Chibi Clash One Year Later Part 2: A Glimpse into the Future
ICYMI you can read Part 1 here
Anyone who has watched Black Mirror should remember the episode Fifteen Million Merits. For those who are unfamiliar with the episode, the premise is as follows:
Bing Madsen lives in a room surrounded by screens that wake him up, serve as a video game console and feature regular adverts. He rides on a stationary bike to generate electricity in exchange for "merits", which he needs to pay for his daily cost of living.
In reality, this is not so different than what X-to-earn is for developing countries; in fact, one can argue that earning “merits” is better than a token as at least the value of the merit is less likely to depreciate! By definition, play is to “engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose”. If one is not enjoying a game, then participating in that game should not even be considered as “play”.
An Industry Identity Crisis
Axie and other projects have tried shifting away from the label of “play-to-earn”, but so far nothing has stuck:
Play-AND-earn feels like a forced relabeling of P2E that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.
Play-to/and-OWN places more emphasis on digital ownership in games, but the term fails to convey the connection between “playing” and “owning”.
GameFi is promising as an abbreviation, but the term heavily implies the “Finance” side of gaming, which not all games have.
Free-to-Own implies that gamers will have the opportunity to own their digital gaming assets for free, but the terms raises more questions than answers as it is up to interpretation on what is actually “free”.
This currently leaves us with web3 gaming, a generic term which captures the technology that is being applied to our games, but says little about the experience one would have with these games. We all know that web3 games will utilize fungible/non-fungible tokens in some shape or form, but why does that matter to the gamers, and how does it differentiate as a gaming experience v.s. web2 games? Financial incentives aside, web3 developers must honestly ask themselves: why does your gaming project even need to be built on web3??
Unlocking New Gaming Experiences
Free-to-play games have been a successful model, with the most successful games all sharing the following:
A free gaming experience designed for high replayability.
A monetization strategy designed for enhancing one’s experience with the game. The more invested you are in the game, the more likely you’ll want to spend on the game.
One can argue that many top mobile games aren’t “fun”, but there’s no denying that they have a well designed core loop supported by strong retention features, and you’ll more than likely want to login again after your first game session. While many web3 gaming projects like to showcase their game art, floor prices and/or community numbers, very few (if any) have succeeded in actually retaining their users through gameplay.
As gaming industry veterans, we knew that our top priority was to deliver on the gaming experience. After finally unveiling our pre-alpha to our Legendary Seal holders, I believe we are on the right track with our gameplay. The game development team is already working on the next 6+ months of new features and improvements leading up to our open beta and beyond.
Next comes monetization. If players can enjoy our game for free, we want our token holders to be able to enjoy the game even more. This is where I believe the true potential of web3 can be unlocked for gaming, as blockchain technology allows for unlocking experiences in ways that web2 can not. Up to now, the main utility of token ownership is a store of value; an asset that has the potential to appreciate in value and can be freely traded and/or exchanged. But so much more can be accomplished with smart contracts. We are already seeing glimpses of this with concepts such as semi-fungible tokens, crafting mechanics and staking contracts for unlocking digital and/or physical rewards. If the benefits of token ownership can be clearly conveyed for a game that is well designed, perhaps gamers will finally care more about the utility of the asset rather than its traded value.
What’s Next for Chibi Clash
Before finding its massive success as a battle royale/sandbox game, Fortnite initially launched as a cooperative hybrid tower defense-shooter and survival game. It was not until the success of PUBG that Fortnite transitioned into a free-to-play battle royale game, building off the tech framework from the original title and finding success with a much wider audience.
Chibi Clash was originally scoped to be a P2E auto battler game, but our ambitions for what it can become has gone far beyond this. With the accumulating of knowledge, capital, and human resources over the past year, we realize that we are now presented with a very unique opportunity: to become a driving force for innovation in web3 gaming during a time of uncertainty.
Behind the scenes, we are working on a number of major initiatives that are still in-progress and can not be shared at this time due to non-disclosure clauses or simply because they have not been confirmed yet. But without giving away too much, these initiatives include:
Partnership with one of THE leading gaming software companies on a yet-to-be-announced web3 gaming initiative (announcement coming in Q4!).
A brand new Chibi Clash game mode in addition to the auto battler game, which will introduce new utility to NFTs and other tokens.
Exploration of a strategic integration partnership with another web3 gaming project.
Our governance token launch, which will introduce value propositions for holders that have never been seen before for any other projects.
One year from now, web3 gaming will have evolved to something that is drastically different than what we see now. New projects you will have never heard of will emerge as new leaders in this space, and we will do our best to put Chibi Clash on the map alongside the best in the industry.
Wago & the Chibi Clash Team