Gold Fever Evolves Blockchain Gaming Beyond Play-to-Earn

Amidst all the breathless talk about how blockchain-powered play to earn gaming will enable people to make a living, too often one important point is overlooked: blockchain games should first and foremost be great gaming experiences.

That’s something that multiplayer survival strategy game Gold Fever doesn’t take for granted. With lush graphics and immersive gameplay, it throws players into a fictional jungle wilderness inspired by the dramatic events of the real-life gold rush at the turn of the last century.

As adventurers, players explore the wilderness, work the gold claims they discover and fight for survival in the face of the rugged terrain, hostile wildlife and indigenous tribes. As tribes, they defend their land against the ravages of outsiders who would exploit it. Their reward for doing so: the shiny stuff, which they earn in the form of an in-game currency called NGL.

“We are creating a product that will stand alone and be relevant to a passionate gaming audience and a crypto audience,” said Gold Fever CEO and Founder Emilian Ciocanea Decrypt.

Developing in-game economies

By building Gold Fever as a compelling game first, which just happens to hand out the rewards as cryptocurrency, the developers hope to avoid the trap of play-to-earn titles that turn people’s free time into grind for in-game currency.

“We’re able to do that because the in-game economy reflects a real economy, and because the in-game elements have real utility in gameplay and for the original audience of the product — the players,” Ciocanea said.

When players in a traditional video game buy in-game equipment, such as a weapon or a skin, the money goes to the game developer. In a game to make money, the NFTs that players acquire are often pure digital assets with no real value beyond the fact that some might consider them to be collectibles. But Gold Fever transforms the entire in-game infrastructure – from boats, planes, land and buildings to the shops where players can buy tools and weapons – into commercial NFTs.

“Blockchain games can create points of friction, but we remove them by giving ownership of the entire game structure to people,” said Alina Tudor, head of growth for Gold Fever. Decrypt.

Unlike collectibles, commercial NFTs provide holders with a different, deeper form of ownership. Commercial NFTs are useful both as part of gameplay and as a product that can generate wealth for players outside of the game.

The creators of Gold Fever refer to this as the game dividend generator model. Because players have full ownership of their in-game assets in the form of NFTs, they can earn money while contributing to the game’s economy.

That is true decentralization in action. Commercial NFTs invite players to become a dynamic part of the ever-evolving Gold Fever universe.

“Everything in the game has utility,” Ciocanea said. “We’re evolving from a play-to-earn economy to something more complex, but we’re also creating an experience that can be for any type of player.”

Play to your strengths

Attracting different types of players is central to Gold Fever’s plans – from casual players who are drawn to the title purely on the basis of gameplay, to enthusiasts who grind for NGL and NFT rewards. Then there are the entrepreneurs, who carve out a place for themselves in the game’s economy, taking the NFTs they own and turning them into a profitable business for themselves.

“Blockchain technology has a certain kind of beauty and poetry – it can help people change the way they see life,” Tudor said Decrypt. “We’re talking about the difference between just playing and earning and the opportunity to be an entrepreneur.”

It is important to recognize that entrepreneurship is not a new concept in the gaming industry; esports players, Twitch streamers and even gold farmers make a living playing conventional games. Blockchain-powered games like Gold Fever take the same concept and give players real ownership over in-game assets, a response to an industry that has too often seen game publishers become rent-seeking middlemen, raking in profits at the expense of players.

In Gold Fever, if a player owns an NFT representing a store that sells provisions, they can earn income by lending collateral and generate income from in-game items even when they are not actively playing the game.

Players also control and predict how much return they have for their NFTs. Although Gold Fever will only release NFTs periodically based on the number of monthly active characters in the game as a way to maintain scarcity, Gold Fever itself will not own any of the in-game infrastructure.

The in-game economy ends up being a flywheel for entrepreneurial players. The more people of any type play the game, the more they’ll need the infrastructure to support their play, Tudor said, and investor-type players will benefit from that dynamic.

It is what Tudor and Ciocanea refer to as a utility economy: a metaverse economy built on a free market for goods and services that lives independently of centralized ownership.

“Owners have an ongoing opportunity to put that infrastructure to work and create wealth for themselves,” Tudor said.

Fever height

Although the majority of NFTs in the game are tied to a specific tool, there is a new type of collectible NFT in Gold Fever called “Genesys masks” that give players special superpowers.

Genesys masks will be made available in January on the Gold Fever site in a Dutch auction, and on the NFT marketplace OpenSea when the contracts are revised. The masks unlock a premium beta of the game – players won’t be able to access the mainnet until Q3 without a mask – and provide other benefits, such as increased combat skills and the ability to recover lost NFTs, extract gold faster and magically revive when injured without having to be sent to hospital.

The best way to think of them is as keys to the game, almost akin to cheat codes. Gold Fever makes and sells them as a way to roll out the red carpet for its most loyal token holders and raise money so they can continue hiring and developing the game.

Gold Fever also has a premium pre-launch game – called Game of Diggers – for the opportunity to access Gold Fever in open beta and earn $1 million worth of NGLs and NFTs. To access it, you need a Genesys Mask NFT attached to your character.

These early adopters and crypto investors will help build the infrastructure within Gold Fever and pave the way for more mainstream players to enter the blockchain game.

“We know the crypto audience will be interested in this,” Tudor said. “Once they’ve helped lay the foundation, we can open the doors to passionate players and deliver on our promise to give them a fun and very good gaming experience.”