Game Developer GUNZILLA Raised $46 Million to redefine the Battle Royale genre with the help of big investors in the GameFi space such as Animoca Brands & Twitch Co-Founder Justin Kan.
How they plan to do it and why I'm excited.
(Spoiler, its NFT's 😏)
Gunzilla is a AAA Game Developer working on a UE5, Cyberpunk-styled BR title called "Off The Grid" or OTG for short.
Fun Fact: The "Chief Visionary Officer" of OTG is Neill Blomkamp, the Writer/Director of District 9, Elysium, Chappie, and others.
While OTG itself features a constantly evolving map with 150 players fighting for glory, what I am most interested in is their internal item trading system 👀
or as they put it...
"Core to the experience and deep narrative structure is the unique way in which players can craft, customize, and trade their in-game items with each other."
Unique digital player ownership you say?
Color me intrigued!
To accomplish digital ownership GUNZILLA has described their "GunZ" platform:
"This new round of investment will allow the studio to build out their new platform called GunZ, empowering players by granting them complete ownership over their in-game possessions...
"GunZ will be the foundation for “Off The Grid” (OTG). One of the OTG’s standout mechanics is “in-game item trading”, the first game where players will be able to buy new in-game items from other players who collected them in the game or acquired them from each other..."
"Trading will be handled via an internal blockchain-based marketplace or any third-party marketplace which supports NFT technology."
So, GunZ will be the platform that allows for digital in-game items to be NFT's and based on their verbiage...
The implementation will NOT utilize some form of Play to Earn.
Earn an item and optionally trade it to other players.
Simple. ✅
Clean. ✅
Straightforward. ✅
Exactly what more games need to be doing:
Relying on gameplay first and adding a layer of digital ownership second.
The press release continues:
"Gunzilla assures gamers that they will never sell NFTs directly to their player community, nor will they hide progression or any game features behind a monetized paywall, the trading is entirely optional."
No NFT pre-sale. no change to the User Experience.
This is what GameFi needs more of.
Developers making quality games with real player ownership in a non-intrusive, totally decoupled way.
I've signed up for updates on OTG and will release more news as it comes.
Thanks for reading!
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More Blockchain Gaming/Web3 content coming soon! ✌️
-Darce ❤️