Horizontal vs Vertical
Ultimate winner will be vertical players. Is Loot taking the right approach? BAYC seems leading again.
In building a product, there are typically two directions you can go - horizontal and vertical.
To build horizontally is to build platforms or generic components for others, such as Stripe for payments and Twilio for SMS, where everybody builds on top of you.
To build vertically is to control and build everything end to end and optimize everything altogether, great examples are Apple products, Tesla, or GoPuff.
Personally I’m a big fan of building vertically, since you get to control things end to end and best design how everything fits together. For example, Apple does this a lot where they control everything inside their laptops, but other computer companies are more like fitting existing pieces together without much influence on the suppliers to push through innovation.
One fallacy about building horizontally is that you might scale faster in theory. But you have too much dependency on developers, and they may not wanna go as fast as you wish. So unless your platform is so simple and utility like Stripe and Twilio, it is really hard to pull it off.
Loot right now is taking the horizontal approach and that concerns me. We are relying on too many different sets of developers building stuff randomly here and there. In the end we might not have a cohesive ecosystem, and that affects user experience. Also it is not clear to me how critical Loot is as a component to a game.
In my view, the ultimate winner in the derivative NFT space is going to be a vertically integrated player that keeps building a cohesive experience. The end vision seems something like a game.
I really hope the Loot founding team go and build a game, instead of relying on the community to build this much. There should be one game and it better be really good.
In retrospect, BAYC team already started building a game. It seems they are ahead of others again.