Full text overview:
• Game content > profit.
• Dragginz, a Web3 game, is being built, a blockchain game that combines the elements of "pet breeding" and "open world". The goal is to attract players from all over the world without the need for crypto knowledge. The reverse gas model of the Internet Computer blockchain allows players to pay gas fees without knowing that the game is built on the blockchain.
• Dragginz will remain a free-to-play game, but there will be no sponsorship or advertising, and the only reason players stake tokens to participate in DAO governance is to be optimistic about the future of the game and want to participate in the construction of the game.
• Before the game came out, the governance token first went up 20 times.
• Hope to achieve with Dragginz what was not possible in Neopets.
In November 1999, a web-based virtual pet development game called Neopets was launched, where players could nurture and care for, chat and play games with their cartoon pets. You can also use the in-game virtual currency "Neo Points" to trade various game items.
At the time, founders Adam Powell and Donna Williams were students at the University of Nottingham, and their initial goal was simply to "keep university students entertained and possibly make some money from banner ads".
At that time, Internet technology was just becoming popular, and there was relatively little competition in Internet games, and the game was a great success immediately after its launch. The explosion of word of mouth and word of mouth made "Neo Pet" reach 600,000 daily players in less than a month. At its peak, the game had 140 million players and 5 billion views per month.
Just a few months later, Neopets received significant investment. The money was there, the team was there, but Adam wasn't doing well. While he believes game content > profitable, the pressure to generate revenue forced the team to turn their attention to inserting various sponsored ads into the game.
After being acquired and leaving Neopets, Adam and his longtime partner Donna Williams founded game studio Meteor Games in 2007, releasing hugely commercial successes such as Paradise Island, Serf Wars, and Ranch Town. Paradise Island, in particular, had more than 400,000 daily active players at its peak.
For a long time after shutting down Meteor Games, Adam and Donna seemed to fall silent. However, after talking to Donna in depth, I learned that they started working on the Ethereum blockchain for a long time.
In 2020, with the popularity of blockchain gaming, Adam announced a new game in development, Dragginz. This is a blockchain game built on the Internet Computer (hereinafter referred to as IC) blockchain. The game is described as "<尼奥宠物>Met<我的世界>", pet raising + open world.
Although Dragginz did not become famous with Adam and "Neo Pet", it set off a wave of discussion in the IC community after the governance token SNS-1 rose from the initial price of 1 ICP to an all-time high of 830 ICP, nearly a thousand-fold "increase myth", and almost all community members were looking forward to the launch of the game, hoping to rival the original "Neo Pet". (More on SNS-1 later)
As Dominic Williams, founder of the DFINITY Foundation, puts it, "Dragginz is a massively multiplayer online game developed by the development team of Neopets. Neopets is the first massively multiplayer online game with nearly 100 million users. It was absolutely revolutionary at the time. I'm sure Dragginz will be wonderful too. When the game officially enters the mainstream world, the total number of IC network users can quickly increase to millions. ”
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Donna Powell. Yes, the two who have known each other for 12 years entered the palace of marriage in 2008. Let's explore Adam and Donna's journey with Neopets and the story behind Dragginz.
Game content > profit, and in 2014 it was considering doing chain games
It should be said that Adam Powell was introduced to blockchain very early, at least before 2017.
In the eyes of Axie Infinity co-founder Jizhoz, Adam is an early ETH Maximalist and is very bullish on the development of DeFi. In 2018, he also expressed his optimism about Axie to Jiz.
In 2017, on the Reddit subsection of the early DeFi protocol 0x, a user named TommyEconomics posted that his order was filled at a loss of 500 ETH because the order price was written an extra zero. He hopes the counterparty to the deal will contact him and help reverse the mistake. Soon, a user with the screen name borovan replied that he was one of the counterparties and was willing to return the 163 ETH received for the transaction to Tommy Economics.
It has to be said that the crypto world is sometimes big, but sometimes small.
At that time, Tommy Economics founded Energi, a public chain focusing on transaction security, in the same year.
As a counterparty, Borovan is actually Adam Powell.
"You're a hot man!"
