It’s fair to say Wemade single-handedly kickstarted interest in blockchain gaming from South Korean developers in late 2021 with the launch of its crypto-enabled MMORPG Mir4.
Just look at the price trajectory of the WEMIX token then and since; something also reflected in Wemade’s share price.
Notably, though, Mir4 remains the company’s only real web3 success to-date, with 253,113 concurrent players at time of writing. However, the vast majority of players are not involved in blockchain features.
Wemade lists only 11 players exchanging assets minted in the game during the past 24 hours, with a grand total of $2.47 of value changing hands.
(If nothing else, Wemade is extremely transparent; you can see the number of players and the amount of tokens minted for the dozens of games on its Wemix blockchain infrastructure here.
But maybe everything is about to change.
Wemade and co-developer Madngine have just released Night Crows globally — supporting 170 countries across nine languages including Japanese and Thai, and with 24 servers. The PC-mobile cross-platform MMORPG is triple-A quality in terms of its open-world Unreal Engine-5 web2 scope but also comes replete with fully blockchain features.
For the record, the web2 version of Night Crows has generated $151 million in revenue in South Korea since its 2023 release, so the basic gameplay clearly appeals.
When it comes to blockchain features, at a high level, this means the CROW token, which is supported on blockchains such as Ethereum, BNB, Avalanche, Polygon and Kroma, as well as Wemix.
CROW is minted by players collecting the in-game hard currency Diamonds through gameplay — technically you mint from the vDIA currency, which is based on Diamonds.
However, there are another six tokens, which are minted by burning in-game items. In reverse, you also use these tokens to create in-game items. In this way, CROW is the floating exchange token between these item tokens.
Of course, there are also character NFTs, which can be traded for CROW on the Wemix marketplace.
Some of this is described in the following video, although the economy is much more complex, involving a $0.75 minimum peg for CROW and maximum total supply limits for the six tokens etc to provide controls. Read the whitepaper for more details.
As with most of these games, the blockchain is baked into elder gameplay — players need to be level 45 for minting item tokens and level 50 for minting characters — although NFT owners can presumably jump straight into the blockchain action by importing the NFTs they buy.
For the record, Wemade currently lists 163,675 concurrent players for Night Crows but no blockchain activity I guess because no players have yet surpassed the requisite character limits!
As for me, I’m a lowly level 5 player so a long way to go to get to any blockchain. And while MMORPGs are not the sort of games I have the time or the inclination to play, so far I’m enjoying Night Crows, so let’s see how far I get.
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