DeGames: the boom is far from saturation
Blockchain games are nothing new. In fact, CryptoKitties, which was one of the earliest examples of what is considered a blockchain or crypto game, went live five years ago, in 2017. The game that tightly clogged the adolescent Ethereum blockchain and had its popularity spread way outside the world of crypto adherents, was based on a relatively easy concept of unhackable, unique assets that were bought, sold, and traded in-game.
Today NFTs are nothing surprising but at the moment they were launched, CryptoKitties appeared revolutionary. Just as the Tamagotchi eggs decades prior to that, virtual cats had to be bred and later could be sold. Those Pokemon-alike digital pets were sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars, with the most expensive one, a pale purple kitty named Dragon, trading for an astonishing price of 600 ETH.
The digital cats were far from the only entertainment in the early DeGaming field. Another example was HashCraft, a creative sandbox developed by the gaming giant Ubisoft. The game in which players parachute into a randomly generated island and begin crafting their own world resembles a whole bunch of huge hits, from Minecraft to, in a way, PUBG. The island went public and was shared across the blockchain so that everyone can explore it further.
The segment keeps gaining popularity: according to dAppRadar, there are over 1 million daily active users, i.e. people who interact with the games’ smart contracts. The beauty of blockchain works nicely here with all stats being accessible (in most cases) via publicly available links.
Axie Infinity rise… and fall?
Released in 2018, Axie Infinity was another huge success. The game developed by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis, allows players to collect and mint NFTs which represent digital pets known as Axies — the latter are easy to recognize as they are vaguely based on axolotl, a Mexican salamander.
Breeding the digital salamander appealed to quite a few people across the globe: according to ActivePlayer data, every month over 3 million players take part in the game. This number looks impressive even to the more traditional games: Minecraft (16.6M monthly active users), League of Legends, Cyberpunk 2077, and CS:GO.
Axie Infinity is no charity: Sky Mavis charges a 4.25% fee to players when they trade Axies on its marketplace. The game’s ecosystem is governed by its own token AXS (Axie Infinity Shards). In July, 2021, the AXS market capitalization reached its peak of nearly $10 bn.
The token hit a rough patch in March 2022 when the hackers compromised the game’s proprietary blockchain, Ronin Network, stealing approximately $620M worth of cryptocurrency from the project.
Take My Muffin and Bluelight
So, it looks like the secret recipe for a popular decentralized game looks as follows: a set of popular and well-recognized characters supported by solid gameplay, and employing multiple channels to utilize internal currencies. When it comes to playing strategies, items, and player-to-player interactions, the more is clearly the merries.
And the team behind Bluelight, the new crypto game to be released later this year, took that all into consideration. From what we hear, the new business-inspired playing universe will be full of characters, objects, tradeable items, and performance strategies. Nothing more to expect, given that the game is based on the Take My Muffin (TMM) show publicly released two weeks ago by the Toonbox studios in Limassol and currently available for free on YouTube.
Take My Muffin is a show about the unicorn, the three-eyed cat, and the universe of startups. The first episode went live on April 19 and has already gained over 40 thousand views — not surprising, given a mixture of adult humor and a vast list of homages, from The Pulp Fiction to Futurama, Silicon Valley, and a dozen more iconic shows. The studios decided to air all series for free on YouTube.
Aside from TMM, Toonbox group of companies has a gaming division, Viewpoint Labs, that is working on the crypto game based on the series. Chaired by Andrew Moroz, the team is composed of seasoned professionals known for the Aloha browser which is known for its respect for privacy and already amassed several million users globally.
“An Acid-Trip Version of Palo Alto”
The TMM series chronicles the misadventures of amnesic Unicorn Korney — who discovers he has the superpower to generate billion-dollar startup ideas. To get his memory back, Korney must strike a deal with three-eyed business cat Rok — who surely has his ulterior motives, about which poor Korney is clueless.
The story is set in an easy-to-recognize set, where robots live next door to dragons and walking potatoes, while investors pump their money into developing revolutionary products such as psychedelic boogers. It is clearly anticipated that the Bluelight game will inherit a solid portion of this freedom/craziness.
The game is an economic strategy about building your own startups in a multiverse. It implements play-to-earn mechanics to incentivize active players as they progress, and the end goal of the game is to build the most powerful startup, represented as a unicorn. Though it is more and more often said that nothing less than a decacorn counts anymore…
Players can enjoy various activities while growing their startups, like completing projects, building their own offices, training employees, while competing with other players for rankings, and participating in PvP battles.
Viewpoint Labs is helped by Dragons Lake, a part of Room 8 Group’s umbrella of design and development studios that produce AAA and AA PC and console games. The studio is ISO certified and licensed by PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo, and has a solid portfolio of projects that include full game development, co-development, and porting to all platforms, including next-gen consoles.
Being a web3 game, Bluelight benefits from modern technologies like NFTs and item ownership. The game is currently under active development and early betas are expected quite soon. We will definitely be watching it seeking early-bird opportunities like grabbing a land parcel earlier and getting extra time to build new property before the full-scale launch.
Bluelight Links
Website: https://bluelight.inc/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bluelightworlds
Telegram: https://t.me/bluelightworlds
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/QbpHr4z3qk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bluelightworlds/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCPGjsqqZVDVIqCOFjSiAHg
Disclosure: This is a sponsored press release. Please do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any project.
