Blockchain games on Solana,whose market cap repeatedly hits record high.
Peter Li@Foresight Ventures
Today’s blockchain games are still in the early stage — -many of them are just NFT-based card games. But still, the development of blockchain games has exceeded our expectations: a large number of boutique games such as Star Altas, Guild of guardians and Gold fever will be public beta in the first and second quarter of next year, when we may usher in the outbreak of Gamefi.
Foresight Ventures has combed the various blockchain games developed on different public chains, and this article, in particular, will focus on Solana, aimed at finding the next possible hot spot.
Since the game projects are not available yet, there may appear a certain degree of deviation from our description,so a rational view is suggested while reading this article.
Project Name: DeFi Land
Official website: https://defiland.app/
Game type: business simulation, strategy
Game tags: land for sale, Q
Targeted game: Dream Town (traditional mobile game)
Game content: players are able to simulate farming and manage production in this game, with a combat mode soon to be added in version 2.0 to enhance playability. In-game infrastructures include banks (lending aggregator), Warehouses (providing seeds, similar to liquidity tokens in DeFi), and Markets (trading through AMM and liquidity providers such as Serum and Raydium). The purchase of NFT facilities such as granaries will help to receive an additional five percent of the yield. There is also a weather system set up in the game, in which a change in weather will be based on your location and the market condition, greatly simulating the environment of crop growth. Some other small games are also set up, enabling players to receive additional benefits.
Token economy: The game’s native token is DFL, which, in addition to governance, can be used to upgrade lands, purchase skins, buy NFTs from the market, etc. In addition, the public offering of the 2.0 version(allowing betting and competing in the battle mode) will start in September, when the specific distribution plan will be announced.
Play to earn: Players can receive tokens and NFT rewards through daily check-ins and completing tasks according to game guidelines. Plus, regularly held events and competitions also allow for additional rewards. After the combat mode is available, players can also make gains by capturing land, grabbing resources and so on.
Team Information: There are 7 team members, who have extensive experience in VR, AI, games, Fintech, ERP, and have worked with large banks and retail companies in multiple regions.
Institutional investor: Animoca Brands, Alameda Research, JumpCapital, Rarestone Capital, kyros Ventures, Double Peak, CryptoJ, Illusionist Group, Dialectic , Ankr, Gate.io, Transfero Swiss, Coin98 Ventures, Rok Capital, Youbi Capital, Caballeros Capital , 3Commas, MXC, Solar eco fund, GBV, Skyvision Capital, NGC Ventures, Solana Foundation — -seed.
Brief review: DeFi Land is a game that has skillfully combined DeFi and GameFi, in which the gamification of DeFi protocol allows for different assets to represent different currencies(For example, SOL for sunflower, USDC for corn and COPE for pumpkin). The game allows players to enter different protocols through planting different crops, while demonstrating the characteristics of different protocols to players. This enables rookie players to learn more about DeFi while playing to earn, which is a great attempt with educational significance.
I was surprised by the wonderful ideas of DeFi Land, but at the same time worried about whether its production difficulty is too high. According to the official project roadmap, version 1.0’s internal beta will be online in 2020 Q3, and version 2.0 will be launched in 2021 Q1. in 1.0 version, players can only use fake assets on educational land(practice mode) to simulate DeFi protocal functions, and whether 2.0 version can really deliver the full content of the game remains to be answered.
DeFi Land is more like an educational entry to the DeFi world, which may become the first stop for rookie players to learn about DeFi knowledge. The game surely has it special status in that aspect, but how it will accumulate users in the future is a problem worth thinking about. I still wish the project good luck and hope that it will help promote the development of blockchain.
Project name: Project Seed
Official website: https://projectseed.io/
Game Type: ARPG
Game tags: pet , cultivation
Targeted game: illuvium, Monster Hunter
Game Content: The game’s setting is that the world is about to be destroyed, and players need to explore the truth of the world by looking for guardians and save the saint from destruction.Players will begin their journey at Hunter Harbor, a small city located at the western end of Sandrocks, where players can learn the combat system through a tutorial.
Players have three main careers to choose from, respectively, Mercenary(hand-to-hand fighter), Archer (remote attacker), Alchemist (big boss). In addition, players can also choose from six sub-careers, respectively, blacksmith, tailor, chef, carpenter, alchemist and breeder. Each occupation requires players to find the career handbook and upgrade their level, at the same time each occupation can open up their own store.
The game’s uniquely featured dungeon creator mode allows players to create their own dungeons for other players to use. The providers can decorate every part of the dungeon and capture Zeds to place in it. And they earn a revenue from players who enter their dungeon. In addition, several small games are also designed into this game such as fishing, logging and mining.
Token economy: The game’s native token SHILL will open IDO in 2021 Q3.
play to earn: players can receive dropped equipment and items for sale by killing the god beast (Zed), or by making weapons and armors made out of monster materials, which with different material possesses different effects. Players can also receive tokens or item rewards by joining the guild and winning guild tournaments.
