With a valuation of nearly $100 million and 120,000 Steam wishlists, can Abyss World, the flagship blockchain game on Sui, make a name for itself?

Can Abyss World, the leading blockchain game on Sui with a valuation of $100 million and 120,000 Steam wishlists, establish itself?

The author and the projects mentioned in this article have no association with any interests. The content of this article is only for information sharing and does not promote or endorse any business or investment behavior. Readers are required to strictly comply with local laws and regulations and not engage in any illegal financial activities.

On May 24th, Web3 game studio Metagame Industries announced that it had completed a strategic financing round with a valuation of nearly $100 million, with participating institutions including the Sui development team Mysten Labs, and game publisher Funplus/Xterio Ecosystem Fund, among others. Metagame Industries’ AAA-level game Abyss World also announced that it will hold related activities on June 1st. In addition to the endorsement of a luxurious financing team, it also has 120,000 players on the Steam wish list, and with the community’s question of “whether it can reverse the trend of the Sui ecosystem or the GameFi track”, the game’s expectations are high.

Abyss World is a third-person ARPG open-world game, relying on the high-performance public chain Sui network, and later expanding to become a multi-chain game parallel to Sui and Polygon. The game is set in a fictional world called “Nordinia” full of ancient secrets, where players can explore this huge world and step by step unlock the “Secrets of the Abyss”.

• Modular account abstraction overview: what is it? What are the developments?
• Derivative DEX Battle: Kwenta and Level Surpass GMX in Weekly Trading Volume
• Zero Knowledge Machine Learning (zkML): Privacy and Technology Coexist in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Game Basics

1. Hero

The game’s hero character is a combination of profession, race, and characteristics.

(1) The professions include Warrior, Musha, Mages, Engineer, and Explorer. Different professions have different attributes, which can be divided into external attributes (physical strength, wisdom, magic, and luck) and internal attributes. The parameters of external attributes determine combat power and the minimum requirements for weapons and skills, while internal attributes refer to the character’s combat skills.

(2) Races are divided into Bannerlord, Human, Orne, Seracoron, and Sigma Elves. Different races exhibit different combat characteristics in the game competition.

(3) Each hero has its own quirks/characteristics, which can be positive or negative, such as “Captain” who adds buffs to the team, and “Fight to the Death” who will not retreat due to serious injuries (that is, more likely to die).

2. Gameplay

The gameplay can be divided into two categories: PvE mode, in which players explore the in-game environment, and PvP mode, which takes place in The Abyss Colosseum and The Battle Arena. The Abyss Colosseum is driven by AI after players have been matched.

3. Assets

Unlike the typical dual-token model, the homogenous assets that can generate value in Abyss World can be understood as “Token+Points+Stablecoin.” In the early stages of the game, there is only one native token, the fixed supply AWT, which is not directly used for governance or equity tokens. The second token is the in-game currency MGC, which only exists as game points in the early stages and is not yet on the blockchain, meaning it lacks speculative properties. The third is the stablecoin USDT/USDC, which is used for pricing and trading all in-game assets.

NFT assets can also be roughly divided into two types. The first type is weapon or hero NFTs, which are referred to as commodity NFTs or resource-generating NFTs. The second type is non-weapon or hero NFTs, which are referred to as asset-based NFTs.

Game and Economic System

Depending on different game modes, players can be roughly divided into two categories: casual players who focus on PvE and competitive players who focus on PvP. Casual and competitive players achieve balance by exchanging economically with each other without colliding in the same game. Casual players can obtain the game currency MGC, which has no speculative properties, by completing PvE daily tasks. Using MGC points and collecting the necessary game props (NFT fragments), they can be used to forge weapon or hero NFTs. Casual players can sell these weapon or hero NFTs on the in-game trading market to make a profit. Competitive players need to buy better weapon or hero NFTs on the trading market to improve their lineup’s combat power and increase their chances of winning in order to achieve a good ranking on different PvP competition leaderboards.