"I spent most of my childhood playing with Neo Pets. Thank you for making me happy! ”
Hello, Donna, it is an honor to have a conversation with you. Can you tell us about you and Adam, and the background of the team members?
Adam started writing games at the age of 5. From writing children's game books, then to developing MUD-type games (multi-user instant virtual games, often based on text descriptions), and then web-based games. During Neopets, we also designed console games, board games, and trading card games.
We love creating entertainment that makes us feel good, which is why our games are family-friendly, fair, and not profit-driven.
We are working with a studio made up of many former Meteor Games employees to develop Dragginz. Their addition brings with them a wide range of expertise, ranging from developing the real-time strategy game Syndicate at Bullfrog Productions to developing the mobile game Monopoly Go! and Scrabble Go! 》。
All members of the team are avid gamers, and some of our favorite games include Dungeon Keepers, Camelot's Dark Ages, World of Warcraft, Slime Ranch, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Gravekeeper. I'm sure you'll see these games in Dragginz.
The number of players in Neopets reached 140 million in the early 2000s, what an astonishing number. Can you tell us about your journey to developing and managing Neopets?
Adam and I co-built Neopets in 1999, and initially, the two of us worked as developers, database engineers, game designers, writers, artists, graphic designers, and community managers until we raised money to scale the team. When we scaled up, Adam started focusing on development and I focused on the design side, but we always worked out the creative direction together.
As you can imagine, in 1999, there were no cloud services then, so we had to buy, install and manage servers ourselves. We encountered a lot of hard technical limitations early in the development of Neopets. Scalability is a complete nightmare, with repeated downtime and data loss often occurring. Whenever something goes wrong, we have to drive to the data center to fix it. In contrast, I'm thankful that now with Internet Computer, it's fully scalable and doesn't require a data center or even a cloud service. All components of the game can be stored on the blockchain.
However, the rapid growth of "Neopet" surprised us. I think the reason for the success is that we update the game content every day. We set up puzzles for players to solve, and sometimes they are so complex that they require players to compile code hidden in HTML pages to find the answers!
As the popularity of Neopets grew, so did the pressure to generate revenue. There was a time when most of our employees were looking for sponsorship for the game, making it difficult to update the game's content. That's one of the reasons why Adam and I are so opposed to putting profit above game content. It was really stressful for us at the time because we were basically fighting with the management to get more resources to develop the core content of the game!
Anyway, Neopets isn't all bad, the community is great. We learned a lot and intend to build on Dragginz.
I heard you guys developed Dragginz inspired by Neopets?
Dragginz was actually our original idea for Neopets, but it became different after actually building Neopets. We also tried to make the idea a reality again at Meteor Games, but it still hasn't happened. This is our third attempt to make our dream game, and back in 2014 we considered building it in Web3.
Please tell us more about Dragginz's gameplay.
Dragginz is a free-to-play MMO where everyone comes to the game world with a dragon egg, and you can craft items to hatch, evolve your pet, and then go on adventures in the huge game world, or, just trade.
Dragginz's goal is to provide players with a variety of ways to play. Depending on the interests, you may become the one with the strongest Dragginz, the most powerful spells, the most delicious recipes, etc. It's a virtual world, and we want to try to give each player the feeling of being an independent participant, rather than just following a standard upgrade route.
In the Reddit section of "Neopets", many old players are not optimistic about Dragginz because it contains NFT elements, what do you think of this?
Many people outside the crypto industry believe that NFTs are just pictures, more precisely related to fraud. In Dragginz, however, NFTs are different.
Let me give you a few examples.
In the UK, there is an old-fashioned party game called Beetle Drive where players take turns rolling dice and drawing beetle body parts. As shown in the following figure.
In our game, each pet is like a beetle drive, and every part is an NFT. You have to pay two Flows (mana in Dragginz) to roll the dice once, once an hour, to draw parts. If you collect all the parts of your pet, you will unlock and use it.
Players can sell a certain part of the NFT or sell a partially completed pet as an NFT. This is valuable for other players because it takes time and luck to pump the part. This is essentially a way to pay for shortcuts.
