Illuvium
written on August 23, 2022
Introduction
In a world of its own, Illuvium started to announce its game in early January 2021. An open-world game filled with vast terrain and dangerous beasts in a land of beauty and wonder. Here, the players can enjoy an NFT collection and auto battler game built on the Ethereum blockchain, integrated with Immutable-X L2 system.
Game Overview
Illuvium is a “game child” of both Pokémon and Hearthstone. Lore heavy, where players act as a survivor of an intergalactic space fleet investigating a distress beacon. However, once players arrive, they are welcomed by a myriad of mythical creatures called Illuvials. Luckily, the players have the power by using a shard (equivalent to Pokémon’s Poké Ball) to capture these creatures and harness its power.
There are countless Illuvials to be captured spread across the world, each with their own unique abilities. Interestingly, some Illuvials could form symbiotic synergies with one another — Hybrid Synergy System. These Illuvials also have other important attributes such as affinity and class. Affinity relates to the Illuvials base element (i.e. Water, Earth, Fire, Nature, and Air), whilst class matches to traditional RPG classes (i.e. Fighter, Guardian, Rogue, Psion, and Empath). It is important to note that stronger and uncommon Illuvials could possess multiple attributes.
Illuvials are unable to be evolved, but things really get interesting when players fuse several creatures together. When several Illuvials are fused together from different types, they could form an ascended form of affinities (i.e. Frost = Air + Water) or a stronger bond with a single element (i.e. Inferno = Fire + Fire). However, each of these affinities have their own strengths and weaknesses when fighting another Illuvials with different types. Likewise, classes follow the same strategic mechanics with affinities.
When Illuvials are teamed up precisely with their synergies, players could dominate the battle arena. Here, players queue in the Ranked Arena where they will be matched with a random opponent in a PvP auto battle style game mechanic. Spectating players could invite other player in wagered matches inside the Leviathan Arena.
From the gameplay perspective, Illuvium might just have the precise cross-section between Pokémon and Hearthstone. Despite having the method of acquiring and tending the creatures similar to Pokémon with the only significant difference being the combat itself (autobattle), Illuvium has the upperhand from the immersive gameplay. That said, there is little to no information whether the game will be mainly focused on PvP, PvE, or both. Hence, it would be too early to determine the direction of where Illuvium is going but rest assured there is no other P2E game in the cryptospace like Illuvium currently.
Here is a link to a teaser for the open-world of Illuvium.
Technology
Mesmerizing isn’t it, the world of Illuvium? Thanks to the game engine being built in Unreal Engine 4. The battle runs in a simulation programmed purely by C++, meaning that it could run instances in less than a few milliseconds. These front end attributes are complemented with the backend hosted through Amazon Web Services (AWS) — which claims to be decentralized. Specifically, the backend services are built using a serverless model, enabling Illuvium to scale infinitely whilst maintaining a cost effective solution.
Enough said on the game technology, let’s talk about the matter we are waiting for — blockchain tech. Illuvium made the appropriate decision when integrating Immutable X to its system. In contrast to plasma chains or other rollups (i.e. optimistic rollups), Immutable X has given the best track record in scaling NFTs, especially granting users to enjoy zero gas fees without purchasing the unique L2 token to transact NFT. Additionally, Immutable X is carbon neutral while providing a turing-complete language — Cairo.
On numerous occasions, Illuvium outsourced several of Chainlink’s products: Verifiable Randomness Function (VRF) and price feed/oracle. Illuvium integrated $LINK VRF to fairly distribute rare promotional NFTs to random users that participated in the platform’s liquidity mining program. In further expansion, Illuvium integrated the $LINK price oracle to its system — serving a critical role in ensuring sales.
In terms of handling security risks and bug issues that could break down the system, Illuvium’s team is one of the fastest teams in the crypto gaming industry to resolve the complication. An audit for Illuvium’s yield farming on June 30, 2021 by Quantstamp indicated that there are 16 total issues with 12 already resolved (1 high risk but likewise has been resolved). The gaming platform is then rewarded with a Fast Response Times from the security contractor. Following the audit, the team decided to halt building the game itself but instead focusing on resolving security issues, which could be seen from its medium posts.
It is uncommon to see P2E gaming projects that outsource several of the integral functions to other platforms. In Illuvium’s case, they integrated Immutable X for its backend/blockchain and Chainlink’s VRF & Price Oracle for price discovery. Doing this would drastically reduce the speculation of players that were before hesitant of Illuvium.
Economics
Before diving deep into Illuvium’s economics let’s talk about the tokenomic first. Unlike most crypto gaming platforms, Illuvium has only one token around the platform — $ILV as its native token. $ILV has a maximum supply of 10 million with a total supply of 7 million currently.
