This year is going to be the decider for blockchain gaming.
If, when December rolls around, there is no significant game launched and no serious movement of gamers towards BG, then I think we can say the experiment has failed. The idea of gamers actually owning game assets is a good one, and will continue to build steam regardless, but for “blockchain gaming” as a collective, 2024 must be the year that promise becomes reality.
Why?
Because talk is cheap, and effectively, talk is all we have had for three years. That’s a university degree in hot air. That has been ok until now, because good games take many years to make. Many years, but not forever.
There are promising signs. Illuvium, one of the best-financed and highest profile BG projects, launched its competitive PvP mode in beta late last year. The numbers were underwhelming, with just over 20k downloads in its first week on the Epic Games store, but the gameplay was solid. Illuvium is pushing for a launch of its three-game suite halfway through the year, and the way the game elements mesh will be a test of some of the core promises of blockchain gaming.
Illuvium will be Pokemon meets Teamfight Tactics: you collect creatures in an AAA world, then use them to fight other players in pre-planned arena battles. The third element is a mobile city-building and resource collecting game where players produce the materials that are necessary for operations in the other two games.
At this point, it’s not clear whether the city-building game (called Illuvium Zero) and its resource element will be ready to launch with the other two games. It could be that just collecting fighters and fighting is enough complexity for launch.
A bigger problem for the game is the learning curve for new players of Illuvium Arena (the auto-battler), which is so steep it feels like a cliff. The most necessary thing right now for Illuvium is a good tutorial that not only explains how to play, but more importantly, tells you why you would care about the choices you make and the outcomes of the battles. If Illuvium succeeds in making a game that is fun for only the very best players, then they haven’t succeeded at all.
Token trading
BG influencer Jinkirin, whose real name is Thomas Napier, dropped a fascinating and disturbing tweet over the break.
“Back in Oct/Nov, I took on a sponsorship for Big Time. They gave myself and others advanced knowledge of upcoming changes which allowed major profits to be had by those of us in the loop. This hasn’t sat well with me since and I mentioned it in a couple of spaces, but thus far no one has condemned the practice.”
That’s the essence of the tweet, but it goes on for a while. Developing a clear definition of insider trading in the context of crypto is something that will have to happen if BG wants to shake the wider association of crypto with shady practices.
Tokens aren’t shares, but it seems obvious to me that allowing a favoured few to profit from knowledge in advance of the market is unfair and exploitative, whatever the law may say on the matter.
This newsletter
I am away next week again, so there will be no newsletter. I intend to make a permanent shift to a fortnightly publishing schedule from that point, in order to continue to focus more on producing video. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions on that, and have a great weekend.
