Why NFT games are missing the mark and what we are doing about it
This article serves as the first part in a series geared towards PxQuest holders and the broader NFT community interested in gaming. The purpose of the series is to inform and educate by providing a clearer view of project direction and the reasoning behind key business and game development decisions.
This first article is a little long but we feel it is well overdue so brace yourselves for a thorough deep dive into our thinking!
Where are the good games?
Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen a lot of new players entering the NFT space, from fashion to sports, DeFi and contemporary artists. What we haven’t seen is many serious Web2 game publishers — with the notable exception of Ubisoft. The absence of web2 studios can be explained by a few factors:
- Bad Press: Overwhelmingly negative coverage of NFTs in the gaming press.
- Genuine ethical objections: Some studios are simply not that aware of more environmentally-friendly NFT alternatives to Ethereum mainnet (like carbon-neutral IMX), and if they are, there is little incentive to debate the technicalities with their staff.
- Lack of expertise: The vast majority of studios we talked to had no blockchain expertise in house
- Little to gain: It is worth remembering that for an established game studio the added technical complexity and public relations blow up of starting an NFT game can easily dwarf expected financial returns. Traditional web2 studio shareholders on the whole have little appetite for such risk-taking when the existing model serves studios so well.
The void left by dedicated game studios has been filled mostly by small teams of developers who can build relatively simplistic games at low cost and risk. There are a few notable exceptions playable now (see Gods Unchained https://godsunchained.com/) and upcoming (see Illuvium https://www.illuvium.io/), but on the whole there are few high quality NFT games on the market.
The above observations aside, we do expect the space to gradually improve in the last quarter of 2022 and into 2023 with the entrance of at least a few more sizable studios; we know of several that have started doing the ground work but simply aren’t prepared to share this publicly. It is also apparent that more sizable NFT gaming projects are beginning to find their way out of the woodwork with former staff from AAA studios, and some of these have VC backing to allow them to be fairly ambitious in their game design. A good indicator for this shift is the slow but steady shift from predominantly 2D NFT project launches on OpenSea to high definition 3D projects (see ‘Why 3D?’ section below for more thoughts on this).
What are you doing about it?
From day one the PxQuest team knew that we wanted to make a genuinely good game, and moreover that this game needed to be a strong statement of our intent to be a game studio first, and NFT project second.
For those that aren’t yet part of the community or are unfamiliar with the project, here is a quick summary of what we are developing:
Dueler Mini-Game
The Dueler is a PvP turn-based battle between Adventurers inspired by classic PokeMon battles. Users can battle for fun, or wager $chronos and game items, with the winner taking all. The first version of the game will be released with no wagers to allow game-balance to be determined over a month or so before valuable assets can be wagered.
Main RPG Game
The main game is a desktop hack-and-slash 3D online multiplayer RPG with a rich ‘kingdom building’ economy.
Players form raiding parties of increasing size to take on quests, dungeons and raids of increasing difficulty and reward. Defeated enemies will drop weapons, armour, and resources for constructing crafting buildings on player-owned land. All uncommon items dropped are NFTs in their own right that are minted directly to players on the IMX Layer 2 solution.
Access to dungeons occurs via a hex-based world map — composed partly of player-owned land tiles (representative of land NFTs), and partly composed of tiles for entering dungeon instances or obtaining quests. The map forms both the social hub and provides a deep economy complete with land trading, building construction, resource harvesting and crafting/gear upgrades. We will be posting a second article all about Kingdoms very soon!
How are you doing it?
As a small founding team we had two real options regarding how to deliver a high quality game of this scale:
- Attempt to rapidly hire and build game development teams in house
- Partner with an existing studio
As former enterprise technical professionals we were aware of the difficulties of hiring a large number of technical staff in a short space and getting them to perform well as a unit. We had also watched the amount of time and resources our friends over at Gods Unchained had to expend to put together their stellar in-house game development studio. The above noted, we also found that very few game studios had any in house blockchain expertise.
In the end we decided to adopt a codevelopment model of partnership. Our internal technical team is developing the blockchain-specific aspects of the game including:
- NFT creation APIs (for item drops in game)
- NFT user inventory & event tracking
- Smart Contract Development for new NFT categories
- Assisting integration with an ethereum-wallet-based user authentication model
For the remaining aspects of the game we decided to pursue partnership with an existing game studio in order to deliver a high quality product in a relatively short time frame.
