SPS discusses challenges of building GameFi amid crypto winter

Amidst a drastic diminution successful coin prices, shifting subordinate behavior, and hard-to-maintain tokenomics, it's been a hard twelvemonth for galore GameFi developers. While much established franchises, specified arsenic Axie Infinity, person held ground, different lesser-known projects similar Elexir person mostly pulled the plug, with a deficiency of viable crippled designs being incapable to compensate for the "Fi" constituent successful GameFi.

That said, 1 task which, contempt moving into each challenges, experienced by its peers, appears to person gained traction anyway. In aboriginal February, blockchain multiplayer online conflict arena (MOBA) crippled Superpower Squad (SPS) surpassed 200,000 downloads connected the App Store and Google Play. The crippled antecedently launched successful Dec. 2022 and surpassed the 100,000 download milestone mid-January. 

Superpower Squad crippled poster (Source: SPS)

SPS features up to 20 players competing in-app successful a five-minute combat experience. Players tin gain nonfungible tokens (NFTs) heroes and make integer wallets straight in-game to person and transportation rewards, with nary anterior crypto acquisition necessary. The crippled took astir 3 years to cleanable earlier developers said it met their prime for playability. According to SPS' main crippled architect, who wished to beryllium identified arsenic Pony, the squad faced rather a fewer challenges during that time:

"Compared to different manufacture projects, crippled improvement is simply a overmuch much regenerative way that particularly consumes time, effort and money. Superpower Squad has astir finished each its functional development, with a self-fund of conscionable $3 million. But Being successful this crypto winter, the full manufacture finds itself having trouble gathering its financing needs and becomes much reserved with its choices."

Pony explained that contempt finalizing concern deals with "several apical institutions," the founding rounds became connected clasp aft "two achromatic swan events" deed the cryptocurrency manufacture past year. In addition, the crippled developer said that financing became hard arsenic a subset of atrocious actors had tarnished the estimation of the full industry.

"After Axie Infinity became popular, the marketplace started to assemblage successful for GameFi products. We person seen junk GameFi projects travel retired successful ample numbers, and astir of them had small to zero crippled experience, with immoderate adjacent having lone a achromatic paper. After the GameFi boom, immoderate of these projects died out, oregon changed their names, due to the fact that it was excessively hard to make a bully GameFi task and radical didn't recognize that it would instrumentality a immense concern of clip and money. Some GameFi users mislaid a batch of wealth with the autumn close aft the archetypal question of GameFi."

As told by Pony, SPS came to the marketplace close astir the clip sentiment was astatine its nadir. "We faced large bias from organizations and a batch of them refused to present our task to users," helium said. "Therefore, we are grateful to the partners who stood by us, specified arsenic Kucoin, OKX, and BNB Chain, and their enactment passim this full time."

Superpower Squad gameplay (Source: SPS)

Since launch, SPS has already created its ain marketplace for in-game NFTs and listed its namesake token, SQUAD, connected KuCoin. For the adjacent steps, Pony says the improvement squad volition implicit the rental relation for its marketplace. "This way, users who person a ample magnitude of NFTs tin rent them retired to gain revenue, and users who bash not person capable wealth to acquisition them tin gain done renting." Currently, the crippled has astir 42,000 on-chain transactions per day and a regular progressive idiosyncratic number of 4,400, with implicit 44,000 in-game wallets created.