#853 Why the most ambitious project in blockchain gaming is a web2 game
BCGW #198 on Wildcard and Thousands
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What if every blockchain game developer has got one simple but fundamental thing wrong?
What if instead of making a blockchain game, they made a normal game but built a blockchain-enabled ecosystem around it?
This is the secret sauce that US developer Playful Studios hopes is going to work for its card collection action game (CCGA) Wildcard.
In development for over seven years and still not finished, it’s an attempt to take the best bits of deck builders, action games and MOBAs and cook up something novel and exciting.
“I want a game that makes me feel like this amazing creature-summoning champion where it’s fully the fantasy that I have a collection of creatures, I show up in battle, I summon them and I’m fighting alongside them, and it’s this amazing, visceral action game which still takes advantage of deck building. I’m a collector. I’m building my collection of summons over time.
“We couldn’t find a game that was like that when we started working on Wildcard. And there’s still not a game like that out there. When I fire up Wildcard, it’s not like anything else in my Steam library,” says CEO Paul Bettner.
But the studio’s dedication to getting the game right extends beyond the vision to the actuality of game production too.
“I always remember especially the last year of development on every Age of Empires game, because it was the same thing. A year before we shipped the game, we felt maybe we were done. We’d sit down and say ‘if I wasn’t a developer on this game, if I was just a random gamer, would I pick playing this game tonight for fun versus some other game?’
“The year before the game was out, usually the answer was some people said ‘yes’, but the rest of the team said, ‘honestly no. I’m going to go back and play Counter-Strike’. And we’re like, ‘we’re not done yet. Until our own team can’t put the game down, we’re not quite there yet’.
“And we’re in that last year right now for Wildcard. It’s the most crucial time. But we’re definitely getting to the point where people are choosing to play Wildcard in their spare time, even though they worked on it all day long.”
Of course, one of the clues to why Wildcard is so ambitious and anticipated is that Bettner and many of the team are veterans of decades of game development, working on Microsoft’s strategy series Age of Empires, as well as early mobile hit Words With Friends, which sold to Zynga for $53 million.
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But, not all of Bettner and Playful’s releases — which also include early VR title Lucky’s Tale and sandbox game Creativerse — have been hits. They all have pushed the boundaries of combining new technology with classic gameplay.
In the case of Wildcard, however, that technology isn’t and has never been blockchain.
“In this case the new platform wasn’t web3, it’s streaming,” Bettner says. “What we are most excited about, as far as what we’re trying to push the boundaries of with Wildcard, is games that are as fun to watch as they are to play, that are built for content creators and fans and spectators and viewers to enjoy.”
And that finally brings us to Thousands, Playful’s blockchain-based streaming platform, the necessity of which only become apparent when the studio finally gave up on being able to cobble something together using Twitch or Discord plug-ins.
Bettner says this was something of a relief however, given that he’d raised $46 million of funding in a Series A round led by arch-crypto VC Paradigm, who didn’t seem to care that Wildcard hasn’t — and never had — any blockchain elements.
Still, he felt like a bit of fraud in the blockchain gaming community, until Thousands.
Two years on from that decision — and still no crypto bro, far less a degen — he’s happy to praise the technology functionality for what it enables.
“Blockchains are ideal at tracking attribution and sharing revenue and monetization across a broad ecosystem. So what we were talking about earlier, what is the ecosystem of Thousands in Wildcard? It’s about doing this, allowing for the attribution of content creation and viewership to lead to the monetization and the sharing of that value back to the content creators that help you tell the world about our games.”
And that’s the overall vision.
A novel, highly competitive web2 game that will be distributed through Steam, combined with a web3 streaming platform that will enable its financial success to be shared with those watching, sharing and creating content in the wider ecosystem.
In other words, the best of both worlds.
Calendar
MapleStory N’s global launch — 15th May
TOKYO GAMES’ TGT VIP cards mint — 15th May
Xociety’s collab with Adidas mints — 17th May
The Sandbox Alpha 5 Season ends — 17th May
Avalanche Summit London starts — 20th May
Last game of Soccerverse Season 1 — 28th June
2,483 Days Ago: One of the early — and better — blockchain gaming opinion pieces I ever wrote was How blockchain will fix esports in July 2018.
Maybe the combination of Wildcard and Thousands will finally fulfill my musings?
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Apparently Infinite Node Foundation acquired the CryptoPunks IP for “around $20 million”.
Xociety and ALTS by Adidas’ allowlist sold out in 40 seconds.
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