I’m hoping to get some feedback on a proposal I’ve been planning out for a while. The main idea is a Trading Card Game (much like Hearthstone / GWENT / Elder Scrolls Legends, but powered by NFTs to allow players to trade with one another/sell their cards). The end result of the grant is a going to be an open source game that is freely accessible by players and that landowners can deploy on their land + can develop and sell their own cards for. TCGs are crazy popular and I’ve put together a powerhouse of a team to cover development of the game’s framework and community along the entire course of the project.
We are also planning on becoming self-sustaining by selling NFTs that provide access to more cards, allowing us to fund further development of the TCG without additional grants!
You can check out the full proposal here; feel free to DM me if you have any feedback or want to discuss it further!
One additional thing that I am curious about is whether this proposal would fall under the ‘in-world content’ or ‘platform’ grant category. While we’re going to be hosting our own content/events, the project is also going to be open source and we’ll be encouraging creators/landowners to engage with the framework. Users will be able to customize (creating/selling their own cards) and deploy their own versions of the game (or just the ‘vanilla’ game) on their land or worlds. This meas we’ll be maintaining the servers/repo and generating documentation around how to use the framework. So, there is a lot of overlap between the two categories.
Thanks for the replies guys! It’s all covered in the proposal, but I’ll break it down below (I know the doc is a little long xD):
There is no plan to include ‘Play To Earn’ in the framework’s standard deployment. Our current approach is going to be a more traditional:
Free To Play:
Anyone can play the game by picking from pre-designed decks (1 for each faction). ‘Free players’ cannot create custom decks or interact with the server (view stats, create presets, etc.), but can still participate in events and battle their friends. This effectively acts as the ‘trial’ period for the game, allowing users to play the game before purchasing their own decks/cards.
Pay For Account:
When a user buys a TCG NFT (either deck, booster pack, rare card, etc) they are treated as a ‘paid player’ and can interact with the server. These users will be able to create custom decks, their stats will actively be recorded, and their account will be able to level up (unlocking access to additional free cards and maybe cosmetic effects/fields).
Instead of luring in players with the promise of financial rewards by playing the game, we are going to be make the gameplay / entertainment value the primary selling point of the game. We want our users to play the game because it is fun, not because they have a financial incentive to be there. Needless to say, this should also reduce or outright remove the bots that are usually present in P2E games (making our metrics significantly more honest in regards to actual player count).
[I don’t want to start a fight over the viability of P2E games: it just isn’t a good fit for this game.]