Just how important is 'Free to Play'?
As we have a breather before Illuvium PvP and Overworld PB2 drops I want to discuss Illuvium's current strengths and weaknesses and if I think mainstream is far away
We are just getting into April and I have never felt better about the state of Illuvium. Despite everything that has been happening these past 2-3 weeks with the addition of financial reporting from the Illuvium team and a roadmap imminent I like this new chapter of the studios history. The Illuvium showcase is also helping reveal just how far along the 3 overworld regions are not to mention some behind the scenes PvP footage I have seen is making me really excited for these next 4-6 months.
Here is what I will be covering in this newsletter:
How did the Illuvium: Beyond sale go? And what’s next for Illuvitars
What sort of strategy gameplay would I like to see in Illuvium PvP
I don’t think every single game needs to be free to play, Illuvium included
Deadrop snapshot 5 was launched in March but more importantly how does Illuvium fit into this picture?
We will cover all of that here and more so please keep reading. I am excited to share this journey with you.
Please don’t forget to subscribe below! It really means a lot and together we can tackle the Illuvium metaverse better than anyone else.
Is it too late to get involved in Illuvitars?
Illuvium Beyond is finally here and quite frankly its even better than I expected. However many would say the sale was a failure and wonder if the NFTs will even be worth anything in the future.
Lets first discuss the elephant in the room. Sales, revenue and the safety pool. Before the Illuvium Beyond sale begun the council made a move to reserve the revenue from the Illuvitars sale in a special safety pool. Although the intent still remains to distribute it to stakers, it remains as a safety net for the DAO to ensure they have as much money as possible to reach open beta for the main game. As of this time approximately 100k D1sks have been sold. The Illuvitars safety pool currently holds $1,521,458.48 as of the time of writing this. To many this may seem tiny considering the safety pool was set to accommodate up to $15m worth of eth however this is tiny compared to the amount of sILV2 burned during the sale. More importantly the partner d1sks will release towards the end of wave 1 and could have a significant effect.
Now should you be selling your Illuvitars? Will they be worth more in the future? What should you consider? Let’s go back to front. There are 2 major factors to consider when it comes to your collection, T0 Illuvitars and accessories. Both of these will continue to be available in future waves and although they are surprisingly rare and likely will be up until the sale ends, they will slowly lose their scarcity over time. That’s not to say they aren’t worth holding but they definitely have significantly more risk attached and less longevity from a purely analytical point of view.
What should you be buying? Anything that is even remotely rare and will end this wave could be seen by many as having growing value over the next 2-3 years given the Illuvium IP grows like we all think it will. In particular any T4 or T5 Illuvitars make obvious candidates especially if they are holo or have an expression, any of these with both I would consider an immediate blue-chip, especially Goliant, Adoredo or Rhamphyre. The question remains whether or not you should bond them with accessories, it seems like accessories can slightly devalue these Illuvitars but the drive to fill difficult slots in the album can take precedence. If you bond an Illuvitar with some of the max rarity or even T4/T5 stage 2 accessories can even boost its value on the marketplace and help you gain a premium. It is undoubtedly always a decision whether or not you decide to bond an Illuvitar so think about it before you go ahead and give everything shades like I have.
Lets speculate on potential Illuvium PvP
Illuvium has an excellent capturing gameplay loop and a visually stunning combat engine, but will the PvP strategy be deep enough? It’s my turn to discuss the potential.
‘Ally Switch’. Many of you have no idea what I am referring to but this move in Pokemon is the single reason I almost left the Pokemon competitive scene almost a dozen times. In my opinion ally switch single handedly converted Pokemon from a strategy game into a game of blackjack. What it allows a player to do is swap the position of the two Pokemon on their field. That might not seem like a big deal but it turned every single turn into a game of paper, scissors, rock. You could either predict they use trick room, or predict they didn’t, the user also had the same choice to make and this game of trying to read a faceless opponent would more often than not decide the outcome of a battle.
This is currently my biggest fear for Illuvium. Illuvium has many deep layers of strategy and zero rng in its current form from what we have seen in the survival mode. However the minute you add mechanics such as this one into the game is when strategy rapidly devolves into ‘getting lucky’ against your opponent. One instance of how I see this potentially playing out is with blind boards. Imagine you both have 5 Illuvials placed on the board, the battle plays out and there’s a victor. If both boards were to then be hidden and each player has the opportunity to completely change their strategy and deck on the fly now every round is completely independent. You might as well not be facing the same opponent during round 2, 3, 4 or even 5.