Token Distribution:
- Pre-seed: 500k (ILV @ $1)
- Seed: 1.5M (ILV @ $3)
- Team: 1.5M
- Treasury: 1.5M
- Launchpad: 1M
- Yield Farming: 3M (on-going)
- In-game Rewards: 1M (not started)
Several other assets in the game include:
- Illuvials (in-game creatures)
- Illuvitars (player’s avatar)
- Land (strategic NFT estate)
- Promo NFT (i.e. Rhampyre NFT, limited skins and emotes, and badges)
All of the revenue stream generated in Illuvium either from in-game purchases or IlluviDEX exchange fees would be channeled into Illuvium Vault. Specifically, in-game purchases include shard curing (used to catch Illuvials), imbues, obelisk travel (fast travel), wagering battle fees, enhancement, revival, and cosmetics. Exchange and wagering fees generated from every sale takes up an initial rate of 5% through the IlluviDEX. Additionally, Immutable X takes a small capped fee in exchange for wavering the gas fees. link
Governance
Illuvium takes an interesting approach when it comes to governance; contrary to the common method of governance — holding the governance token would grant the holders voting power in proposals. Illuvium’s governance adheres to a council voted by holders of ILV, similar to NEO smart economy and DOT. The role of council is mainly as community reps who are able to convey the community’s hopes without directly influencing the voting weight of proposals.
Voting for the proposal, however, still follows the same conventional approach to governance. There are two different types of the proposals in Illuvium:
Illuvium Configuration Change Proposal — able to modify systems config variables
- Configurable Council Values
- Marketplace Fees
- Illuvials Capture Mechanics
- Balance Changes
Illuvium Improvement Proposal
- New Contracts
- New Systems
- Expansions
- Character Sets
Alternatives/Competitors
It is important to note that Pokemon has been a long-standing brand ever since 1996 whilst Hearthstone is the first unique strategy card game. Illuvium stands on the cross-section between these two games. Under the assumption that Illuvium could attract 25% of the average number of players between the two games (~10 million players), Illuvium would undoubtedly generate high revenue. Seeing that both of these games have in-game purchases around the range of $1 to $100; If Illuvium prices the purchases around these ranges, then the total number of sales would be between $10 million to $1 billion, given that all players will inevitably purchase at least $1 from the game. Since most of Illuvium’s source of revenue comes from the IlluviDEX, 5% to be precise, this would result in Illuvium generating revenue around the range of $500k — $50 million. Though, certainly, Illuvium still has a long way to go since Pokemon and Hearthstone are both giants in the gaming industry.
Looking at Illuvium’s direct competitors, it’s more than reasonable, to say the least, that the game has the upper hand among othersimilar crypto-gaming projects. Take Untamed Island and NFT Champions as an example. Both of these games are worthwhile ventures to pursue, however, they do not have the technology level that Illuvium has. Illuvium is built on Unreal Engine 4 — the most powerful 3D game creation tool with real-time technology. Furthermore, its backend is supported and integrated with Chainlink and Immutable X.
Team
Kieran Warwick (Co-Founder): Serial entrepreneur who was exposed to Bitcoin and Ethereum early on. Helped The Burger COllective amass 100k unique reviews, 20k monthly web app users, and established a partnership with DoorDash. Worked alongside his brother at Synthetix.
In addition, Twitch/Playstation’s Scott McCarthy and Riot Games’ Veronica Foo join Illuvium as key marketing executives. Both of the new joiners will focus on Illuvium’s branding in both the crypto space and the mainstream gaming industry.
Partners
Illuvium took an interesting decision when partnering with the Blockchain Gaming Association (link). Not only is the BGA a well-known association for web3 gaming that promotes decentralization, but also the partnership indirectly exposes Illuvium to numerous renowned BGA sponsors (i.e. Ubisoft, AMD, Animoca Brands, Gameloft, Atari, etc).
Taking a quick look from Crunchbase indicates that Illuvium has received $5M in total worth of funding. Furthermore, Illuvium has attracted multiple prominent names in the blockchain industry.
- Seed Round (March 11, 2021): IOSG, Framework Ventures, LD Capital, YBB Foundation, Moonwhale, Delphi Digital, Stake Capital, Lotus Capital, Blocksync Ventures, Bitscale Capital, Bitcoin.com, YGG, Immutable, Quantstamp
- Private Investors: Richard Ma — CEO of Quantstamp, Kain Warwick — Synthetix founder, Stani Kulechov — $AAVE founder, Anton Bukov — $1INCH DEX founder, Tyler Ward — Barnbridge founder, Santiago Santos — Partner ParaFi, Dansih Chowdry — CEO Bitcoin.com, Jason Choi — Spartan Capital/Blockcrunch, Sebastian Borget — $SAND founder, Kevin Lu — Band Protocol developer
Additional Review
The early announcement focuses on gameplay features(teasing), but recent announcement leans more towards security and building a strong foundation be it for the team or the platform itself. Going in the right direction since users wouldn’t want to be hacked when the project has fully launched. TL;DR resources are focused on security and building a strong foundation
