Long Term CrytpoGame for Fun & Profits? Yupp, that would be CryptoCities.Net
Allow me to take a moment of your time and talk to you about a little something called CryptoCities. CryptoCities is the second crypto game I found and invested in, and I’m very glad I did. You see, the mechanics of this game are very different from your run-of-the-mill hot potato flipping games that dominate the cryptogaming world. Think of Civilizations meeting the blockchain. Yeah, exactly! This is a game for investors, who happen to have long-term profits and turnover in mind. That doesn’t mean you can’t make a quick profit from this game by the way. On the contrary, it’s very easy to make some quick flips and gain yourself some nice ETH (Ethereum). We’re going to touch on all of this and more within this article, but here’s a link to the game first:
Let’s begin by defining cryptogames. As is implied, they are games based and built on top of a cryptocurrency blockchain. As of this moment, all cryptogames are hosted on the Ethereum network, and as such they are sometimes referred to as ethgames. All of these games are dApps, which stands for decentralised apps. It means they are open source software that are leveraged on the blockchain. You enter these kind of games by using ETH to buy in, and then the payouts are also in ETH. CryptoCities is no different from the rest of these blockchain based games.
So what’s this game all about? Well it focuses on the accumulation of geographic locations on good ‘ole mother Earth. These can be villages, towns or cities (you can even own countries or continents, if you feel bold enough to pay for them in the premium section). You can own a city/town/village (we’ll just refer to them as cities from now on) by one of two ways: buying them and discovering them. Buying is straightforward, you go to the marketplace here:
https://cryptocities.net/marketplace
Then you find a location that takes your fancy, and you pay for it using ETH. You will need to install the metamask extension to your web browser for this, as cryptogames currently only work through this specific wallet. You can download metamask here: https://metamask.io/ . Once your metamask wallet is up and running, you just fill it up with some ETH and you’re good to go.
So what’s the point of owning cities on the blockchain? Well, with this particular game you can make a quick profit by either flipping your cities over the short term or over the long term, it’s completely up to you. BUT the true potential lies in the developers’ vision that spans over the long term. You see, their dream is that CryptoCities is implemented as a platform for a multitude of games. Anyone who wants a geographic base for their game can migrate their code and integrate it into the CryptoCities framework, making it an open-source large-scale gaming venue. The implications of this are HUGE! Just imagine for example, anyone that would like to set up a game within CryptoCities would end up paying commissions to the owner of the city they are using. Auto dividends!! And we all know how much cryptogamers love them dividends. The sky is the limit. Wanna set up gold mines, or diamond mines based on geographic locations in your game? No problem, integrate the code into the CryptoCities platform, and the owner of the locations of these mines gets a cut of the sales and profits. Beautiful! Once we reach this point in the game roadmap, it’s expected that location selling prices will rise exponentially due to the higher demand from buyers.
For the meantime, the game has simple mechanics. You have your locations, their respective locations points and your total number of discoveries, as factors in the gameplay. These three factors determine what you can do in the game. To discover a location at a certain level, you need to fulfil some criteria. The criteria is detailed in the following images:
So if you start off at the very beginning, and buy yourself a level 1 location, you will need to either buy yourself some more locations to unlock high level discoveries, or begin by initiating a discovery for another level 1 location. It will also cost you a small amount of ETH to initiate a discovery. The amount of ETH is a non-fixed rate that can change according to the games supply and demand. As of now, the price of discovery is set at 0.006 ETH per location point you are trying to discover. A level 1 discovery will therefore cost you 0.006 ETH. A level 2 would be 0.012 ETH. A level 3 is 0.018 ETH. And the list goes on. Just to show you how far the game can go, the highest level locations in the game are level 50, and this would cost you 0.3 ETH to discover according to today's prices (so long as you fulfil all the other requirements for a level 50 discovery).
Right now, the highest level city on the marketplace is worth 0.5 ETH at level 31. The prices will continue to rise as the levels do, and when the major cities are discovered (think London, Rome, Sydney, etc.) their prices will be phenomenal. This will be a great profit for their finders, which is ALWAYS ONE OF THE PLAYERS. You have to understand that this game started off with a minimum supply of locations that the developers sold to the public (almost like an ICO). Then from that point on, all cities added to the marketplace are through players discovering new locations and listing them. That’s a pretty amazing aspect of this game. The players are rewarded for their time and efforts spent discovering, and are encouraged to do so long term, and the developers are happy to let them have almost all of the profits generated from a city (this is of course minus the developer % fees which are amazingly low at 3.5%).
As well as location points, cities can also have features. These range from Housing to Roads to Food, Technology, Community and so on. These features are still being discovered as the levels of location discovery rise, and we are all expecting some surprises down the line. The developers haven’t quite yet made clear what these features will/can do. It’s currently one of the most curious aspects of this game and it will all soon be revealed in the grander scheme of things. One thing is for sure though. These features will play a key role in the future games that will be implemented on top of the CryptoCities network.
Oh yeah, and did I not mention that there are also bounties programmed into the game. You find these little gems randomly spread out in locations not yet discovered, and should you be so lucky as to find one, then it automatically adds some ETH into your Metamask wallet as a reward.
Another point I have to mention is the technique that the developers implemented within the game design to stop the market from being saturated with new cities, which is a very important thing to take into consideration. Market saturation drives prices down, and can kill a cryptogame in its infancy. To prevent this, the developers coded in a Discovery time period. If you initiate a discovery, it takes 16 hours to complete. This period of time may change eventually, but as of now it is indeed 16 hours. Once the 16 hours are up, you will gain access to your brand new city. No-one in the game has seen this city before you. It is yours and belongs to you via the smart contract, making it your property 100%. Not even the developers can take it from you. The only way you can lose ownership of your location is if you sell it on the marketplace. This is the true beauty of decentralised games. Ownership is put totally and utterly in the hands of the buyer/player. Also worth noting is that all the locations you own in the game will be on a cooldown period while you are busy discovering. You won’t be able to sell them on the marketplace because you are effectively using their location points to fuel your discovery. So you will have to factor that into your playing strategy.
The game roadmap is very clear with where it wants the game to go. We should be seeing some more game integration within the next few months of 2018, and that will be very exciting for everyone involved in this game. If you would like to learn more about this game then you can check out the information provided on the main website or join the discord to keep up with the latest updates:
Also worth checking out it is the premium section of the website, where you can buy up entire countries, continents and even the world itself! You will earn dividends simply by owning any of these mighty assets. Mind you the prices are much higher for countries than they are for cities, but if you can afford them, then you will be making some pretty sweet money back from the dividends they pay.
https://cryptocities.net/premium
So that’s it from us folks. Check out the game and pick a strategy. Are you a collector or a trader? Which cities do you dream of owning? Will you buy your assets or discover your way to glory? And will you stick around long enough to see the multitude of games that will be released upon the CryptoCities platform network? I hope you do, because I certainly will. This is truly a game that will, as the cryptocommunity likes to say, moon!