An easy fix to this problem is to restrict a players freedom of choice as much as possible. They can already only remove 2 units from the board, but maybe they can only move 1 or 2. Or maybe they can’t move any at all. This changes the potential combinations from hundreds into 10-20 potential moves. This would play much more like a game of chess rather than shuffling your hand after losing a round of Poker.
There are many other ways to look at this problem but maybe a slow strategy approach is possible as well. Each player placing a piece on the board one at a time. That way they can actively counter their opponents positioning as play proceeds. Although I think this would make metas more dominant given singular Illuvials would be a more dominant force than the overall synergy or strategy I think there is some merit to facing a visible opponent.
If you have any of your own ideas about how PvP could play out don’t hesitate to reach out to Scoriox on discord.
Is Free to Play overrated?
Everyone loves a freebie but is that really the driving force for the gaming market? I will tackle a series of video games and come to my own conclusions.
It’s no secret that Free to Play gaming has taken the world by storm and become the dominant business model for gaming in the past decade but is it going to last forever and is it the only business model in existence right now? Firstly we have to take a look at current Free to Play games and the reasons they become successful (besides being highly accessible). We need to review PC games for this particular discussion given Illuvium will primarily exist on PC however it is worth mentioning that mobile games dominate the revenue charts and are almost exclusively free to play.
Here are the top 10 games by Monthly Active Users according to https://newzoo.com/resources/rankings/top-20-pc-games
Minecraft (Paid)
Modern Warfare II / Warzone 2.0 (Paid / Free)
The Sims 4 (Paid)
Roblox (Free)
Fortnite (Free)
Hogwarts Legacy (Paid)
League of Legends (Free)
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Free)
Valorant (Free)
Grand Theft Auto V (Paid)
I believe this list tells a very interesting story, not only are the top 3 games not free for the standard package but the free games on this list are either on mobile or had an established IP before launching a free to play game. Fortnite had an existing franchise albeit small, Roblox is a mobile superpower, Warzone came after over a decade of Call of Duty and Valorant followed League of Legends. I believe the key exception to this is League of Legends, considering CS:GO only adopted the free to play model later on in its life.
Unironically League of Legends was the follow up competitor to DOTA, a free to play mod on the existing paid game Warcraft III. Although DOTA was standalone it is interesting that League of Legends and Dota effectively kicked off this business model outside of mobile gaming. After this was proven successful many others jumped on board with the likes of Counter Strike, Overwatch and Fortnite, all heavily multiplayer experiences. When you really break it down doing a purely single player free to play experience would be almost impossible to monetize since cosmetic items are only useful in terms of flexing on the social stage.
But to understand where play to earn fits in we need to also consider the highly active paid games. Minecraft, Hogwarts Legacy and the Sims all have a rich single player experience and Call of Duty serves as more of an extension on top of Warzone in many ways. Which leads me to believe that free to play mostly serves as not only a mobile hub, but a hub for multiplayer gameplay. When you really think about it this makes sense since they thrive on major social aspects and effective matchmaking. By guaranteeing a minimum viable player base through minimal barrier to entry this model is extremely effective, only enhanced when you throw it onto mobile and add cross-platform play. As many may have experienced with Battlefront II it takes surprisingly little to crush a multiplayer scene, especially on a paid multiplayer game.
But where does Illuvium fit into all this? Honestly I like to view the 2 core gameplay loops separately, the Arena and the Overworld. I would argue the Overworld is a primarily single player, story driven and collectables focused experience with serious stakes, actions and consequences and is served quite well by a paid model. The arena on the other hand much better suits the free to play model to create a thriving ranked system and make the game accessible to as many different gamers as possible. The underlying problem being that the two are intrinsically linked.
If you overly enforce the free to play model in the Overworld I am concerned you lose the value of your time and effort you put into the game. In the same way that you might open a pack of trading cards and jump for joy if you obtained something rare. If everyone got packs of cards for free then rare cards would simply not exist and would have no value, given you could infinitely open them. Obviously Illuvium is much more gamified than that but without gated entry bots would simply devalue the time of those who aren’t software on a computer.
A potential solution to the Arena situation is enabling things like free decks, rental decks and competitions with either little or no prize pools. This may separate out the PvP experience a little bit but the exposure and accessibility it would grant without damaging the deeper experience would be a beneficial tradeoff. I hope you enjoyed my breakdown of the gaming ecosystem and why Illuvium needs to suit both models given its broad scope and wide range of audiences.
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