A blockchain game developer who works for Animoca Brand told Asian Trade that blockchain games should spend more time making them “fun to play” and less time making them look cool.
Luke Sillay, the lead community manager at Australia-based game developer Blowfish Studios, told Asian Trade on the first day of the 2022 Tokyo Games Show that far too many blockchain games have put the focus on in-game rewards and tokenomics instead of gameplay:
“If you look at other blockchain games, you can see that they aren’t actually fun to play. Like, yes, you have the chance to earn quite a lot of tokens, and most of the time you get a good return on your money. But in general, they aren’t that much fun, right?”
Related: creators of Final Fantasy join the Oasys blockchain, and gamers complain about it.
Sillay said that most of these games have simple game modes that are built around making money instead of having fun. Because of this, traditional gamers haven’t been interested in them so far.
According to data from DappRadar, Gameta, Alien Worlds, and Solitaire Blitz have had 1 million, 814,000, and 652,760 active users over the past 30 days, making them the most popular blockchain games. The numbers show that people are interested in the games, but they aren’t as popular as other games.
Silly said that games should be “fun to play” and nice to look at first and foremost.
“We think that if a game is fun to play and looks good, people will want to play it.”
Blowfish Studios is an Australian company that makes video games. In July 2021, Animoca Brands bought the company for about $6.6 million. As part of the acquisition, Animoca has helped Blowfish move from Web2 gaming to Web3 gaming. The company’s main focus is the NFT game Phantom Galaxies, which is currently in beta.
2022 Games in Tokyo
When asked what kinds of games would work best with nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and play-to-earn (P2E) integration, Sillay pointed to free-to-play games like League of Legends and Fortnite that already have built-in markets.
He said that these kinds of games tend to have devoted fans because they are fun to play and are always being updated and made better. This means that people play for a long time and are happy to spend money on things like new character skins.
“Say League of Legends and Fortnite with your skins and stuff like that. […] If you play and enjoy something for a long time and then stop, you don’t really have much to show for it after a year or two. “But if you do that with blockchain, you might be able to sell all your assets,” he said.
Sillay went on to say that there are some barriers to entry in blockchain games that may be putting some people off, and that if the onboarding process can be improved, this could bring in new users.
Related: Gamers Galaxy, Pakistan’s biggest esports event with a prize pool of 2 Crores PKR, to be held in IslamabadÂ
“It’s very scary to try to learn about this whole new technology, like making a wallet, and there are so many words in blockchains that mean totally different things,” he said.
Tokyo Games Show: Sega Booth
Phantom Galaxies is an open-world mecha-robot shooter game that is set to go into early access in the fourth quarter of 2022. OpenSea says that more than 517,000 people own its Origin Collection, which shows that people already want its in-game NFTs. In May, the project also finished a private sale of NFTs that brought in about $19.3 million.
At this point, Phantom Galaxies only needs one NFT to get started, which makes it easy to join.
“Then the rest is basically just like a regular game right now,” Sillay said.
