Creating Digital Scarcity for Mass Market Games

This post was originally posted on Medium by Rudy Koch on October 23rd, 2020. You can read the full article here.

This week marks the official launch of our Blankos Founder’s Packs sale. We are proud to finally introduce you to the 4 new Blankos and all the cool stuff that comes with each of the packs. Even more than that we are so excited to announce that beta is officially launching on Nov 17th, and everyone who has bought a Founder’s Pack gets guaranteed day 1 access to the private beta. I can’t wait to party with you all.

With another big milestone out the door, I’d like to talk a bit about our vision for digital assets, and answer some of the questions from our community!

How we got here

We set out 2 years ago with the goal of driving mass adoption of blockchain in the games industry. We were inspired by concepts like true ownership, verifiable scarcity, and secondary markets. We believe that these concepts are ushering in an exciting change in the way we design and think about game economies.

We assembled a world class team who have built some of the most prolific games in the industry. We are excited to tackle blockchain through the lens of mass market, AAA games. Blankos Block Party is built, first and foremost, to be a mass market game. If we want mass market gamers to adopt blockchain, we need to build a game they want to play. We can’t lose sight of that.

Here’s what that means:

• As soon as we add blockchain to a mass market game, we are in uncharted territory.
• We’ve had to introduce solutions that are going to be new to everyone.
• And every step of the way, we ask ourselves: how do we bring all this awesome tech to market in a way that makes sense to mainstream gamers?

We are bringing blockchain to the masses because we share your passion. We want the industry to see the potential.

Relative Scarcity

We’ve heard a lot of questions about supply and limited quantity. It’s a topic that’s important to us, but it’s also a concept we need to solve at scale in a game that could have millions of players.

We believe that owning a digital asset with actual utility in a game with the potential for millions of players is the future of blockchain asset ownership and gaming monetization. The game becomes a tangible platform for a true in-game economy. In this scenario, we believe owning an asset that is 1 of 5,000 or even 30,000 is a better opportunity than owning 1 of 5 assets that is traded in an ecosystem of a few thousand traders with no utility outside of trading between owners.

Founder’s Packs

The Founder’s Packs are an awesome opportunity to get day 1 access into the beta, celebrate your purchase as a founder in both our communication channels and in the game, and own some very cool NFTs to stand out. There is a cap set on each of the four packs but we aren’t revealing that supply cap for a few reasons.

The primary reason is that we actually don’t want a small group of buyers to do the math and buy out the entire inventory. This is important because we want this game in the hands of a strong early user base to jump start the game. This creates the basis of a long-term community and a healthy economy that will drive value to Blankos asset holders long-term vs being narrowly held by a few thousand traders that might not be planning to play the game at all. If we have too many asset holders who don’t play the game, then we don’t have a game. It’s the usage of these items by mainstream gamers that helps create value.

Having said that, we have set these caps to what we anticipate will ultimately be significantly less than 1% of the total player base by the end of 2021. From our experience, game items with <1% ownership are indeed rare to players and are sought after more and more over the lifetime of a game thus driving value over time for NFT owners.

Where we’re going

Something we like to say at Mythical is that we are not building blockchain games, we are building mass market games that use blockchain technology. This is an important distinction, because it means we’re not just bringing blockchain to mass market for the first time, but we’re also introducing mass market concepts to blockchain for the first time.

Here’s what you should know:

We are building games where NFTs are at the center of our game economies. Economies that enable us to create open ecosystems where liquidity, value, and digital assets can flow freely and globally between developers, creators, and players.

We are building this new economy with the goal of introducing it to millions of mainstream gamers. That means we need to design the economy from that perspective. If we hit this goal, then the definitions of scarcity and limited-quantity are on a completely different scale. When we hit our stride through launch and into our first season, we expect our Founder’s Packs to be some of the most limited and coveted items ever made.

A few months ago, Blankos Block Party was featured in some of the biggest media channels in the games industry — a first for the blockchain industry. Mainstream gamers from around the globe watched our trailer, and joined the conversation on Discord. We saw crypto gamers and mainstream gamers come together to share their excitement for the same game.

With that said, as we go through beta and our next milestones, there’s a lot of awesome stuff coming from us. We’ll be bringing concepts to the table that will challenge the status quo and be new to everyone. We are breaking new ground.