MetalCore CTO on making a Web3 game fun: “We use what we understand”

Blockchain games dominated the first quarter and accounted for 30% of all on-chain activity in this period, according to DappRadar's “State of the Dapp Industry Q1 2024” report. The report highlights that an average of 2.1 million wallets were active daily during the first quarter.

This dominance in blockchain gaming activity could mean that analyst expectations for entertainment-focused Web3 games this cycle are being met. MetalCore is a blockchain shooter from this new batch of titles focused on entertaining gameplay and is seeing success in its second closed beta test.

“(The number of players) is actually much more than we expected. We plan to have a couple hundred, maybe 1000 players. We have about 9,000 players and between 1,500 and 2,000 daily active users. And then at any given time we have 300 to 400 concurrent users, which is really good for a game that's not available for free, you still have to sign up for a waitlist and get keys,” shared Dan Nikolaides, CTO of Metal core.

The second closed beta test for MetalCore ends on May 16, after a two-week period used primarily to test the game's economy and check for bugs, Nikolaides added. Since these trial periods run without the full game, it is more difficult to retain players, which is why the MetalCore team is surprised by the number of players who dedicate up to 50 hours per week to the game.

However, making a blockchain game fun is no easy task, especially since most of the teams behind the new Web3 titles come from the traditional gaming industry and must acclimate to the new standards.

“The Web3 industry is still very young, so it's hard to know what the right thing to do is. And that leads to changing direction, more than we would in Web2. Changing direction from a business perspective is not something you typically need to do in Web2. It's basically thinking: well, this is going to be a premium game or free-to-play, or we're going to sell it in bundles, or whatever you're going to do. Whatever the business plan is, it doesn't require you to change your entire development process.”

However, in Web3 there are more factors to consider, such as choosing a blockchain to implement digital assets and deciding whether the game will have tokens or not. This drastically affects the technology stack used and what the team can do with digital assets, MetalCore CTO said.

“Can we improve them? Will they have attributes that we can upgrade cheaply and will players be able to level them up? Or will the cost be too prohibitive? That is the simplest of things. Even from a business point of view, we have to ask ourselves when we should launch from a market perspective. When is a good time to launch a token? Who should we partner with? “These are all very, very difficult decisions that we have to make in addition to just making the game, which there was definitely a learning curve for us to figure all of this out.”

scratching an idea

MetalCore is a multiplayer shooter reminiscent of famous titles such as Titanfall and Destiny. Players can take on missions, use different battle vehicles, and fight alien monsters. Nikolaides shared that the decision to create an online multiplayer game is tied to the “DNA of the company,” but it started outside of Web3.

“We actually started this as a virtual reality game. So we created a virtual reality game called World of Mechs for Quest 2 (virtual reality glasses). And that was very fun. Our founder has a long history in the development of mechanical games. And once we did that, we had a really good foundation for some fun mech combat. And we thought, 'What if we took this and made it a great PC game?' And at the time we weren't sure how to finance it. “We weren’t sure how to do it.”

So migrating to Web3 made sense, as the team could create a new blockchain title from scratch, rather than just trying to “release a game to Web3.” Following this decision, Nikolaides explains that making the game free-to-play was the next logical step, as the team did not want to control the game with expensive nfts, allowing players to build a community around it.

“Control games with nfts are just not fun. The fun thing about games like this is when you get to show off. If you have something really interesting, you will naturally want to show it off to other people. But if you make a game where you have to buy a super expensive nft just to play, there won't be anyone to brag to. There's no one else there to say, 'Oh my God, that's great.' So people in general, just the average person, really love to feel like they've accomplished something.”

Keep it simple

In addition to the initial barrier of getting used to a new industry, Nikolaides shares additional challenges in creating a fun Web3 game and how the MetalCore team overcame them. “There are all the normal challenges that come with making a fun game, even in Web 2, which is difficult in itself. “Then there are additional challenges, which are the kind of economic challenges that come with designing a system that works on Web3.”

MetalCore's approach then was to stay “as close as possible to something they understood,” Nikolaides says. They already understood the idea of ​​building a character, leveling them up, upgrading their equipment, spending time, energy, resources and money potentially upgrading them and making them “super bad,” he adds.

“And then we thought that with a free nft market, people would want to sell upgraded characters. And so we designed our game around character upgrades, right? This was very important for us, because instead of trying to do something very complicated, we were able to learn a lot of lessons that we learned in Web2, that we understood from designing game economies that involved upgrading characters, and then just doing it. do it in such a way that it would be compatible with Web3.”