Let's take another example. In Dragginz, you can create spells that serve a variety of purposes. Ordinary players can create a floating cloud and water all plants for a week. If you're really not interested in tending your garden on a daily basis, but you still want to harvest the special ingredients you need for cooking, processing, etc., then this may be ideal.
If players really focus on spellcrafting, they might be able to create clouds that can last for a month. It can then be converted into NFTs and sold to other players who need it.
Another spell that players can cast is mana batteries. The player needs to create Flows and then populate more Flows. These fully charged mana batteries can be sold as NFTs to other players who need them.
In Dragginz, the list of possibilities for NFT use cases is constantly expanding...
One thing you might notice is that in these examples, we, as developers, don't directly benefit from the sale of NFTs. Only those who invest time and effort in creating NFTs will benefit from the sale. We didn't design Dragginz to make quick money from NFT sales. Instead, we're seeing that if communities want to take advantage of NFTs, they can be a part of a thriving gaming economy.
Dragginz's tokenomics and development
In May 2021, the Internet Computer mainnet was officially launched, and the price of the native token ICP was extremely high. Although the token price was subsequently manipulated and plummeted, the creator DFINITY Foundation did not choose Rug, but continued to develop according to the rules of the roadmap.
SNS (Service Nervous System) is an important step on the roadmap, and all ecological dApps can launch decentralized token sales on SNS, turning into a fully decentralized DAO governance model. The SNS-1 token is an experiment before the official launch of SNS, all ICP holders can participate in the exchange, 1 SNS-1=1 ICP. It can be said that SNS-1 is the first DAO in the IC ecosystem and the first fully on-chain DAO ever.
However, because it is only an experiment, there is no direction for development. In the months that followed, community members proposed to create DEXs, integrate AI, and empower SNS-1.
Fast forward to June this year, and SNS-1, which has been listed on various DEXs of ICs, suddenly soared after 4-5 months in the price range of 30-50 ICP. There are "whales" who buy a lot of SNS-1 and stake it for 100 years without voting rewards. This "whale" is Adam. He accumulated enough SNS-1 that the voting rights in his hands could pass any proposal. This means that Adam is buying full creative control of SNS-1 with the goal of using SNS-1 as Dragginz's governance token.
In anticipation of reduced liquidity and strong empowerment, the price of SNS-1 soared from 47 ICP in early June to an all-time high of 830 ICP (about $2,400), an increase of nearly 20 times.
Dragginz is said to have been in development back in 2017, so when did you guys start looking to adopt blockchain? And, in the end, why did you choose Internet Computer?
In 2014, when we started looking at Ethereum, we were very impressed. The possibilities of this new technology are fascinating.
After a year or two of preparation, we encountered some obstacles. The main problem at the time was scalability, and the programming language we needed simply didn't exist. After encountering so many obstacles, development work was basically suspended. Then we met Dominic Williams, the founder of Internet Computer, in 2017, who introduced us to ICs that sounded perfect for the game we wanted to build.
Since then, we have been following the IC's progress with interest, and about a year ago we thought it was mature enough to begin our full-scale development work.
There really isn't another blockchain right now that can come close to Internet Computer. It is far ahead of other public blockchains in terms of efficiency, transaction speed, carbon footprint, security, and scalability. The reverse gas model is also great for us because it means that the average player doesn't need to know anything about paying gas to just play the game.
You acquired a lot of SNS-1 and wanted SNS-1 to become Dragginz's token. Why did you do that? Maybe issuing a new token on SNS wouldn't be a better option?
WE TALKED TO THE DFINITY FOUNDATION ABOUT HOW TO CONDUCT OUR OWN SNS DECENTRALIZED TOKEN OFFERING, BUT THE MORE WE DIGGED IN, THE MORE IT FELT THAT THIS WAS NOT THE RIGHT PATH FOR US. We didn't want to raise money for Dragginz, all we needed was a token. Since SNS-1 already exists and is decentralized enough, we adopted it. Although there were some limitations (for example, we could not change the name SNS-1 to DKP-Draggin Karma Points until the DFINITY Foundation added a name change feature to SNS), in most cases it was a good fit for our needs.
Your team recently initiated a discussion on changing SNS-1 (DKP) tokenomics on the DFINITY Developer Forum, and many community members have made suggestions, so do you have a clear plan for this at this time?
