In the past five years, a number of new tea beverage brands with annual revenues of billions of RMB have emerged in China, such as Luckin Coffee, HeyTea, Bawang Tea Ji, and Mixue Bingcheng. Their rise is not due to the notion that "milk tea tastes better," but rather due to their precise tapping into the infrastructure dividends of mobile internet and food delivery platforms, which have restructured consumers' purchasing paths and decision-making processes.
Previously, Starbucks, with its core competitive advantage of "golden business districts + third spaces," relied on a large offline store model to build its moat. However, when consumers no longer go to business districts but instead open their phones and click to order, offline locations are no longer scarce. Brand SKU density and frequency of reach have become the core variables. This platform-driven structural change has ended the path dependence of traditional brands and also paved the way for the rise of a new generation of high-frequency consumer categories.
In short, when "food delivery" became the new consumer infrastructure, the explosion of brands like Luckin Coffee was inevitable.
Now, a similar paradigm shift is quietly happening in the gaming industry.
With the maturation of Web3 technology, we are about to witness another wave of behavioral restructuring. This time, the key variables are "asset ownership" and "predatory incentive mechanisms."
THE ESSENCE OF GAMING IS COMPETITION + PREDATION
The cigarette cards and glass marbles that children from the 70s and 80s played with were essentially collectible toys that could also be used for battles. In our memories, regardless of the type of toy game, the outcome of the battle was always the possibility of winning the opponent's items. If there is no predation in a battle, then the battle loses its meaning. We also had toys like Transformers, but because they were expensive, they weren't used for battle games. Toys used for battle games are always those with a lower unit price, collectible in nature, and can be traded or obtained through predatory battles.
PK + predation is the most captivating aspect of the competitive nature of games. Through Web3, we can quickly enable global users to compete fairly in the same game while facilitating asset movement.