These weapon/hero NFTs forged can be called resource-generating NFTs. To forge these NFTs, it is necessary to go to a specific NFT factory in the game. To pay for the factory’s income, 3-5% of the forging cost is required. In the early stages, the management of the factory belongs to the game project party, so the forging cost of the factory is part of the game’s profit (the forging cost should be priced in MGC, which also provides a basis for the future MGC to go on the chain); in the future, the profit distribution of the factory will be extended to long-term partners and stakeholders of the game. The forged NFTs can be traded on the in-game C2C NFT market, and players can freely trade these NFTs using the USDT/USDC stablecoin. The transaction fees generated by the transactions will be paid to the foundation and its partners. Therefore, the C2C NFT market transaction fees are another source of profit for the game.

MGC is mainly responsible for weapon or hero NFT and PVE rewards, while AWT is mainly responsible for non-weapon or hero asset NFT and incentives for core players.

First of all, AWT serves as the raw material for asset NFT. In the scenarios given in the official documentation, it is explained as follows:

When players complete the season tasks and receive treasure chests, they need to use keys to open them. For a period of time, ownership of the key can only be generated by destroying AWT and the key can be freely traded on the market; players holding the key will be able to receive transaction fees for the items in the treasure box.

The official promises to design multiple similar scenarios in the game, which can attract more participants who contribute value to the game without destroying the traditional player gaming experience. Although the examples given by the official do not explicitly state it, it can be inferred that both the key and the items in the treasure box will belong to asset NFTs, and the destroyed AWT is dynamic. The value of the key and the scarcity/functional effects of the items in the treasure box are complementary. The more scarce or powerful the NFTs that can be opened in the treasure box, the higher the potential value of the key. Since pricing and trading in the transaction market are denominated in stablecoins, this also anchors a dynamic real value for AWT. The more powerful the items that can be opened, the higher the value of the key, and the more AWT will be destroyed.

Secondly, AWT will allocate 40% of the total supply as incentives for the core players of the game ecosystem, including players who complete in-game tasks weekly, PVP rewards, game guild operation rewards, proposal rewards and third-party market liquidity rewards.

Governance System

The governance system of Abyss World is also worth mentioning, abandoning the 1 Token 1 vote governance model, not allocating governance rights based on the number of AWTs held by users, but valuing players’ achievements in the game, and nominating governance seats based on multiple in-game indicators. This avoids the dilemma of large holders who are not players, and ensures that large holders do not have too much say in proposals. These in-game indicators may include players in the top of the season PVP rankings, players holding Gazer/Genesis NFTs, or players holding key asset NFTs. In addition, after AWT issuance and circulation, an Abyss World DAO will be formed.

According to online videos and community testing of the demo, the game Abyss World, which uses the Unreal 5 engine, has a high level of completeness and its graphics are not inferior to some AAA titles. Therefore, the game requires high computer configurations. In addition, the Abyss World team also attaches great importance to attracting Web2 players, cooperating with well-known game platform EPIC, and promoting and displaying on multiple well-known game media such as IGN to demonstrate their determination.

Of course, strictly speaking, Abyss World still belongs to a Web2.5 game, that is, the assets are on the chain, but the game is not on the chain. From the economic system of Abyss World, it can be seen that the team behind it has deep thoughts on the dual-token model of chain games and has given its own “non-governance token + game currency points + stable currency pricing and trading + classified NFT” solution based on this model. However, it is essentially a repair of the dual-token model rather than a breakthrough. Of course, this is not a problem of a single game, but a dilemma faced by the entire blockchain game industry. The logic of Abyss World is what capital used to say in the past, that blockchain games should have the same graphics quality standards as traditional games, and prioritize game quality and player experience, with tokenomics as a supplement.

In addition, although Abyss World initially tried to build around the Sui chain, in the later planning, it may gradually build some genesis assets on Polygon due to better liquidity on the EVM chain and native stablecoins, and Sui will be re-planned for game settlement, which may cause problems in the future regarding cross-chain security of EVM and non-EVM assets, and incompatible single wallet.

Reference:

https://medium.com/@ABYSS_WORLD/tokenomics-update-ido-de3a3915eb37

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!