Daniel Malinovski Mentors the SuperGG Gamejam Cohort

Daniel Malinovski, co-founder of Simplicity Group, mentored the SuperGG cohort of the Solana Gamejam Acceleration Program, which ran from 8 February to 27 April 2025.

SuperGG is the acceleration track that follows the Solana Gamejam. Where the jam itself is a build sprint, the acceleration programme takes the teams that came out of it and spends eleven weeks turning a working game into a company. The cohort included Pool Legend, SurvIve Run, Loot Go, CiFarm, Tokyo Stupid Games and Windfall, with backing from the Solana Foundation and Foundation Ventures among the programme partners.

Why game studios need a different tokenomics conversation

Game economies break in ways that DeFi economies do not. A lending protocol can price its incentives against an external yield curve, whereas a game has to keep an internal economy stable while players are actively trying to extract from it. The failure mode is well documented: pay players to play, watch the reward token inflate, watch the players who were only there for the reward leave, and discover the remaining players were never enough to hold the economy up.

The work in these sessions was mostly about separating the two questions studios tend to merge. What does the game need to be fun, and what does the token need to hold value are different problems, and a design that answers only the second produces a spreadsheet that people quit within a week.

What was covered

Daniel's sessions with the cohort covered token supply and emissions, sink design, and the point at which a studio should launch a token at all. For most of the teams the answer was later than they expected: a game with a functioning economy and paying players can launch a token into real demand, whereas a game that launches a token first has to sustain the price while the game is still being built.

Simplicity Group runs tokenomics design, audits and Machinations modelling for funded businesses, alongside its go-to-market practice. The SuperGG programme ran to 27 April 2025.