Back to collectionFinal Form’s Three Turns: Permanence Was Never Playability
Background: The community had just heard Final Form’s account say it was proud to be built on Arbitrum, yet still did not know how players would ultimately enter the game. Today: The retrospective began in late 2022. Impact and next steps: The article described a third turn: the core game would leave the chain entirely and become a complete role-playing game sold for a single upfront price, with no in-app purchases, battle pass, or pay-to-win mechanics.
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Background: The community had just heard Final Form’s account say it was proud to be built on Arbitrum, yet still did not know how players would ultimately enter the game. Ex Populus then published a look back at two and a half years of development, and the Chinese community translated the whole article that day. The debate gained a concrete question: how much room should a chain made for games occupy in game design?
Today: The retrospective began in late 2022. The team initially embraced “autonomous worlds” and wanted a game that ran entirely on chain, required no permission, and could operate forever. Later it admitted that permanence did not equal playability: many such experiments collapsed under their own complexity, and players never came. Its first turn moved most of the game off chain while retaining both fungible and non-fungible game tokens. A fresh look at the market then showed the team that tokens alone could not sustain a game. Beneath the translation, one reader argued that XAI had not abandoned the token model but split its path: Raijin would reward players of conventional games for on-chain achievements, while games such as Planet X would keep token economics within their gameplay. Another asked what remained of a chain built for games. That same day, someone asked whether key sales had been put to a vote; an operator pointed them to the proposal area.
Impact and next steps: The article described a third turn: the core game would leave the chain entirely and become a complete role-playing game sold for a single upfront price, with no in-app purchases, battle pass, or pay-to-win mechanics. The goal was a Steam release early the following year; the team stressed that this was a direction, not a promise. The chain would recede from players’ view and offer small achievement rewards only if players opted in. To the narrator, the pattern was that Final Form had moved the chain farther out three times over two and a half years, finally removing it from the core game, each time because players had not come. A chain could not, by itself, solve the absence of players. Whether the new design could hold their attention would have to wait until the game appeared.