsored, creating a positive feedback loop. As a guild’s treasury grows, they can buy temporary guild-wide discounts on NPC convenience services for guild members.

Founding a guild requires a full group and a fee to be paid to the guild registrar, which goes to the game developers (another NPC convenience service). Each member of the founding group will be made officers of the guild, the top-tier of any guild. These founding members are important because a m-of-n multisig (configured by the founding members) will be created upon the formation of a guild, which is what allows the members to spend treasury funds on sponsoring keeps and outposts and buying NPC convenience service discounts.

By changing the core components of how money is generated in an MMO, we can utilize sats as the currency of the game. This benefits players and the game’s developers because players are incentivized to create their own marketplaces and the game developers can earn fees on optional services built into the game.

Hopefully this can inspire a game developer to create the first sats-denominated MMO. I was inspired by this article to write this. I'm interested to know if there are any other write ups similar to mine, since I purposely didn't search beforehand so that I wouldn't be biased. All ideas here are free for anyone to take, modify, expand, whatever you want, even without attribution. I believe if someone builds this, we'll all benefit.