Blockchain Game Shrapnel aims for AAA status in Web3

Traditional AAA studios tend to keep things in the dark until a project is deemed ready for its big reveal — not Neon Media, the publisher behind the upcoming multiplayer first-person shooter Web3 game Shrapnel.

Top-tier video games usually take a long time and require a large budget to build – three to five years with an average cost of around $80 million.

However, the process of building blockchain-based video games is different, Don Norbury, chief technology officer at Neon Media, told Blockworks.

Set in a dystopian future world, Shrapnel is currently being built on the Avalanche subnet and the Unreal 5 graphics game engine. What sets this game apart from other Web3 offerings is the level of community engagement and its distinct game funding mechanic (GameFi), fueled by NFTs.

The team behind Shrapnel, made up of entertainment veterans from HBO and Microsoft, has worked to include future players in the development of the game, lore and NFT ecosystem.

For employees coming from a Web2 background, “engaging with the community, getting ideas back, sharing more than you would traditionally be comfortable sharing—just because you wanted to go through 18 iterations before it ever saw the light of day – been difficult.” said Norbury, who is also studio head of Shrapnel.

The game is currently in pre-alpha development. The team will share early access versions with focus group participants to get feedback from next spring – so a full public release could still be years away.

Potential players have been able to purchase an Operator avatar NFT, which represents a mercenary in the Shrapnel universe. Holders received digital and physical comics created for each of the five available characters’ backstories at San Diego Comic-Con in July.

Recently, Shrapnel released a two-minute gameplay trailer on Monday, similar to how a trailer is released ahead of a movie premiere.

Shrapnel to brag about in-game crypto economy

Shrapnel also released the project’s white paper on Friday, which outlines tokenomics and in-game assets.

The game itself will act as a platform for community-built maps with different sets of rules and playstyles, all based on a single-token economy based on SHRAP, an Avalanche-based management token.

For what it’s worth, the trailer features a spacious character exploring a futuristic and dirty city, along with some gunplay. Stakeholders can fall into different categories – players, creators, curators and landowners.

Each user type can earn SHRAP rewards by completing missions, creating NFTs, or staking their tokens to receive two types of NFTs – vanity items and maps. Beauty items include gear, weapons, cosmetics and skins.

Maps are split between game areas known as The Arena and The Podium. Stakeholders aim to get their own or favorite maps to the center of the Podium by advertising them. As maps become popular and SHRAP stakers increase in size and move closer to The Podium. Once at The Podium, players and actors can take part in performance-based SHRAP incentives.

“We want most of the time people play Shrapnel to be on community maps, not the maps we’re making,” Norbury said, adding that “a lot of the effort we’d put into creating a narrative in a single-player campaign we spend on the tool pipeline.”

This reward system requires dedication and skill to create high quality maps that others will want to play, rather than just clicking to earn money. Any gas taxes will be subsidized in the transaction fee.

Play-to-own

Shrapnel follows what it calls the play-to-own model.

This means users effectively own the intellectual property (IP) for what they create and create, but they give Shrapnel the license to use in the game, Norbury said of creating a “healthy self-sustainable ecosystem where people actually own and control things they creator.”

Shrapnel therefore plans to attract and retain users via its content generation mechanism – finding, curating and promoting the best player-created vanity items and maps, as well as betting on them. A large user base will ensure a balanced supply and demand for SHRAP.

A token offering and the Shrapnel NFT marketplace are planned to launch in the next few months, according to Norbury.

The white paper stated that 3 billion SHRAP tokens will be created as the total token supply, which will never increase. The community will receive 33% of SHRAP tokens, 27% will be distributed to the team and its advisors, 20% will go to Seed token holders and other stakeholders will receive the remaining 20%.

The SHRAP tool includes voting rights on player-generated content and on certain aspects of the Shrapnel protocol. Additionally, the team is still figuring out how validator nodes can take SHRAP as the gas token, and subsidize the gas fee to the end user.

The game will also build its own subnet for low latency. When asked why the AVAX subnet was chosen, Norbury listed the reasons for security, adaptability, future proofing and computational power.

He also made the distinction between games like Axie Infinity that continually require more people to come in to bolster the people who are already there.

“If you look at it from an economic perspective, there has to be a manufacturing principle in it. Something of value has to be produced, and then people have to want or be willing to engage with it in different ways, Norbury said.

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