WTF is TOKYO BEAST?

Very Japanese

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In these dark days, I’ve been getting my thrills from the attempt to work out what exactly is TOKYO BEAST?

The first sign of trouble was a press release saying TOKYO BEAST — which I’ll now drop into normal capitalization — was moving from Polygon to the Immutable blockchain.

Asides from this fact, the information conveyed was not very informative, however. For example, it stated the partnership was with “Japan’s No.1 mobile gaming developer” but then failed to say who this was.

That was the first challenge.

Checking the Tokyo Beast website wasn’t very helpful, although it did link out to Tokyo Beast Fzco, “a game publishing company specializing in blockchain technology”, which is based in Dubai.

Clearly not “Japan’s No.1 mobile gaming developer” but most likely launching the game’s token.

More helpful was the link to the Tokyo Game Token site, TGT being Tokyo Beast’s cryptocurrency. This listed Cygames and Gumi as partners, Cygames also being described as “Japan’s No.1 mobile game maker”, while Gumi is a “leading mobile game maker driving Japan’s web3 games”.

Given the high profile nature of the companies, quite why they aren’t formally listed on the press release or the game’s website or whitepaper is not clear to me. Both are large companies, publicly listed in Japan. Maybe that had something to do with it.

But the more complex challenge was understanding how Tokyo Beast works as a game. Simply put, it is a beast.

Most significantly, the game is split into two elements.

The web2 Trials component sees players collecting beast characters through gacha boxes, which they organise into a squad of four and then battle against other players and through PVE dungeons in an auto-battle turn-based bouts. These beasts can be upgraded and combined with modifications using the Jewels in-app currency.

All players in the arena are ranked through the process, with the top players getting various valuable in-game items. The top 20 players also get entered for the weekend championship, which is livestreamed.

There are also many other options in terms of borrowing beasts, collecting chips which can be used for wagering on the championships, and various lotteries. Simply put, the game is very Japanese in its design and fiat monetization.

And that’s just the web2 part.

The web3 element is called Base, and focuses on the ownership of Beast NFTs and the TGT cryptocurrency. Both of these can be staked for rewards and Beast NFTs can be bred together, upgraded and burned for rerolls. Beast NFTs will also have the potential to generate passive revenue for holders as the web2 versions of these can be borrowed through the Trials mode.

Of course, this explanation is massively over-simplified.

The whitepaper really gave off vibes from 2022 when every blockchain game was complex and very crypto. The more complex and crypto the better. It would likely work if you have millions of players, but given that blockchain games currently don’t, web3 game design has become considerably less high concept in recent years.

Yet it is nice to see someone pushing the envelope. If nothing else, Cygames and Gumi are experts at operating very successful F2P mobile games in Japan, generating billions of dollars from some of their franchises.

But how well this sort of thing will be accepted outside of Japan — especially given issues with gacha boxes in various European countries a la gambling — remains to be seen. Of course, the web3 elements add extra complexity as does the *actual gambling* via the lottery and wagering elements.

If nothing else, the game will be age rated 18 in many countries.

Still, personally I can’t wait to play, and I might not have long to wait as the releases for the Base and Trials elements are currently scheduled for Q1 2025.

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Calendar

• Immutable’s big hope RavenQuest goes live — 14th March

• Sui Gaming Summit at GDC 2025 — 18th March

• Saga’s GDC 2025 Sidekick event — 19th March

• First Forkast CGX staking loot boxes drop — 20th March

• The Beacon goes live via Treasure launcher — 27th March

• Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse launches — June TBC

Will Ronin break 1 Million DAUWs in H1 2025?

• Activity on the Ronin blockchain dropped lower than 1 million DAUWs in December to its current level of 600,000 as games such as Pixels and Wild Forest saw strong declines in audience. But with Ronin now going permissionless will titles such as Fableborne herald a recovery? The smart money on Forkast is currently a Yes, with a 75% probability, although my money’s on No.

• You can take any side of the prediction here.

Herman Narula Has The Vision news

• I often think my podcasts are the best (!) and my most recent interview with Improbable CEO Herman Narula is no exception. Partly this is because Herman has walked the talk over the past 12 years, raising almost $1 billion for Improbable from the likes of Softbank and a16z, while also scaling and exiting from businesses in multiplayer gaming tech and defense.

And now — following on from Improbable’s work with Yuga Labs on its Otherside metaverse — the company has stepped into the blockchain space, with its own EVM Somnia chain live in testnet.

What I really enjoyed from the conversation was Herman’s outsider view on the current blockchain sector as being something too small, too insular, and too focused on token price. Who could disagree?

He also says blockchains more generally haven’t taken into account what can happen when they are fast enough to enable all games and apps to be fully onchain and composable. For example, it’s claimed Somnia can handle 1 million transactions per second.

“With the performance we’ve reached, you could take the entirety of every single transaction currently happening on blockchain, move it onto Somnia, and still have room left over,” he says.

As to the question of whether the world needs another blockchain — even a very fast one — he points to some of Improbable’s key advantages. It has $270 million in cash to invest in the Somnia ecosystem over the next five years, and it also has deep connections with many blue chip companies not currently involved in crypto thanks to its past decade of work.

We also get to riff on how AGI and AI agents could impact the sector and our lives. “Games will become a critical industry for human health,” he says. “If you take away the fulfillment people get from their jobs – which is going to happen, it is an inevitability – then where’s that fulfillment going to come from?”

As ever, you can check out a full transcription on BlockchainGamer.biz.