Were I a naive waif, I would be tempted to concatenate the news that F2P mobile game developer Wildlife Studios is simultaneously laying off 300 staff, while also rolling out the next layer of player-owned functionality for its web2-to-web3 game Castle Crush.
Of course, web3 is the future. Wildlife is ahead of the game!
But, sadly for everyone concerned, I am not a naive waif and I know these two nuggets of news are unrelated.
Instead, Wildlife Studios is dealing with the pain of its aggressive expansion from a decade spent as a competent developer of casual F2P mobile games based in the low cost LATAM region — mainly Brazil and Argentina — to a heavily VC-funded model — $260 million raised to-date — with half-a-dozen new studios in North American and Finland created over the past 18 months in a sector that’s been fundamentally broken by Apple’s IDFA changes.
Brutally put, Wildlife made some longterm decisions that seemed sensible, if optimistic, at the time, but which now seem hopelessly utopian, which is why its headcount has been so dramatically slashed to stabilize future operations.
But what’s ironic is that while Wildlife’s ongoing web3 strategy hasn’t been thought out much better, I think it’s turning out to be one of the most compelling in blockchain games.
Strong foundations
Without getting into all the details, Wildlife decided to add NFTs to its existing web2 PVP tactics game Castle Crush, launching the first limited set of character-based NFTs — which run on the Avalanche blockchain — in May, with the NFTs going live in-game during August.
These NFTs provide an in-game boost as they are more powerful than their non-NFT equivalents, and you can also earn in the game’s ACS token by winning at least once a day using your NFTs.
Personally, I’ve found this incredibly compelling. Rarely has a day gone by in which I haven't played Castle Crush.
The ACS token can then be used to level up your NFT characters, which doesn’t make them any more powerful in the game, but does allow you to earn more ACS tokens.
I spent around $500 buying five base NFTs, which originally meant I could earn 20 ACS daily, but thanks to levelling them up, I’m now earning 32 ACS daily.
But the real genius of this system is that the ACS tokens aren’t officially listed on any exchange, nor it seems with any functional level of liquidity on DeFi AMMs either.
That means despite being a live cryptocurrency, ACS is only useful as an in-game currency; functionality that has just been extended as you can use it to buy chests to acquire more in-game character NFTs.
As can be seen below, at a rate of 32 ACS a day, it would take me 125 days to buy an Ascended Set 2 chest or 3 and a half years for a Founders chest.
Fun fact, in September, I laboriously estimated the base price of an ACS token as $0.10 to $0.15, although the Avalanche AVAX token has dropped 30% since, and is down 89% year-on-year.
In this way, Castle Crush is operating in a fully player-driven mode.
Players earn ACS tokens by buying NFTs and playing the game. They use these tokens to level up existing characters and/or acquire new characters.
There’s even a full NFT rental system, which is run via thirdparty marketplace reNFT.
But what’s significant is — again timing and FTX be dammed — I don’t think this is because Wildlife has carefully thought through its web3 strategy but because at this stage, it really doesn’t care.
Let’s get real. It’s just laid off 300 staff. Some NFT experiment that at most 1,000 weird crypto/players care about doesn’t — and maybe shouldn’t — register.
Which — of course and thanks in part to a bear market — is what makes it the almost perfect petri dish for a community-led blockchain game.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: Intention is our middle name
A New Steam news
Three years on, Steam-on-blockchain PC platform Ultra is inching towards launch. Its Uniq NFT marketplace has been live for awhile now, but the main meat of allowing users to acquire paid and resale using its native blockchain, plus a bunch of social features including streaming etc, has only been lightly publicly tested by less than 100 users.
The final stage before the open beta will see around 1,000 users kick the tyres from 14th December, notably around overall user experience and the flow of spending the native UOS token or via credit card payments.
Interested parties can sign up here or read more about the entire process here.
Cruel Lost World news
I have fingers in many pies, but one of my favorite NFT projects is CyberBrokers, which means I’m all in for Lost Paradigms, the Milton-referenced NFT project which is leveraging CyberBrokers’ excellent art style for a 10,001 collection of artwork designed specifically to be used as Twitter banners.
What could be more Elon?
Minting kicked off on Monday 28th November, with every wallet holding a CyberBrokers getting a free mint, the allowlist minting for 0.0222 ETH ($25), and the public list now minting for 0.033 ETH ($40).
However, I fear my enthusiasm is not so wildly shared, given that one day one less than 2,800 NFTs have been minted.