Blankos Block Party: The First True AAA Blockchain Game?

Since the world’s first encounter with the COVID-19 pandemic, people have naturally been spending an increasing amount of time indoors and by extension spending more time to play video games, leading to significant surges in gaming sales. In these difficult times, our perpetual need for social interaction has not only resulted in the high usage of communication tools like Zoom, but also with simple multiplayer online games with small budgets like Fall Guys and Among Us breaking Twitch viewership records – the latter getting nearly half a million viewers during a broadcast featuring streamer all-stars and the ever popular US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The undeniable success of such interactive party games no doubt makes the present a great time to enter the space and Mythical Games with their title “Blankos Block Party” aims to do just that.

Mythical Games

Mythical Games is a Los-Angeles-based developer that describes itself as “a next generation game technology studio”. Founded in 2018, they have raised $16 million in two rounds of funding in the same year followed by an additional $19 million in November 2019 from a group of Venture firms lead by Javelin Venture Partners and including Galaxy Digital – totaling $35 million in funding. They currently have about 50 employees with an executive team that packs plenty of industry experience having had high-level roles at Activision Blizzard, Electronics Arts, Oculus VR, Zynga, and Telltale Games.

Leveraging their dGoods blockchain technology, Mythical aims to create universal economies driven by player ownership with the core belief of “true ownership of digital assets, verifiable scarcity, and integrated secondary markets are the future of games”. They want to create a platform that provides a suit of services which other developers can use to make their very own player-owned and driven economies around their games. What better way to prove the effectiveness of this model than showing by example, with Blankos Block Party. Here is its first gameplay trailer, released in June:

What is Blankos Block Party?

Blankos Block Party is a free-to-play MMO party game set in a vibrant online world styled like a giant block party called ‘The Junction’, with a focus on custom art and design, world-building and exploration, and collecting unique Blankos. Using an ever-expanding array of building items, toys, and accessories, players will be able to design and build various types of single or multiplayer parties that include any combination of shooting, racing, and collection challenges in a user-friendly manner without any coding knowledge. The most popular user-created content will be richly rewarded.

Making your own levels is as easy as clicking a button

At the center of gameplay are of course Blankos, fun and mischievous collectible digital vinyl toy characters each custom designed by talented artists. Players will not only be able to collect and customize their Blankos with different powers and abilities of their choosing as they level up but also make them truly unique with a wide range of skins, accessories, and gear.

The Beta will have dozens of unique Blankos designed by industry-leading artists with more to come

What makes the game stand out as an AAA title and why we cover it: its blockchain elements. Each Blanko as well as other game items are NFTs that will be minted on an EOS private blockchain, where the asset’s security, ownership history, and provable scarcity are established. Players will be able to buy and sell these NFTs for FIAT currencies in the game’s marketplace as well as other trusted blockchain mainnets and marketplaces when those connections are made with time.

Investment Potential

With multiplayer party games’ current popularity and the pandemic not going away anytime soon, this is a good time for Blankos Block Party to enter the market. The game looks polished and fun while the content-creation tools pave the way for unlimited new content. Though EOS isn’t known to be the most decentralized or adopted blockchain, it is more than capable of doing what’s needed from it: providing the NFTs provable ownership. In any case, game development is still very much a centralized proposition so users have no choice but to place their trust in the team – which in this case very much seems like a well-backed competent bunch.

The NFT real-money trading aspect should provide additional incentive to keep people engaged and playing like we’ve never quite seen before in this type of game. The Founders Packs offered are not only limited in supply, potentially making the contents quite scarce and lucrative if the game receives mass adoption like planned, but also offer lots of additional value in the form of Blanko Bucks – the in-game currency with which NFTs can be bought from the game’s own shop.

The 4 types of Founders Pack available in the pre-sale are priced at $150, $100, $50, and $25 respectively.

With that said, the project isn’t beyond reproach. The pre-sale launched with no disclosure of Founder Pack supply limits, without even a time-based cut-off. Not providing this basic level of transparency, which the blockchain could and should easily enable, is confusing to say the least. Furthermore, the marketplace will not launch with the November 17th Closed Beta and is planned for end of 2020/beginning of 2021. This means the NFTs within the Founder’s Packs purchased are trade-locked for at least a few months.

Lastly, the in-game currency Blanco Bucks is not a cryptocurrency and cannot be sold by players in marketplaces – likely due to stringent US regulations – which will inevitably lead to its trade in gray markets (something the devs had specifically mentioned they wanted to avoid with this setup). The game could really stand to gain from a liquid ‘valueless’ ERC20 coin that can be earned and traded to create that important Play To Earn path to draw in the large Free to Play player segment.

How To Invest

At the time of this writing, all Founder Packs are still available on the game’s website. They all offer good value at different price points though bigger investors will likely pull the trigger on the most expensive “Boss Pack” for as much as they are willing to spend.

This may be the first Pack to sell out, if whales have anything to say about it.

If you’d like to learn more about Blankos Block Party, check them out on their official channels: website, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube.

The author as of this writing holds tokens relating to this project. None of this is financial advice and you should conduct your own research before making any decisions relating to the topics discussed in this article.