Yes, we do, but at the moment I can't reveal anything about tokenomics (according to our legal counsel). I can say that the discussions on the DFINITY Developer Forum have been very helpful to us and we have documented everyone's feedback. Hopefully next week I can make a big announcement about this!
Note: At the time of editing this article, Dragginz has made an announcement about changes to tokenomics, as follows.
• Modify the token name of SNS-1 to DKP after the DFINITY Foundation added a name change feature to SNS
• Since SNS-1/DKP totals only 10,000 pieces, it is often a fraction like 0.00x when added to the actual use in the game. Therefore, the team plans to adjust the total number of tokens to 1 billion on October 23. (The number of holders will also be expanded by 100,000 times)
• SNS-1/DKP does not inflate. That is, additional tokens will not be minted as the original plan for the operating costs and development expenses of the development team, which are supported by the development team selling official items in the game. (The premise of merchandising is that the game content is good enough, and if the game is not good enough, then no one will want to buy anything)
SNS-1/DKP also does not have a deflationary mechanism. The only slight deflation is to prevent harmful transactions, and when the transaction occurs, a transaction fee of 0.001 DKP will be burned.
• Staking SNS-1/DKP to SNS has a voting governance incentive, but not a token reward, but some kind of reward in the game mechanics.
• The team will still retain 52% of the voting rights in order to have full control over the game's content and avoid the fate of Neopets.
In addition to tokenomics, how is Dragginz's development work currently progressing? When do I expect to go live?
Maybe the second half of 2024 or the beginning of 2025? Development is progressing well at the moment, but we don't want to commit to go-live.
We'll be doing a very small test at the end of the year, and it's not even fair to call it alpha, as it could raise expectations too high. This will be a very basic game loop and concept test, with the main purpose of doing a small-scale test of scalability and initial user experience. We don't want to create something that slows down development for the sake of a single test, so it's really just a snippet.
Dragginz's focus is on adapting to mainstream players
Dragginz will be fully managed by the DAO. Can you tell us more about it? In addition to community autonomy, what advantages do you think Dragginz has over other blockchain games?
DAO means that the community can make meaningful decisions. Holders of the DKP (SNS-1) will be able to vote on the development roadmap, choosing which pets to add, which skins to add, which storylines to develop, etc.
Dragginz is a game that can be played for free, and the only reason to buy DKP is because you like the game and you want to participate in the development. There will never be any advertising, sponsorship in the game. It's a self-contained game world.
I think another big advantage of Dragginz is logging in using Internet Computer's Internet Identity system. While this is one of the barriers for mainstream players to get into the game, it's also the only place where players will be able to notice that they are using a fully on-chain game. However, the security advantages of using internet identities make it worthwhile for us to do. With Internet identity, your identity is completely private and even our developers cannot access your personal information. All we know is that the computer's identity is 100% proof that you are a particular ID.
As a successful Web2 game founder, developer, and designer, I believe you have a big idea for Dragginz. So when the game goes live, what are your plans to attract mainstream players outside of Crypto?
We wanted Dragginz to provide a seamless experience where players didn't even know they were playing a blockchain game. We're really working on integrating internet identity login to make it look more like part of our website. The DFINITY Foundation is also working to make Internet identity more user-friendly.
We wanted to create a game with great content that would appeal to players from all over the world without the need for crypto knowledge. We'll be promoting Dragginz at mainstream gaming conferences and listening to our community. If something discourages players, we'll change it!
In 2021, the popularity of P2E took a toll on traditional gaming, with a flood of hot money, users, and new projects pouring into the blockchain gaming/GameFi space. However, with the advent of the bear market, both the trend and the number of users are now very low. How do you see the future of this field?
I do believe that the game move to Web3 is a natural progression. The best blockchain to date is the Internet Computer. You can't really make big games with any other blockchain.
If an attractive game is developed, mainstream players will naturally turn to Web3. The "attraction" here must be high-quality games, not quick profits through tokens or NFTs.
Web3 is still in its early stages, imagine this is the early days of the internet. At least for the Dragginz team. We are entering a new era where truly exciting things lie ahead!
Concentrate:
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