Online Battlefields and NFT Warriors.
Steam, one of the largest video game distributors globally, recently banned all blockchain and NFT-based games. While some may see it as a setback, I think that it’s an indicator of the impact of the growth of the blockchain gaming industry.
The rise of Axie Infinity stands as a prominent example.
The last 30-day trading volume of Axie Infinity’s in-game NFTs was $523.34 million. The total item sales in the same period was close to 2 million.
Top NFT sales in the market. Source: DappRadar
Undoubtedly, there is a lot of room for competing NFT-based games. We talked about Rarity and Gods Unchained over the last couple of weeks. Today, I am going to introduce another game, Illuvium, which despite being in production, has built a strong community.
Illuvium is a Pokemon-inspired multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) built on the Ethereum Layer 2 platform, Immutable. Immutable is a proven technology as it already hosts God’s Unchained. MOBA is a type of role-playing game where players team up their in-game characters and fight against opposing teams.
League of Legends, DOTA 2, and Arena of Valor are some of the top MOBA-style games. These games are free-to-play and have attracted over 30 million players to their platforms. The prize pool of these game tournaments stretches up to $40 million.
In comparison, Illuvium’s Discord channel has over 160,000 members without a live product. Part of the reason for the abundant membership is that the team has promoted membership via multiple NFT and token airdrops over the last couple of months.
Nevertheless, with such a high interest in the game, the project should not have problems bootstrapping players when the game finally launches.
DOTA 2 gameplay. Source: YouTube
Illuvium founders Kieren and Aaron Warwick are younger siblings of Kain Warwick, the founder of Synthetic. Talk about genes.
The game is backed by leading DeFi architects: Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, and Anton Bukov, the founder of 1Inch DEX. The investor list includes venture funds like Delphi Digital and Yield Guild Games.
Honestly, when the team says that Illuvium is a “AAA game,” I get slightly agitated as AAA games are used to represent games that live up to the standards of FIFA, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption 2, and other popular ones.
However, the kind of money that has gone into Illuvium so far is no less than the real-world AAA games. Illuvium’s $800 million worth of staked native ILV tokens is at par with EA Sports budget for FIFA. I expect to see a quality project from the team.
How to Earn from the Game?
The native token, ILV, will not have any in-game value. The token serves other purposes such as governance, liquidity mining, and earning from the game’s revenue. Nevertheless, staking ILV tokens can give you an advantage during initial NFT sales.
By staking ILV tokens, you will get an equal amount of liquidity provider (LP) tokens, sILV, on the Immutable roll-up. While ILV has no direct use in the game, sILV tokens will enable in-game purchases and trading on the IlluviDEX. Since it is on Layer 2, you’ll be able to skip the gas wars on Ethereum during future item sales.
The play-2-earn aspect of the game lies in the Illuvial NFTs. Similar to Axie Infinity, Illuvium will require players to own these Illuvials. Thus, it will involve an initial investment. Nevertheless, buying the early editions of these NFTs can be highly profitable in the future.
The project already distributed some NFTs, some of which are currently on sale at OpenSea. However, not all listed NFTs are usable in the game; some are just collectibles. It is advisable to look for game-redeemable items.
The emotes, skins, and badges, which Illuvium dropped to the early sale participants of ILV tokens, have utility in the game. The others are collectibles issued in partnership with other Ethereum dApps like Balancer to increase community outreach and have no real use in the game.
Besides Illuvials, the team has also announced 100,000 “land” units, which will serve as the breeding ground for the Illuvial and host battles with other teams. The sale for lands will go live somewhere around late October, or early November via dutch auctions.
These investments come with considerable risk. However, by being early to the game (quite literally), you can get your hands on the first batch of in-game NFTs in lands and Illuvial, which will likely become rarer in the future as the number of players increases.
How to Stake ILV tokens and purchase NFTs?
To stake ILV tokens, first, you need to purchase ILV tokens using decentralized exchanges like Uniswap or Sushiswap.
Make sure you have ETH in your wallet to pay for the transaction fee for staking ILV.
Visit Illuvium’s Core Staking page and connect your Metamask wallet. You can choose between ILV staking directly, or via Sushi LP options. Follow the instructions here to stake your tokens directly.
To add liquidity via Sushi LP tokens, you first need to add liquidity to ETH/ILV pool on Sushi.
Providing liquidity on Sushi pool. Source: Sushi
Then, use the Sushi LP tokens on Illuvium’s staking page.
Additionally, keep a lookout for Flash Pools, which will distribute ILV tokens to deposit ERC-20 tokens in new ILV AMM pools. For instance, the latest active pool was for LINK tokens.
As I mentioned earlier, staking ILV tokens will give you an equal amount of synthetic sILV tokens, enabling NFT purchases. The sales of digital battle arena’s (“lands”) are expected to go live around late October/early November. While the new character NFTs launch is expected closer to game launch next year.
The Open Beta for the game is scheduled for Q1 2022, so start preparing in advance.
