I first jumped into the game late June 2021, starting to accrue the P2E rewards for XP progression in the game. The actual mobile CDH has nothing to do with blockchain; it appears that the game creators have used it as a part of their marketing strategy to advertise an upcoming PC title.
A certain amount of in-game XP was rewarded with a share of TOWER tokens. I’ll talk about the TOWER token utility in a moment (TLDR: NO meaningful utility). The XP threshold required for the reward used to be 250,000 back in June last year. It has been gradually increasing since then, arriving at 600,000XP. Considering the influx of players, each player kept “earning” less TOWER each month. On the other hand, the company behind CDH had rolled out a Daily Reward Chest that rewarded players for consecutive in-game achievements, which compensated for decreasing individual rewards.
This September though, the crushing news came in without a due warning: reward collection would be impossible if there were no NFT cards or Tower Tickets in a contestor’s wallet.
Here is a little backstory. Months before I started playing CDH, the dev team sold a bunch of mystery Chests for some 200+ BUSD each – limited edition, of course. As you may remember, the market sentiment pushed NFT prices really high at that time, and the Bitcoin bull run was still going on. The Chest owners were able to unpack the contents just recently, and, yeah, they found a randomized selection of NFT cards inside. I wonder if the card owners knew that their only use would be merely to keep players hooked enabling them to earn some TOWER scraps (or stake cards for increased rewards).
The announcement provoked a wave of speculation. The floor card prices jumped up from 0.01 to 0.04 ETH. My opinion? Overpriced. NFA.
Prior to making NFT ownership a necessary requirement to claim rewards, the team implemented KYC verification with selfies and IDs. I thought back then, ‘Maybe roll out a barely playable blockchain game prior to such serious measures against bots?’
No doubt, the mobile CDH game is masterfully designed in terms of graphics and mechanics. And I had my fun with it. Got to the level 70, feeling somewhat overpowered and bored by now. Still, it is an ordinary mobile game.
Like I wrote in my previous, old posts on CDH [1][2], I like Tower Defense. I’m not counting on a sky-high ROI.
At this point, I “earned” about 1,700 TOWER. It is pointless to talk about TOWER price right now. Most coins and tokens are going through their local all-time lows, even if they have unique utility within their network ecosystems.
As for the TOWER utility, one can spend it on CDH in-game items, which increases the said player’s VIP level, as if they were paying in fiat. Cool, right?
More than one year of super-secretive blockchain PC game development, and all the milestones I can remember are:
- Two seasons to port TOWER from Ethereum to Polygon
- Daily Chest reward linked to the mobile CDH game
- Sell some more NFTs to keep the pot boiling
- KYC
- Be very fruitful announcing partnerships with Ubisoft, Atari, and whatnot
- No prototype, no mockup, no alpha, no nothing that I'm aware of concerning the "upcoming blockchain PC game".
Which naturally causes discontent among players, like myself, who expected to see some faster development progression and certainly did not expect being dumped with a prohibitive entry barrier of around $60 (per cheapest NFT card) plus Ethereum fee. All things considered, I am going to hold TOWER and see.