Cyball Income Calculations
Last week I wrote about my first impressions on Cyball, a young soccer game running on BSC. Overall, I found the gameplay familiar and easy to learn, although there were a few things that needed improvement and a lot of key features still in the works. I calculated that Cyball’s earnings token CBT needed to be at least $0.04 in order for it to be a viable P2E game for the average Filipino player, netting them something like 7,000 pesos a month as a guild scholar. Well, $CBT launched on March 9th and it’s currently trading at $0.35, about 10x the value I was targeting. Although this may sound like good news, we need to walk through its implications.
So why is the price so high? Primarily this is because there aren’t enough players yet to flood the market with earned $CBT. Most users are probably also accumulating $CBT to prepare for the upcoming “genesis mentoring” event beginning on March 22nd. During this period, you’ll be able to take your Cyblocs and breed new ones at a heavily discounted breeding fee: just 500 CBT and 100 BUSD for each breeding attempt. (In other words, each breeding attempt will cost you $275 approximately.) If you breed some good Cyblocs, you should be able to sell them on the public marketplace and make some decent money. The floor prices for bronze, silver, and gold Cyblocs are 600 BUSD, 1000 BUSD, and 2600 BUSD respectively, so on paper, this sounds like a good return. Of course, being able to breed cheaply is one thing, and being able to sell your newly-minted Cyblocs is another. A prospective breeder would have to assume that there are enough interested buyers out there to absorb the flood of new breeds. Currently, the market turnover is not particularly high, so you may end up waiting a while. There’s only been about $1.4M in total trades so far, which translates to roughly 2,000 individual sales.
The Cybloc marketplace only has a few hundred items for sale Because each Cybloc can only breed up to 3 other Cyblocs, “virgin” Cyblocs will become increasingly valuable right before the breeding event kicks off. I have a gold Cybloc and a couple of silvers, and there’s a part of me that wants to be lazy and just sell them all off right before the breeding event. On the other hand, I do want to try being a breeder for a few days. There’s no guarantee that you’ll actually breed anything good, so each attempt is a bit of a gamble. For instance, if you have a single gold Cybloc, the chances that you’ll breed another gold one is only 20%. You’re far more likely to breed a silver or lower Cybloc (around 77%). The prices in the marketplace are therefore going to be dictated by a combination of expected value from breeding as well as market perception … which is pretty much how it works in Axie Infinity too. And it’s precisely that similarity to Axie that will cause the Cybloc marketplace to heat up a lot faster than people expect. People already know how to make money this way.
From the scholars’ perspective, the income calculations are much easier. Since each bronze Cybloc earns 3.5 CBT per win, every victory translates to 10.5 CBT, or $3.67, or 192 PHP. Bronze Cyblocs earn the least amount of CBT per win, so teams made up of higher classes can earn even more. With a 50% win rate, an all-bronze team can make $1,099 or 57,600 PHP in gross earnings a month, assuming the CBT exchange rate doesn’t change. Now, before you fall off your seat, remember that we’ve been through this cycle before. With Axie Infinity, this was in May 2021, when SLP hit $0.36 for the first time, and people were swarming the platform by the hundreds of thousands. The difference of course is that there’s a lot more anticipation now. We’ve already seen how crazy prices can get with these games, so the market is future-proofing its prices. It’s imagining a future where Cyball is already as big as Axie. Of course, the reality is that the game is still in its infancy and nowhere near the size and scale of SkyMavis’ game (the @CyballOfficial Twitter account only has 57,000 followers vs Axie’s 930,000), but that’s crypto for you.
Do I think that $CBT will stay at $0.35? I think in the short term, it’ll exceed $0.35, with many entrepreneurial players making investments in their Cybloc breeding farms. I also think that the community will move extremely quickly here, and the Cyball economy will go through multiple massive upheavals over the next month. To be fair, we already know the ultimate outcome of this kind of P2E model. The game needs more ways to spend its token if it wants to keep the price high. Otherwise, the number of earnings-hungry players will simply overwhelm the market demand, causing the price to sink. Axie Infinity itself hasn’t quite solved this yet, but they continue to provide the roadmap for a lot of younger games to follow. All that being said, at least Cyball got one thing right: they didn’t offer an Adventure mode.
See you all next week, cryptofam!