Announcing Hashed Cup EOS Racing
The Korean mobile game industry reached its golden age between 2012 and 2013 with the resounding success of Anipang which induced more than 20 million downloads, and in the midst of it all was KakaoTalk’s game platform. Games that took advantage of the messenger app’s 40 million users were blowing up left and right, making mobile game history. The biggest success stories of them all were those of the casual game genre, optimized for mobile devices and free of any complicated rules, so that anyone could easily play. The integration of social graphs, which added an element of competition to the gameplay, fueled the games’ success. A notable case was NetMarble’s Everybody Cha Cha Cha, which was launched in Korea in December 2012 and downloaded over 10 million times.
In Everybody Cha Cha Cha, the goal is to beat other cars to the finish line, and you can compete with your KakaoTalk contacts. The game was optimized to the smaller mobile screen, preserving the sense of speed integral to a vehicle racing game. The result was its widespread popularity among casual game players.
Bearfoot Games, one of the portfolio projects in the Hashed Labs program (launched this March), aims to create a casual game optimized for blockchain and mobile. CEO Park Jae-duk has ample advice in the online/mobile game industry, having created Knight Online, and worked on the board of directors at NetMarble for Everybody Cha Cha Cha. On a not-so-side note, Bearfoot Games launched EOS Racing on the EOS blockchain this September, which now ranks third on the chart for EOS Game transactions. (We should keep in mind that Dapp.com and DappRadar’s EOS Racing user count may not reflect the actual number of users due to staking issues with wallets that can play EOS Racing.)
Hashed invested in many different blockchain game companies with the launch of Hashed Labs in March, choosing among those who already are veterans in online/mobile game industry the ones who had the grit to try launching many rounds of games until they succeeded. Bearfoot Games met our requirements, and we went ahead with our investment with the belief that EOS Racing had the following strengths.
First, the team is comprised of members who are veterans in both online and mobile game industry. Although Korea is a strong producer of games with many success stories in online/mobile gaming, the oversaturation of the domestic game market has induced many successful game developers to leave the industry, and impeded new game developers from entering. This makes it hard for us to find an entrepreneur or a team that has had success with both online and mobile games. On top of that, a team with experience in blockchain games, an industry that has yet to see successful cases, is even more difficult. In these conditions, Bearfoot Games was an excellent candidate, having had experience in both online and mobile games.
Moreover, EOS Racing is a casual racing game optimized for mobile devices. We believe that with the emergence of a new technology, a new platform, the easiest way to attract users is with games. Since younger audiences are more attracted to games, and they are usually less resistant to adopting new technology, this is a natural fit. When ADSL was first introduced in Korea in 1997, the most popular applications were online games. And in 2012, when KakaoTalk introduced its games platform, casual games were the first to gain popularity among many mobile game genres. We feel that mobile-optimized casual games will experience a similar popularity in the blockchain game market.
Finally, we put faith in the fact that EOS Racing created an open economic ecosystem through user participation using blockchain technology. One of the most important characteristics of EOS Racing is that the market ecosystem is not controlled by a central entity but by the users. One needs fuel to play EOS Racing, and vehicle parts in order to create better-powered vehicles. Fuel can be obtained when a user takes apart a vehicle or buys it from another user at the marketplace. Vehicle parts can also be obtained at the marketplace or by winning a race. Bearfoot Games does not directly sell fuel or vehicle parts(Technically speaking, vehicle parts are sold by Bearfoot Games but in expensive price, so that encourage users to buy parts from each other), and the users control the prices of these commodities. In order to have better vehicles and win more races, the user has no choice but to interact and transact with other users. This is the point where a decentralized, user-based economic ecosystem is created. And since all of these logistics take place on-chain, the economic ecosystem within the game is transparent to all users — another huge plus.
EOS Racing has been growing with the steady support of users after its September launch, and now ranks third in transaction volume on the EOS Game category. As it gains more and more users, the user-based economic ecosystem is starting to prove itself. With this in mind, as investor and contributor to the blockchain game ecosystem, Hashed is sponsoring an EOS Racing tournament from November 30th to December 9th(If you want to play withmobile devices, don’t forget to download EOS Wallet and make a new EOS account to play EOS Racing. You can download TokenPocket wallet here. Or you can play it through the website directly here.) It’s true that blockchain games have yet to be popularized in wider circles, but we still believe that we could create household names in blockchain games if we continue approaching the challenge at different angles. Hashed Cup EOS Racing is an extension of this belief. Just as Hashed Labs, true to its name, fosters an environment for various experimentations, we hope that our venture could be remembered in not only EOS Racing but also the general blockchain game industry as one of the newest endeavors to bring change.
