Predicting soon the rise of a new digital future — ‘Blockchain game’

Published in

Coinmonks

6 min readSep 7, 2021

Since the start of the pandemic, people have embraced virtual lives. Video games have been major beneficiaries of this shift, particularly online games where people visit to spend time and have fun. The increasing trend for online gaming among millennials has led to the creation of a virtual world for video gamers, where they get a virtual economy, currency, trade environment, and real-time scenarios to deal with.

Digital Market Outlook predicts that the number of users in the Online Games segment in the World by 2025 will be around 1.3 billion.

Many in-game purchases are temporary or are attained through winning several challenges to create scarcity and increase their perceived value. For the most part, the players that buy them don’t legally own them. Another problem with web 2.0 online games is that they remain largely centralized. This centralization is significantly vulnerable to both attacks and outages.

Blockchain and NFTs:

NFTs, therefore, seems to be a natural fit as expressed by CITI ventures in their opinion report. A successful example is a virtual soccer trading-card game that recently raised $50 MM in a Series A round.

We knew that gaming grew during the pandemic, and game investments and acquisitions have seen a boom as well. If you combine games with blockchain, then that can only get hotter, right? That’s the dream offered by Axie Infinity, a video game developed by Sky Mavis, a Singapore-based development studio. The game recently blew up, attracting more than 1 million daily players in August, up from less than 500 in July of 2020.

#The success of Axie Infinity has not gone unnoticed.

Many gaming developers are embracing blockchain technology to protect player’s in-game assets ownerships (NFTs) and monetizing in-game actions to fuel real-life transactions (in-game economy).

In the first half of 2021, 24 crypto/blockchain gaming companies closed investments valued at $476 million. Just three companies — Forte (which raised $185 million), Animoca Brands (which raised $89 million in the second quarter and more subsequently), and Mythical Games ($75 million) — accounted for 75% of the total, according to a report by InvestGame.

Shift to fundamental:

In the past, NFT collectibles value was majorly driven by speculation and what someone else is willing to pay for it. Therefore, demand drives the price rather than fundamental, technical, or economic indicators, which typically influence stock prices and at least generally form the basis for an investment decision.

After the success of Axie Infinity, today the new wave of NFT projects are bringing unique utility to their NFT collectibles such as use as playable avatars or metaverse experience and Defi opportunities (play-to-earn, in-game economy, or staking).

Planet K-9, and similar NFT projects, are a bet on the ‘digital future’ — “Games that retain the powerful hook of traditional board games while embracing blockchain technology to protect players in-game assets ownerships and monetizing in-game actions to fuel real-life transactions”.

Planet K-9 is an anthropomorphic dog-themed nonfungible token (NFT) project that includes a play-and-earn game dubbed K-9 Konquest. Starting with a collection of 5,033 hand-drawn K-9s spread across four dog breeds — Doberman, Pitbull, Husky, and German Shepherd, these K-9s will be adorned in several human apparels.

The collection will exist as ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Upon the launch of the game, K-9 holders will receive early access to a K-9 blockchain gaming universe with tons of play-to-earn modes like card dueling, space shooters, open world-building, etc., and earn in-game native currency.

The Mythology of the K9-Konquest game:

Long ago in an alternate Earth, legend has it that ancient aliens from hallowed antiquity abducted dogs in their macabre spaceships and took them to a faraway exoplanet. There, on one of its moons, torturous experiments were carried out, forever transforming the nature of these mutts.

Months turned to years, and then to centuries and after, eons until at last, these subjugated canines mustered up the courage and led a rebellion against their captors.

For what seemed like an eternity, these dogs were locked in a war of attrition on that barren moon until at last, they struck a decisive blow against their abductors during the siege of Canis Maria. This victory turned the tides in their favor and they went on breaking one alien stronghold after another. At last, they broke through the gates of the fortified encampment at Phora Heights and sealed their victory, awash in the blood of 10,000 of their former captors.

Faced with defeat and certain death, the remaining aliens fled the barren moon. With the rest of the alien horde driven from their base, the enhanced canines retrofitted landing gears and made for the planet, a new home now known in the common tongue as Planet K-9.

Summary:

Blockchain gaming, play2earn, and everything around this niche of gaming is still a relatively new concept. The intersection between blockchain technology and gaming was more or less an inevitability, and now that it’s here, it’s rapidly rising in popularity. Planet K-9 and hundreds of other NFT projects are a bet on this intersection to create a new digital future.

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