How to Tame a Dragon?
Finding a willing game studio partner was a massive undertaking. We engaged in discussions with only 20 of the many studios we reached out to.
We put this poor response rate down to both the unpopularity of NFTs amongst game studios but also the traditional challenges of cold contacting a potential business partner.
Of those studios we engaged with fully (including sharing our game design document and discussing costing, time frames etc) the key criterion we focused on were:
- Technical ability to execute: does the studio have the staff and scale to deliver a game of our desired complexity?
- Reliability & Willingness: does the studio appear to be a reliable partner with an equally strong interest in ensuring high quality results?
- Budget: can we afford this studio while allowing for scope creep and game sustainment costs post launch?
The majority of potential studios failed to meet these criteria.
If at this point you are asking yourself — ‘why didn’t they secure a studio before mint?’. Considering finding a willing studio partner was difficult with our funding already secured, imagine how hard that would be with zero dollars raised. The standard qualification questions from studios during initial discussions are ‘how much did you raise during mint?’ and ‘do you have VC Backing?’.
Ammobox
Ammobox Studios stood out as a potential partner in several respects:
- From the outset Ammobox clearly took game delivery seriously, bringing in their CEO and two of their operations leads in our first meeting. The focus of their questions was also technical and operational, covering expected play through times, volume of models, player incentive models and platform limitations.
- They had delivered an online multiplayer game with high graphical fidelity and gameplay complexity.
- Ammobox also understood what we meant by ‘making an artistic statement’ with our game, and in art tests were able to bring our NFTs to life in 3D animated form in a way that was distinct and beautiful.
- In terms of scale, Ammobox sat in a sweet spot. They are supplying 25 staff to work on our game, but also aren’t so large that we are competing for attention with other partner projects and titles. They were not the cheapest studio, nor the most expensive, but one of the best value for money options in our opinion.
- Being based in South East Asia also positions us well in terms of capturing the rapidly growing play-to-earn market in the region. (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-3-filipino-gamers-quit-065431408.html)
Despite the difficult journey we are excited to have found a studio partner that shares our vision and is as excited as we are about just how cool a world we can build with PxQuest.
Why 3D?
One additional unexpected outcome of the game studio assessment process was that we shifted our plans from a 2D isometric visual style to 3D.
Understandably, parts of our community most attached to the original pixel styling were disappointed in the change, but we trust in time you will come to love the added life we can bring to your assets in 3D. This was not a decision we made lightly but rather based on our observations of a changing market and advice from multiple studios who had a better understanding of game development than any of our team. Ultimately, we decided this was the best course of action due for the following reasons:
- The long term viability and value of the project — particularly NFTs themselves, depend on adapting to market conditions. We’ve had a flood of low quality pixel games and believe with AAA studio entries next year we need to get our foot in the door as a serious game.
- By setting the visual standard high, there is no future limit to the potential growth in value of the game, whereas 2D RPGs generally cap out in terms of digital asset value and player count at much lower numbers.
- We found the cost of producing many unique character sprites at different angles in a high quality 2D style (something like Bastion) at an isometric angle (necessary to be able to see all players in a large raid) ends up being reasonably comparable to 3D. There are also more standard 3D assets for simple objects available on marketplaces that can be used to accelerate development (e.g. it is not necessary for the studio to make a candlestick model or a rock just for this game).
- For this to be a true P2E game we need to ensure our assets are mass marketable and ‘look valuable’. A detailed 3D model of a beautiful set of armour is a much easier sell at a high price than a simple 2D pixel sprite.
Valid feedback that we have received was that we needed to include the community and our holders more in these decisions. This has been noted and we will do better in this regard. To provide some context, there are many moving parts behind the scenes of PxQuest and in order for us to move fast we need to balance incorporating community feedback with the practical realities of game development.
Until next time
If you’ve made it this far, you obviously care as much about this project as we do! We are really excited with the progress we are making behind the scenes and can’t wait to share with everyone. In the next part in the series, we will be going further into detail around game development timelines, an exploration of the PxQuest World Lore and the Game Economy.
Rudi (AKA Reno — Operations Lead) & Lachlan (AKA Dogberto — Technical Lead)
We are always open to feedback. Please jump into our Discord and let us know what you think.
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