Blockchain Gaming World episode #146 is now live through the usual podcast channels plus video via YouTube (below).
It’s an in-depth conversion with MetaKing Studios’ co-founder and CEO David Johansson about Blocklords, a web3 strategy game I first played in 2019 but which — in a very different form — has been live via Epic Games Store since May.
During that time I’ve been playing it quite a bit, so it was a great opportunity to cover both the broad vision behind the game, as well as details about the current version and how that is going to change in the coming months — airdrop alert!
Still, the game is very much a work-in-progress at present. To be honest, it’s a little bit boring playing the resource farming loop, but David was happy to reassure me that key changes including the first combat elements, economic rebalancing and the ability to create your own dynasty by marrying and breeding your NFT heroes are all due in the next six months.
Like many blockchain games, it was also good to hear how MetaKing is planning to eventually add more blockchain elements into the core gameplay loops, as well as leverage the game’s most exclusive NFT characters — its titular lords and ladies — to have a strong in-game economic influence.
That process will likely take most of 2024 and maybe even beyond, but Blocklords is definitely one of my most anticipated projects so I really enjoyed the conversation.
It also reinforced what I see as one of 2023’s trends that top players in the game will have to spend a lot of time and resources, and while they will gain tradable assets, the main driver for such activity will be in-game status, not financial rewards.
As ever, you can read an edited transcription of the discussion at BlockchainGamer.biz.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of gaming
Calendar
Ronin RTS game Wild Forest enters open beta — 9th November
Mocaverse starts minting its .moca IDs — 9th November
Phantom Galaxies goes into early access — 15th November
Symbiogenesis mints its first 500 characters — 21st November
Nine Chronicles M goes live — 22nd November
Rumble Racing Star enters open beta — 22nd November
Illuvium launches via Epic Games Store — 28th November
See you at Future of Games in Helsinki? — 29th November
The Rumors Were True news
Neon Machine’s Shrapnel SHRAP token is now live — paired against USDT — on Bybit, KuCoin and HTX (ex-Huobi) exchanges; all Chinese-centric, although now headquartered in Dubai, Seychelles and Seychelles respectively.
First day trading volume was around $8 million, with the price dropping 25% from Coingecko’s initial listing of $0.11. The floor price of its NFT collection has also dropped back to 0.15 ETH ($280) from a peak yesterday of 0.3 ETH.
Pixels Booms Ronin news
Originally based on Polygon but now launched on Ronin, pixelated social RPG Pixels appears to have found perfect blockchain-market-product-fit. As demonstrated by the following graphs, within two days of going live, it’s hit 50,000 daily active unique wallers — as tracked by DappRadar on the right.
The left graph is from Nansen and show the impact of those players on overall activity on the entire Ronin network, which is up from around 20,000 DAUWs to 70,000. Yes, the numbers match. ✅
As ever, the question in blockchain is whether this is just a short-lived launch spike and how well will the community sustain in its new home during the coming months?
But, if nothing else, it is jet fuel for Sky Mavis’ ongoing push to get unloved live games and undiscovered new games onto its platform.
Symbiogenesis Get Complicated news
The experiences building up to the launch of Square Enix’s Symbiogenesis web3 game in December have — to-date — been some of the least accessible in a sector not lacking in such examples. Demonstrative of this comes the news it’s releasing 500 character NFTs via a free mint process, access to which will be based on a leaderboard organised by points that users collect by fulfilling various tasks within the game’s Discord.
However, even this is not really correct. Actually, only 50 mint spots will be available to the leaderboard’s top 50 users, with another 40 randomly assigned to those ranked 51-300, and a further 400 spots available to anyone who got involved in the campaign. Even more bizarrely, 10 spots have been reserved for stakeholders and the dev team.
Additional Links
Merit Circle’s Avalanche subnet Beam has gone permissionless and has 16 games signed up for deployment, although not many of them look super interesting imho.
A deep dive from Wu Blockchain into what’s been happening wrt users and trading volume on NFT marketplaces over the past six months.
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