Blockchain-based games should spend more time being “fun to play” than developing flashy tokennomics, a blockchain game developer that owns the Animoka brand told Cointelegraph.
Speaking to Cointelegraph on the first day of the 2022 Tokyo Games, Luke Silley, chief community manager at Australia-based game developer Blowfish Studios, said that too many blockchain games have focused on in-game rewards and tokennomics rather than gameplay. .
“You can see that they are not fun to play from other blockchain games. Like, yes, you have the potential to earn a large amount of tokens and often get a good return on investment. But generally speaking, they’re not that interesting, are they?”
According to Silay, in general, most of these games have simple game modes that are built on discovery rather than pure fun, so they haven’t caught the attention of traditional gamers yet.
According to data from Dapradar, the most popular blockchain games in terms of active users in the last 30 days are Gameta, Alien Worlds and Solitaire Blitz with one million, 814,000 and 652,760 users respectively. Figures show high demand for the games but it pales in comparison to popular traditional games.
Games should primarily be “fun to play” and visually appealing, he says.
“Our kind of idea is that if it’s fun to play and attractive to watch, people will want to play it.”
Blowfish Studios is an Australian video game developer that was acquired by Animoka Brands in July 2021 for around $6.6 million. As part of the acquisition, Animoca moved Blowfish from Web2 to Web3 Games, with NFT game Phantom Galaxies (currently in beta) as the company’s main focus.
As for the types of games that work best with NFTs and P2E integration, Silay highlighted free-to-play giants like Riot’s League of Legends and Epic Games’ Fortnite, which already have built-in marketplaces.
He pointed out that these types of games generally appeal to die-hard fans because they enjoy playing them and keep updating and improving the experience from time to time. This leads to people who have been playing for years and happily spend money to buy products like new character skins.
Say it with your skin and things like League of Legends and Fortnite […] If you can play something and enjoy it, you know, and then throw it away, in a year or two, you don’t have much to show for it. But if you do it on the blockchain, you can sell all the assets you’ve got,” he said.
Silley went on to point out that there are some barriers to entry in blockchain games that may turn some people off, and if the board process can be ironed out, this could attract new users.
“It’s really scary trying to learn about this new technology, trying to create a wallet, etc., and there are a lot of words in blockchain that have completely different meanings,” he said.
Phantom Galaxies is a world-class mecha-robot shooter that is expected to have official early access in Q4 2022. In-game NFTs have already seen a high level of demand, with more than 517,000 owners of the initial set according to OpenSea. . The project completed the sale of NFT worth $19.3 million in May.
Related: Animoca secures $110m round led by Temasek, plans new acquisitions
At this stage, Phantom Galaxies only requires one NFT to launch, making it a relatively simple process to participate.
“What’s left of that right now is basically like a traditional game,” he said.