Despite tough times for the industry, the blockchain MOBA game reached 200k downloads after just two months.
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Amidst a drastic decline in coin prices, shifting player behavior, and hard-to-maintain tokenomics, it’s been a difficult year for many GameFi developers. While more established franchises, such as Axie Infinity, have held ground, other lesser-known projects like Elexir have mostly pulled the plug, with a lack of viable game designs being unable to compensate for the “Fi” element in GameFi.
That said, one project which, despite running into all challenges, experienced by its peers, appears to have gained traction anyway. In early February, blockchain multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Superpower Squad (SPS) surpassed 200,000 downloads on the App Store and Google Play. The game previously launched in Dec. 2022 and surpassed the 100,000 download milestone mid-January.
Superpower Squad game poster (Source: SPS)
SPS features up to 20 players competing in-app in a five-minute combat experience. Players can earn nonfungible tokens (NFTs) heroes and create digital wallets directly in-game to receive and transfer rewards, with no prior crypto experience necessary. The game took nearly three years to perfect before developers said it met their quality for playability. According to SPS’ chief game architect, who wished to be identified as Pony, the team faced quite a few challenges during that time:
Pony explained that despite finalizing investment deals with “several top institutions,” the founding rounds became on hold after “two black swan events” hit the cryptocurrency industry last year. In addition, the game developer said that financing became difficult as a subset of bad actors had tarnished the reputation of the entire industry.
As told by Pony, SPS came to the market right around the time sentiment was at its nadir. “We faced major bias from organizations and a lot of them refused to introduce our project to users,” he said. “Therefore, we are grateful to the partners who stood by us, such as Kucoin, OKX, and BNB Chain, and their support throughout this whole time.”
Superpower Squad gameplay (Source: SPS)
Since launch, SPS has already created its own marketplace for in-game NFTs and listed its namesake token, SQUAD, on KuCoin. For the next steps, Pony says the development team will complete the rental function for its marketplace. “This way, users who have a large amount of NFTs can rent them out to earn revenue, and users who do not have enough money to purchase them can earn through renting.” Currently, the game has about 42,000 on-chain transactions per day and a daily active user count of 4,400, with over 44,000 in-game wallets created.
