- Shrapnel released the latest version of its white paper on Friday
- Players can mint and manage in-game NFTs and wager SHRAP tokens
Traditional AAA studios tend to keep everything in limbo until a project is deemed ready for the big reveal — not Neon Media, the publisher behind the upcoming first-person shooter multiplayer Web3 game Shrapnel.
Top-tier video games usually take a long time and require a large budget to build – three to five years with an average cost of about $80 million.
In contrast, the process of building blockchain-based video games is different, Don Norbury, chief technology officer at Neon Media, told Blockworks.
Set in a dystopian world in the future, Shrapnel is currently being built on the Avalanche subnet and the Unreal 5 graphics game engine. What sets this game apart from other Web3 offerings is the level of community involvement and the various gaming finance (GameFi) mechanics powered by NFTs.
The team behind Shrapnel, made up of entertainment veterans from HBO and Microsoft, has worked to engage future players in the development of the gameplay, knowledge and NFT ecosystem.
For staff with a web2 background, “being involved in the community, getting ideas back, sharing more than you traditionally would, would be comfortable to share – just because you wanted to go through 18 iterations before it ever saw the light – is tricky” , said Norbury, who is also the studio head for Shrapnel.
The game is currently in pre-alpha development. The team will be sharing early access releases with focus group participants to get feedback starting next spring — so a full public release could take years.
Potential players have been able to purchase an Operator avatar NFT, which represents a mercenary in the Shrapnel universe. Holders received digital and physical comic books created for the backstories of the five available characters at San Diego Comic-Con in July.
More recently, Shrapnel released a two-minute game trailer on Monday, similar to how a trailer is released leading up to a movie premiere.
Shrapnel to boast of in-game crypto economics
Shrapnel also released the project’s white paper on Friday, outlining the tokenomics and in-game asset schedule.
The game itself is set up to act as a platform for community-built cards with different sets of rules and gameplay styles, all based on a single-token economy based on SHRAP, an avalanche-based governance token.
For what it’s worth, the trailer features a spatial character exploring a futuristic and dirty city along with some gunplay. Stakeholders can fall into several categories: gamers, creators, curators, and landowners.
Each user type can earn SHRAP rewards by completing missions, crafting NFTs, or staking their tokens to receive two types of NFTs: vanity items and cards. Vanity items include gear, weapons, cosmetics, and skins.
Maps are distributed across game areas known as The Arena and The Podium. Stakeholders strive to get their own or favorite cards to the center of The Podium by advertising them. As cards gain popularity and SHRAP stakes, they get bigger and closer to The Podium. Once in The Podium, players and strikers can participate in performance-based SHRAP incentives.
“We want most of the time people are playing Shrapnel to be on community cards, not the cards we make,” Norbury said, adding that “a lot of the effort we would spend creating a story in one single player campaign that we are devoting to our tools pipeline.”
This reward system requires dedication and skill to create high-quality cards that others will want to play, rather than just clicking to make money. Any gas costs are subsidized in the transaction costs.
play yourself
Shrapnel follows what it calls the play-to-own model.
This means that users effectively own the intellectual property (IP) for what they create and mint, but they license Shrapnel to use in-game, Norbury said of creating a “healthy-self-sustainable ecosystem where people do things.” that they make.”
Thus, Shrapnel plans to attract and retain users through its content generation mechanism – finding, managing, promoting, and betting on the best player-created vanity items and cards. A large number of users would ensure a balanced supply and demand of SHRAP.
According to Norbury, a token offering and the Shrapnel NFT marketplace will be launched in the coming months.
The white paper stated that 3 billion SHRAP tokens will be created as the total token supply, which will never increase. The community will receive 33% of the SHRAP tokens, 27% will be distributed to the team and its advisors, 20% will receive to Seed token holders and other stakeholders the remaining 20%.
The SHRAP utility includes voting rights to player-created content and to certain aspects of the Shrapnel protocol. In addition, the team is still figuring out how validator nodes can use SHRAP as a gas token, subsidizing the gas fee to the end user.
The game will also build its own subnet for low latency. When asked why the AVAX subnet was chosen, Norbury mentioned the reasons of security, adaptability, future-proofing and computing power.
He also made the distinction between games like Axie Infinity that require more and more people to keep the people who are already there afloat.
“If you look at it economically, there must be a production principle attached to it. Something of value has to be produced, and then people have to desire it or be willing to interact with it in different ways,” Norbury said.
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Ornella Hernandez
Blockworks
News reporter
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