What’s wrong with existing crypto games?

Written by Lordmancer | Published 2018/05/16
Tech Story Tags: blockchain | cryptogames | cryptocurrency | gaming | mmorpg

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About half a year ago Crypto Kitties was launched and amused everyone. A lot of transactions generated daily turnover of bargains that beat previous top records. During that period we were conducting Lordmancer II ICO and we experienced significant issues regarding Ethereum network due to a huge number of transactions.

It looked like Crypto Kitties was becoming a true hit. The first popular crypto game ever. Then, just in few months a lot of new crypto games were launched. All these games proclaims blockchain stored assets. Crypto games are just about to completely defeat other types of games…

But let’s take a closer look. There are some services that scan player activities in crypto games. For example, https://dappradar.com/category/game

If you open it, you will see a table as shown below.

As you can see, the number of Daily Active Users is about 500 for Crypto Kitties and about 1000 for all crypto games together. Once again, there are only few thousand users who play any kind of crypto games. And this number has not been changed since last December.

1000 users — it may be a daily audience of a very middle level mobile or web game. Why is this number so little?

Well, there are many reasons:

  1. The total number of cryptocurrency holders is estimated as 1.5 mil comparing to the total number of gamers which is about 1.5 bln.
  2. Not all cryptoowners have Ether.
  3. Not all Ether owners have MetaMask installed thougth it is almost the only way to play crypto games.
  4. All crypto games are pay-to-play. How many free-to-play games do you have installed on your device? How many paid ones?

It is too difficult to play crypto games even for someone who are familiar to the crypto world! It is

There is one more reason. All existing crypto games could hardly be called games. The main and in most cases the only “gaming” activity is collecting. Actually, people don’t play them, they try to gamble with kitties. Crypto games are hard to play, they are “pay-to-play” and even more, they are not games at all.

Existing blockchain solutions including Ethereum can support only basic game mechanics like collecting or gambling. Every transaction takes much time and costs gas. Until we have new much better solutions, we have to consider creating games which combine blockchain with classical architecture.

Lordmancer II is a good example of such combination. On one hand, the game uses ERC20 tokens Lord Coins as in-game currency for trading between players. It brings real values to in-game items. On the other hand, everyone can easily start playing the game as in general it is a free-to-play mobile game. You don’t need to have a PC, Metamask or even Ether or Lord Coins to launch the game. Just download it and play! If you decide to use crypto currency related features of Lordmancer II, you can either buy some Lord Coins (yes, there you will have to create an Ethereum wallet and register on an Exchange) or try to earn crypto tokens by selling game resources and items to other players.

Lordmancer II will bring new users to the crypto world. Players will have a chance for a “soft” start in the cryptocurrency sphere. Let’s make the crypto community bigger!

Lordmancer II is in open beta test now and can be downloaded on http://lordmancer2.io

Join Lordmancer II Telegram community here https://t.me/lm2ico


Published by HackerNoon on 2018/05/16