Why Blockchain Is the Perfect Fit For a Management Simulation Game
With Blockstars, we’re building a music-themed management simulation game on the Solana blockchain. As huge fans of management sims over the years, we believe that blockchain is the perfect and most natural fit for this genre — better than any technology platform that has come before. Here’s why.
What Is a Management Sim?
In management simulation games, players build, manage and expand fictional projects with limited resources. The goal is not to defeat an enemy, but to grow as part of an ongoing process, based on deliberate actions the player takes. Often there aren’t even “levels” or an “end game” per se, but rather ongoing and continual progression is the goal of the game.
The core of the gameplay typically revolves around managing and accumulating scarce resources, which are used to grow into a bigger and bigger economy. These resources can be produced, consumed, exchanged and combined to create new types of resources, and can include anything from money, materials and people.
For example, in my personal favorite management sim, Football Manager, players of the game are managers of football (soccer) clubs, and need to accumulate both money (from gate receipts, sponsorship, player sales, etc) and people (players, talent scouts, physios, coaches etc). Those resources are scarce, must be combined in various ways to achieve success, and are modeled on a set of complex, interrelated rules that govern how gameplay evolves.
For example, managers need to decide how much of the overall club budget is allocated towards hiring the best scouts and coaches (which will help longer-term) versus buying the best players today (which will help shorter-term). Should the manager blow the wage budget on one superstar, or sprinkle it more evenly across a balanced squad? Does the manager transfer list an influential player who is past their prime, but at the risk of upsetting the squad harmony? So many choices to be made.
The fiction of management sims can be very varied, ranging from city building (e.g. SimCity), to sports (e.g. Football Manager), to transportation (e.g. Railroad Tycoon), to daily life (e.g. The Sims) to running actual businesses (e.g. Game Dev Story) and even to managing Caribbean island dictatorships (e.g. Tropico). The exact mechanics, visuals and controls of each of these games can vary greatly, but what they all have in common is the centrality and importance of managing the in-game economy.
What Makes Management Sims Fun
In the immortal words of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign strategist James Carville:
It’s the economy, stupid.
Managing a tightly-constrained in-game economy is core to all management sims. The “fun” for players comes from knowing that the in-game resources are constrained, and then doing a “good job” of accumulating and managing those resources and making continual progress.
Unlike, for example, a game like FIFA, where players control just a single player on the pitch at any given moment, and need to react in real-time to activity happening around them for instant gratification and an immediate dopamine hit, gameplay in management sims is typically much more slow-paced. Players are in control of everything, are required to make a lot of choices that are essentially line items in a giant spreadsheet that only “pay off” if combined in the right ways, and gratification is typically delayed over a much longer time horizon.
When done well, management sims are a deeply-engaging genre, and can become a life-long passion. For me, for example, Football Manager has been a part of my life since 1992, when the game first came out — that’s now 30 years of putting in up to ~1,000 hours a year into each update of the game!
Why Blockchain 🤝 Management Sims?
For me, this is where we get to the most interesting and exciting part.
Management sims are inherently fun to a certain type of gamer, who appreciates the depth of decision-making required to manage a successful economy. But up until now, the technology platforms on which we’ve been playing management sims have not supported true ownership of the assets, nor have they represented “real” economies in any meaningful way.
The in-game currencies have existed on corporate servers, the digital assets players use to play the games have belonged to the developers and players haven’t really been able to transact with one another to trade the limited resources (with just a few notable exceptions, such as Diablo’s Auction House — R.I.P.).
Blockchain changes all of this. And for a gaming genre where the economy management is the game, blockchain is simply the perfect fit.
I’ve been making games for a long time now, across many technology platforms (on social networks at early Zynga, on mobile as co-founder of Rocket Games, on voice platforms as co-founder of Drive.fm) and what I’ve learned along the way is that new technology platforms always unlock a wave of gaming innovation, which then leads to this new category of platform-native games driving mass market adoption of the platform itself.
I predict that the same will happen for blockchain adoption — blockchain-native games will be a primary onramp for the mass market.
However, that doesn’t mean that developers can simply take any game and / or gaming genre and port it over to the new technology platform.
The key is to recognize what makes the new technology platform interesting, what unique behaviors it unlocks, and then build the user experience natively around that. For social networks, it was the casual collaboration model that saw players helping each directly in their Facebook feeds. On mobile, it was designing around those snackable moments throughout the day when players had a few minutes to spare. For voice, it is around integrating into the in-car experience, when players can’t look at a screen or interact with their hands.
For blockchain, it’s the economy, stupid.
I won’t rehash the arguments that have by now been made many times over by many smart people around what blockchain unlocks for gaming overall (if you want to read just one piece on the topic, I can point you to Jon Radoff’s excellent “Building the Metaverse”).
But I will touch on why blockchain is so uniquely interesting for the management simulation genre.
When your core game loop is built around managing and growing an economy, as it is for management sims, blockchain is, pardon the pun, a game changer.
When players can truly own the assets that they are playing with, the stakes are raised, and the core game loop matters more. When players can actually earn a currency that can be traded with other players, or on a DEX / CEX, the stakes are raised, and the core game loop matters more. When players can directly influence the in-game economy by the actions they take, not just for themselves but for all players, the stakes are raised, and the core game loop matters more.
And as all game makers know, when you strengthen a game’s core loop, you have just made the game better and more interesting. This is why I believe that the management sim genre is so well-positioned to take advantage of blockchain technologies — naturally game developers will still need to make great games that players want to play, but while for many other genres blockchain might actually be a distraction or a clumsy add-on, for management sims it will be a force multiplier.
Join us!
This is just a teaser of what we are up to! If you are intrigued by Blockstars, be sure to read much, much more about the game design, tokenomics and development roadmap in our whitepaper, come and chat with other community members in our Discord and follow us on Twitter. If you want to join the team, check out our job openings here. We will also be posting news about upcoming features, roadmap progress & important events regularly right here, on our blog.
Niko Vuori | @nikothefinn | Founder & CEO | Blockstars