Team information: There are five core founders, two of whom have Binance-related background, and the rest with rich experience in programming, community management and game development.
Institutional investors: Exnetwork Capital, Moon Whale Ventures, Tokenmilk Inc. Will launch the public offering in Q3 this year.
Brief review: the game will start internal beta in the fourth quarter of this year. If we consider this as an ARPG game, it may have strong playability. Besides, the unique dungeon creation mode and the guild content will make players enjoy the fun of being in a team , which will be a very good gaming experience. It has not yet been seen what the game will actually look like, which brings a lot of uncertainty to the game’s future development.
Project name: Star Atlas
Official website: https://staratlas.com/overview
Game type: Shooting game, ARPG
Game tag: 3A, virtual engine, Star Wars
Targeted game: Star Citizen (traditional online game), EVE online
Game Content: There are three galaxy factions, namely MUD territory under human rule, ONI area of alien race alliance, Ustur star area controlled by robots. Each faction will be divided into three parts: security zone (to learn the basic skills, such as rescue, fighting, and salvage), middle areas ( where players can fight, but if damaged, assets will be reset), and boundaries (players will fully destroy assets, damage is permanent , but only part of the assets will be permanently destroyed).
Players are free to choose from four career types according to their preferences : Killers (make gains by attacking space and ground mining structures, killing or plundering other players), Achievers (Get rewards by abiding the world order, like collecting certain vessels and collecting sufficient mineral resources), The Explorer (Exploring the Universe Stars, Resource locations can be recorded by scanning and sold for profit in the secondary market), The Socializer (Make connections between players by building organizations and sharing resources). The game will encourage players to create teams and space cities, Integrate resources for a competitive advantage. And the POLIS tokens will play a major role in governance.
Depending on the size of the ship, there are seven classes of warships: junior, small, medium, large, capital, commander, and fearless. Each will have a different subdivision direction and different type of attributes. Players can personally drive the spacecraft into space, to experience an immersive feeling.
Token economy: There are two tokens, ATLAS(in-game tokens) totaling 36 billion tokens, can be used to buy spacecraft, crew, land and equipment. (ATLAS holders get a 60% discount when buying ships or components); POLIS(governance tokens) totaling 360 million(60% discount when buying land and fleet).
ATLAS allocation：
POLIS allocation：
Play to earn: The game takes a unique time-incentive approach that will distribute a portion of the rewards based on the time the player spends.In addition, players can make profits by exploring the galaxy, being pirates to steal ships, being bounty hunter, crew member and so on. The rich game content brings a variety of ways for players to earn revenues.
Team information: From public information, there are 35 people on the team, with 4 executives (Michael Wagner, has been engaged in blockchain venture capital since 2013 and has many experiences in the game field; Jacob Floyd, has repeatedly participated in game and blockchain development with 33 successful projects; Pablo Quiroga, engaged in venture capital for many years; Danny Floyd,with many years of experience in game development), 9 technical personnel and 23 art and design.
Team members have participated in the production of several famous games and films. They are: games including “interstellar citizen”, “fate 2”, “fearless”, “horizon: zero dawn”, “call of duty: black Ops 3 / 4”, “halo remake”, “death island 2”, “special action-a life”, “outside the earth”, “The Sims”, “network genesis”, “war hammer Online”, “Lord of the ring” and so on; Movies include “Watchmen”, “Terminator: Dark Destiny”, “Captain Marvel”, “X-Men: Black Phoenix”, “Superman Return”, “Spider-Man: Hero Expedition”, and more.
Institutional investors: Moonwhale Ventures、Serum、LD Capital、Yield Guild Games
Brief review: Galaxy game content is full of imagination and creativity. On top of that, Star Atlas also brings us a 3A production and movie-level visual experience. The popularity of Gamefi has accelerated the rapid development of blockchain games, but Star Atlas still spans the works of the same period.
The production cycle of 3A games is a long time. It usually takes several years of grinding, and often accompanied by huge costs usually counted in hundreds of millions of dollars. According to what Star Atlas has presented to us, it is not a low-budget game pretending to be a 3A science fiction. On the contrary, it is hopeful to bring players a perfect experience.The game will be launched in 2022 Q2, and will release some small games as warm-ups in early September.
The world’s top game production team and film production team created the world’s top chain game. Those who like it will appreciate it very much, but those who are subject to the operation-difficulty may not like it so much. Even if the game may not be the most popular of blockchain games, it is certainly the coolest.
Project Name: Aorory
Official website: https://aurory.io/
Game Type: RPG
Game tags: side-scrolling, turn-based
Targeted game: Pokemon
Game content: the game provide two different modes: single mode and multiplayer mode. In single mode, the player can follow the NPC plot development, receiving a NFT for every creature beaten by the player, these NFT cards can help players get extra items in the multiplayer mode. Also, players receive token rewards upon completing each task.
