New Ethereum Game Nets $275k in 1st Week

The creator of the wildly popular 2017 Ethereum-based game CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs has done it again. The company revealed its latest Ethereum-based game – Cheeze Wizards – on Friday, May 24.

According to Dapper Labs’ communications head, Bryce Bladon, despite the fact that the game’s launch is only 1 week old, it has already attracted 973 players who have bought 4,470 fighters.

Cheeze Wizards Gameplay

Cheeze Wizards is a social game where players summon different types of Wizards to fight in the global tournament in a bid to win the grand prize and be named the Big Cheeze. All Wizards are crypto-collectibles, which are NFTs (non-fungible tokens). To play the game, users need to spend ETH to summon Wizards. These Wizards are used to then compete in duels, which lead up to the final Tournament.

The last Wizard standing wins the grand prize (which is the pool crypto of ETH collected in the game) as well as the title of Big Cheeze. Most of the ETH collected buy the purchase of Wizards goes towards the prize pool.

So far, in the last one week, a total of 1,013 ETH has been collected in the prize pool, which comes to a value of about $275,000, at current conversion rates.

Bladon states that the first tournament will take several weeks, and will be launched later this summer.

Players Being Held Back from the Game

Since there are monetary prizes involved in this game, players from Canada and the US states of Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland and South Carolina cannot join. This is because regulations in these places are not clear in relation to games that involve money.

Despite these roadblocks, gamers from these states (and country) have found loopholes to participate in the game. They have developed applications that allow them to take part in the Cheeze Wizards ecosystem. So far, 5 different projects have already been created on the game, ranging from a decentralized marketplace for trading wizards to a prediction market.

Opportunities Beyond the Game

Just like the company’s previous game, CryptoKitties, the NFTs in this game are designed in such a way that they can acquire unique traits that may have use cases beyond the game itself.

For example, Glenn Eggleton, a Canadian gamer, has already developed a leaderboard as well as an external battle game as an experiment on the semi-open-source Cheeze Wizards.

Bladon also states that the ability to use the asset for something else besides the game has been the underlying factor in developing such games.