Following on from yesterday’s missive about my first play session with Mythical’s Nitro Nation: World Tour comes a short dip into the closed pre-Alpha for Immutable’s Guild of Guardians.
Significantly, it’s 12 months since my first playtest with the game. The important factor linking these events is that in the meantime Immutable has totally rebooted the mobile game from an action RPG into a roguelite squad RPG.
Talking to game director Chris Clay, the reason given is the original iteration wasn’t hitting its retention metrics, which as well as the change of genre has resulted in a switch of co-development partner from Ukrainian outfit Stepico to Chinese outfit Mineloader.
Personally I like squad RPGs a lot more than action RPGs so I think this change makes total sense, although from an industry insight point of view — and in the context of what’s happening with Star Atlas, Axie Infinity et al — makes me think that in retrospect much of 2021 and 2022’s activity was inexperienced teams just getting onto a learning curve of making games.
But let’s not be bitter. The quality of the best of 2023’s fare is now topnotch and that’s definitely the case with Guild of Guardians and Nitro Nations: World Tour.
These are games people will play whether or not they have blockchain elements, and hopefully the fact that they do include such elements means people will also play them longer, spending more and either way gaining more enjoyment in the process.
As they say, no-one recalls whether a bad game is released on time or a great game is a year or more late. The only thing that’s remembered is the eventual quality (and the financial success).
And I expect plenty of current in-dev blockchain games to be amongst that latter category … if eventually.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of gaming
Calendar
Fableborne’s Pixion League Event I starts — 4th August
Ultra’s esports platform Ultra Arena goes live — 8th August
Mighty Action Heroes releases APK — 16th August
Let’s meet at Gamescom (at Radisson Blu) — 23-24th August
More Amazon Prime NFT news
Following the second partnership between Blankos Block Party and Amazon Prime Gaming comes news of a similar six month deal between the online retailer and autochess battler Mojo Melee.
Coinciding with the launch of Mojo Melee’s Season Two battlepass — I only got 55% through Season One — the deal will gift those who combine their game accounts with their Amazon Prime accounts with regular drops of NFTs, skins and in-game currency. The first free champion will be ninja penguin Gwyn Rockhopper.
Certainly it will be interesting to see how scalable these deal are in terms of bringing new users into blockchain games. The initial Blankos deal in early 2022 saw just under 60,000 NFTs gifted, which isn’t a vast amount in the big scheme of things, but for pretty much every current blockchain game would be a big win.
Gala X Elixir Games news
Web3 PC game distribution platform Elixir Games has announced a deal with Gala Games that will see it push Gala’s games Townstar and Spider Tanks. It’s expected it will work with Gala in terms of future games too. And Gala has over a dozen titles in development.
As part of the deal, Elixir will host a Gala infrastructure node and run weekly gaming nights, featuring exclusive prizes.
Bye-bye Wallet news
Launched in May 2022, it’s not clear to me GameStop’s crypto wallet was ever even marginally successful. At least I never got around to installing it. But having fired most of its crypto team late last year, GameStop is pulling its Chrome browser extension and iOS app citing US regulatory concerns.
Coindesk says — confusingly — that the wallets will be removed on 1st November but that customers will only have access until 1st October. However, as this is a self-custodial Ethereum wallet, presumably people will still be able to recover their wallet into another wallet UX using their private keys.
Additional Links
Beeple buys his first NFT: a $208k clown CryptoPunk.
Kenya suspends Worldcoin’s operations.
Fitch has cut US’s sovereign credit grade from AAA to AA+ because … slowly/suddenly.
Earn Wheelcoin by walking, cycling, scooters or taking the bus