F1 DELTA TIME (F1DT) is an F1 racing-themed web game that came online in 2019, and if you knew about the game before you read this article, I guess you're not an F1 racing fan, but a friend interested in NFT.
Why? Because even an all-round website like Wikipedia, when you search for "F1 DELTA TIME", can only find the corresponding entry in its German version of the wiki, which is unreasonable for a game licensed by the FIA's top event - it is reasonable that this level of IP licensing should have a matching investment of promotional resources, and a WIKI page is almost a basic operation.
Unless — the game's operators just want to let specific people know it exists.
Yes, F1DT is such a special existence, it is arguably one of the pioneers of NFT games, the world's first batch of NFT games, launched in 2019.
After three years of operation, it announced that it was out of service.
NFT games are actually a novelty for most people, so in this delicate atmosphere of "I haven't started, he's over" atmosphere, we have a very rare opportunity to observe.
The game takes place in a top-down perspective, accelerating or slowing down the color-changing arrows on the track to control the car.
Here's a bit of how F1DT works: players can get F1 drivers, cars and accessories by unboxing or trading with other players, and combine them to participate in different required events. The actual game process is operated by the player, but the requirements for operation are very low, and you only need to follow the on-screen prompts to speed up and slow down.
Drivers, race cars and parts purchased through cash out of the box or the game trading coin "REVV" can be put on the market for trading, and the trading currency can be exchanged for real money through the digital coin trading platform, which is the "PLAY TO EARN" (play to earn) that we have recently heard a lot.
As one of the pioneers of playing and earning games, F1DT can be said to be the founder of the NFT game business model: if players want to achieve "play and earn", they must first have a car and at least one driver, which means that you must invest a sum of money to open the box in advance, or go to the trading market to buy cars and drivers with cash - this is not very similar to the business model of Axie Infinity, which is popular in Southeast Asia, but can only be said to be exactly the same.
So far, the highest transaction in F1DT is a $110,000 diamond-set racing car "1-1-1", although this is not comparable to the current millions of NFT items, but in 2019's NFT circle, it is indeed a mythical presence.
That's the "1-1-1" car that first sold for $110,000 and then rose to $360,000.
And with F1DT announcing the end of its licensing partnership with the FIA, the game also ended operations. However, unlike the "suspension announcement" of ordinary games that we are familiar with, the general game suspension announcement will be at least three months or even half a year in advance, and F1DT only has 1 day from the release of the suspension notice to the shutdown of the server: March 15 tweeted the announcement of the next day's shutdown, so suddenly.
"We are very sorry... Can't be renewed... Operations will cease on March 16, but we will ensure that players' assets..."
Although they showed great regret and reluctance in the official announcement, the price action of REVV does not lie: since reaching a small peak last November, it has been all the way down, from 1 REVV token exchange of 0.45 US dollars to less than 0.1 US dollars, in the words of the coin circle: leek coins, cut and run.
Numbers don't lie, real money doesn't.
Of course, unlike the leek coins that really cut and run and buy and sell with a hammer, Animoca Brands, as the operator of F1DT, does not only have F1DT, an NFT game, they have several NFT games with different themes operating at the same time. REVV is the universal token of the three racing games F1DT, MOTO GP and REVV Racing on Polygon, so they also give a compensation scheme for game suspension, which is simply to convert the player's assets in F1DT directly into "equivalent assets" in REVV Racing Polygon. It should be noted that REVV Racing Polygon is a completely original racing game with no licensing fees.
The gameplay of REVV Racing Polygon is not much different from F1DT.
That is, in this way, the developer forcibly completed the migration of players from one NFT game to another. Although some players have expressed dissatisfaction, believing that this method is too simple and rude, and there is no choice at all, to tell the truth, as a player of an NFT game, there should be such a consciousness. For example, when we spend money on shopping, we often console ourselves that my money has not decreased, but has become another form of existence to accompany me - and for NFT players, your NFT items have not really disappeared, but have become... Another in-game item.
As for whether you are satisfied with this change, it is really not something you can control.
Recently there are two new things about NFT games, one is that the big manufacturer Ubisoft experimented with NFT items on their "Ghost Recon Breakpoint" for several months, last week announced the suspension of the game's update, the announcement of Ubisoft thanked the players who purchased NFT items in this game, saying that "you have a part of the game, but also left their own footprints in the history of this game", I don't know how this group of players feel, maybe they will ask, can footprints be exchanged for money?
Another thing is that Ronin Network, Axie Infinity's key trading platform, claimed to have been hacked at the end of March and stole about $600 million worth of cryptocurrency, which caused many "players" who made a living "playing and making money" on Axie Infinity to suffer huge losses and even ruin their homes.
Ronin Network has now urgently shut down their trading system for security upgrades, but at the same time, players on this platform can only watch the token price plummet and can not do anything, which is also the largest "theft case" in the history of the development of decentralized currency trading platforms - the reason for the quotation marks is precisely because the decentralized currency is difficult to trace, so that people can not judge the authenticity of this matter, and the user's assets can not be recovered. Probably the only fact that can be affirmed in the whole thing.