Amid a drastic price drop for cryptocurrencies, changes in player behavior, and hard-to-maintain tokenomics, it’s been a rough year for many GameFi developers. While more established franchises like Axie Infinity have held out, lesser-known projects like Elexir have mostly failed, as the lack of viable game designs hasn’t been able to make up for GameFi’s “Fi” element.
That being said, there is one project that, despite running into all the challenges its counterparts experience, seems to have gained popularity nonetheless. In early February, the blockchain multiplayer online game (MOBA) Superpower Squad (SPS) surpassed 200,000 downloads on the App Store and Google Play. The game was released in December 2022 and passed the 100,000 download milestone in mid-January.
SPS offers up to 20 players competing in a five minute combat experience. Players can earn Hero Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and create digital wallets directly in-game to receive and transfer rewards, with no prior cryptocurrency experience required. The game took almost three years to perfect before the developers said it lived up to its quality of gameplay. According to the game’s lead architect, who wanted to be identified as Pony, the team faced quite a few challenges during that time:
“Compared to other projects in the industry, game development is a much more regenerative path that is particularly time, effort, and money consuming. Superpower Squad has nearly finished all of its functional development, with $3 million spent on capital costs alone. But Being in this bear market, the entire industry finds it difficult to cover its financing needs and becomes more reserved with its options.”
Pony explained that despite having closed investment deals with “several blue-chip institutions”, funding rounds were put on hold after “two black swans” hit the cryptocurrency sector last year. Furthermore, the game developer said that funding was made difficult because a subset of bad actors had tarnished the reputation of the entire industry.
“After Axie Infinity became popular, the market started to become overcrowded with GameFi products. We have seen a large number of bad GameFi projects emerge, and most of them had little or no gameplay experience, some even only had a book. After the GameFi boom, some of these projects disappeared or changed names, because it was too difficult to develop a good GameFi project and people didn’t realize that it would require a huge investment of time and money.Some GameFi users lost a lot of money with the drop right after the first wave of GameFi.”
According to Pony, SPS hit the market just at the time when sentiment was at its lowest point. “We faced a lot of bias from organizations and many of them refused to introduce our project to users,” she said. “Therefore, we thank the partners who supported us, such as Kucoin, OKX and BNB Chain, for their support throughout this time.”
Since its launch, SPS has already created its own marketplace for in-game NFTs and has listed its namesake token, SQUAD, on KuCoin. For the next steps, Pony says that the development team will complete the rental feature for their marketplace. “In this way, users who have a large number of NFTs will be able to rent them to earn income, and users who do not have enough money to buy them will be able to earn through renting them.” Currently, the game has about 42,000 on-chain transactions per day and a number of daily active users of 4,400, with more than 44,000 wallets created in the game.
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