In multiplayer mode, players can challenge each other. Both sides pay a certain amount of token to start battle. They get to choose five items and cards to participate in the game and the selected creatures will fight according to their characteristics. The winner will recover all the paid tokens. The game also set up a ranking list that is updated weekly, to reward mythical items and tokens to encourage people to play.
Token economy: Native game token is Aury, which players can use to buy, sell, and trade items in Aurory Marketplace. But the specific allocation plan has not been disclosed.
Play to earn: players get NFT and token rewards through completing missions in single-player mode. NFTs can be used as battle creatures in the multiplayer mode, where both players can earn and consume NFT by paying tokens to fight. In addition, players can improve their rankings after successful challenges and get additional rewards at settlement.
Team information: There are 7 team members, who have more than 20 years of working experience in the game industry and are 3A level game artists. The team is considered to have solid basic skills and good content.
Institutional investors: Solana、Alameda Research、Animoca Brands、Zee Prime Capital、Ascensive Assets、CMS、Genblock capital.
Brief review: From the game’s videos, we can see that the picture is beautiful and characters are lovely. It has a lower bar in terms of operation, which makes the game easy to promote and for the public to accept. The image of the creatures are very much alike to that of Pokemon, which may attract a group of Pokemon lovers. Plus, with the strong support of Solana, the game has received high attention and will start internal-beta in the fourth quarter.
Project name: Scallop
Official website: https://www.scallop.io/
Game type: business simulation
Game tag: Q, collection
Token economy: a total of 240 million native tokens — -SCA, allocation is as follows:
Play to earn: Users stake SOL to start planting scallops, 20:00 (GMT+ 8) every Friday,the system will randomly reward one (or several) winners with SCA-equivalent staking rewards. Or, users can receive tokens and NFT decoration rewards by competing missions such as joining 10 pools in one month.
Team information: Kris Lai is a senior security engineer of one of the largest web games in Asia. Donnie has many years of experience in game development. Larry served as the core engineer of a large bank’s blockchain laboratory in Canada. The team members are mainly Chinese in Taiwan and Canada
Institutional investors: hasn’t started financing
Brief comment: Rather than defining Scallop as a game, it is better to describe it as a liquidity mining project with reallocation. Players stake SOL, become random users and get rewards twice the value of the initial stake, which is equivalent to a redistribution among the player’s income.Scallop may win the favor of a number of small players, which is equivalent to playing scratch-off with no significant cost. However, it may be difficult to get the affection of giant players, after all, interests alone can not cover a great amount of stakes.
Solana blockchain games outlook
Almost every public chain, sidechain and L2 are laying out in Gamefi, while for blockchain game itself, chains with high transaction speed and low cost are more applicable. Solana obviously meets those requirements. Among the chain games that are currently being developed, Solana chain games have a better quality and include various content such as star wars,business simulation, ARPG and liquidity mining, meeting the preferences of different groups of people.
In the chain games mentioned above, The Star Atlas is undoubtedly the most elaborate and outstanding. However, the entrance difficulty is also the highest: player might have to spend couple of days learning just how to operate. A phenomenal game is often easy to start but difficult to master, so the Star Atlas may have a small players’ circle, making it necessary to educate players with small warm-up games. Project Seed and Aorory, on the other hand, may be more appealing to the majority users, but still need to polish their product. DeFi Land and Scallop target rookie players who seek to learn and users who demand higher returns. There may be a potential users base, but still, it takes time to tell whether it can be go big.
The rise of Play to Earn brings chain games to the next phase of development, but some games may emphasize Earn over Play. In a zero-sum market, APY driven games may not last very long. That is because higher APY often needs user growth to maintain, and once there is a new high-yield game, speculators will quickly leave. What can withstand the waves is the actual high quality game content. Taking Aave and Compound as examples, DeFi protocols don’t get the most TVL simply because of high APY, and this is also true with GameFi.
We think that a healthy game ecosystem should have players who are willing to pay the for game content. Master players should be willing to pay for higher playability while rookie players can make money through time, but none of it should be solely based on economic purposes. Only by forming a closed loop of virtuous cycle ecosystem can blockchain games withstand the baptism of time. And setting the APY too high may negatively effect the game’s life cycle.
We have been exploring who will be the ultimate beneficiaries when the Gamefi Summer outbreaks?
I think the ultimate beneficiaries may not be the chain game project itself. Although these projects can receive huge economic benefits, their life cycle will eventually come to an end. Perhaps it can be stored forever by users in the form of NFT, after the game itself no longer exists. It is hard to say, even for those legendary traditional games such as League of Legends, whether they will be replaced in the next ten years. A project that can exist for a long time and always remain dynamic should be an aggregation platform of chain games. It will have the dual mission of lowering the entry threshold and educating players. It will hopefully integrate projects and traffic to attract more people into Gamefi. You can refer to “GameFi infrastructure card battle?Who can become a new entrance to chain travel traffic”for more content on this.
