I’ve been playing this game on the EOS and WAX blockchains since the game launched in May 2018. Back then it was potentially ground breaking and I was reasonably excited about it for the first couple of years, but it’s starting to look a bit dated. First there was the Wild West world, followed by Yukon, followed by the short lived Tombstone and Eagle City worlds….and now they’ve launched the Grand Land. If I’m being brutally honest there hasn’t been a significant game feature enhancement for years now. The new worlds have really just been tweaks of existing formulas and mechanics. So where do I see it going?
I’m not totally giving up on this game, but it is starting to look a bit tired and I’m getting a bit tired of it too. Other blockchain based games seem to have leapfrogged it in a number of ways and it probably hasn’t been helped by the poor performance of the EOS blockchain technology since….well, long before Dan Larimer left. The new Grand Land world offered a bit of hope, but after playing for a couple of months I am finding it pretty uninspiring so I’ve sold up the last of my land and am now playing as a nomad wood cutter. I imagine that in the next month or so some of the Grand Land gold mines will start producing and that locked up gold (PGL) will start finding it’s way back into the market. In other words, the price of PGL may well have peaked for now as the new world hype wears off and more PGL supply hits the exchanges.
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It’s had a solid run and I still have plots on the original 2 worlds that seem to be slowly bleeding out. I’d sell them if I could get a decent price, but I can’t so I’ll just keep working them into the ground until they finally become unprofitable, unenjoyable and/or not worth the effort. I think there is a lesson here for game developers about whether in-game actions should be executed and recorded on-chain or whether it’s just better to have in-game assets on-chain. I’m definitely swaying toward the latter for now, but if blockchain technologies improve their performance then maybe a game like Prospectors can do well.
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Is this just because the market is completely illiquid?
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To some extent, yes. But nobody really wants to invest in an old, dying world. I could demolish the buildings and sell the materials for more than I can probably sell them for whole. Indeed for a good long while it seemed this was the only reason people were buying production buildings - to demolish them.
Oh yeah great writeup, I saw the Prospectors Game on Wax a couple of months back, I also didn't know it was built on EOS. The game looked really nice like the Wild west kinda game and engaging in odd jobs seemed cool but I wasn't even able to start playing properly - A weird error prevented me from playing and I didn't bother to troubleshoot it. It had that tiring feeling somehow.
Isn't that's the core idea of blockchain games? For all transactions to be recorded on-chain. There are games working it out splendidly - and like you pointed out, this could be a result of EOS somewhere!
Well, yes I did think so. But there are some CCGs that are having good success (like Splinterlands and Gods Unchained) by just trading the cards as NFTs on-chain but the actual games are played off-chain. I'm not convinced the current blockchains have good enough performance to have complicated game mechanics calculated and recorded on-chain at this stage.
Hopefully this will change at some point but for now I think on-chain games have a performance liability and it sounds like you have some first hand experience of that.
Well my bad, because I assumed that most games I'm playing are actually fully on-chain, But now that you mention this(With SP and GU), I realize that might not be the case. I've seen games make descriptions of how in-game transactions are monitored and tracked on the blockchain (SO, it depends on the amount and levels of transactions that is being tracked, I'm guessing)
Games like Prospectors with high-level details def shouldn't be fully on-chain if Even Splinterlands is not
I left and never got back in to it. I hope you managed to finally break even?? I know you sunk a lot in at the beginning...
Yes, I did end up making it all back plus some extra in the last year or 2. It probably wasn't a lot to sink into it by todays standards but I'm always happy to end with a profit regardless.
I remember you talking about it. That sucks that they pretty much gave up on it. Copy and pasting in a game doesn’t work…..
They haven't exactly given up on it. They are still trying to milk it for all it's worth, but development has definitely slowed right down.
I remember when this one started. I think I signed up but ¯\(ツ)/¯
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Capturing momentum is so important. If it starts to feel like work, and there's nothing new or fun on the horizon, people jump over to the next shiny thing. Gotta stay hungry.