SPS discusses challenges of building GameFi in the middle of crypto winter

Amid a drastic drop in coin prices, changing player behavior, and tokenomics that are difficult to maintain, it has been a difficult year for many GameFi developers. While more established franchises, such as Axie Infinity, have held their ground, other lesser-known projects, such as Elexir, have largely pulled the plug, with a lack of viable game designs unable to compensate for the “Fi” element of GameFi.

That said, a project that, despite all the challenges experienced by its peers, seems to have gained traction regardless. In early February, the blockchain multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Superpower Squad (SPS) surpassed 200,000 downloads on the App Store and Google Play. The game was previously launched in December 2022 and passed the 100,000 downloads milestone in mid-January.

SPS has up to 20 players competing in the app in a five-minute match experience. Players can earn nonfungible token (NFT) heroes and create digital wallets directly in-game to receive and transfer rewards, with no crypto experience required. The game took nearly three years to perfect before the developers said it met their quality for playability. According to SPS’s chief game architect, who wished to be identified as Pony, the team faced a number of challenges during that time:

“Compared to other industry projects, game development is a much more regenerative track that especially consumes time, effort and money. Superpower Squad has almost completed all functional development, with $3 million spent on capital costs alone. But in this crypto winter, the entire industry is finding it difficult to meet the financing needs and become more reserved with their choices.”

Pony explained that despite completing investment deals with “several top institutions,” the foundation rounds were put on hold after “two black swan events” hit the cryptocurrency industry last year. In addition, the game developer said funding was becoming difficult, as a subset of bad actors had tarnished the reputation of the entire industry.

“After Axie Infinity became popular, the market began to penetrate for GameFi products. We’ve seen rogue GameFi projects come out in large numbers, and most of them had little to zero gaming experience, with some even having only a white paper. After the GameFi boom, some of these projects died out or changed names because it was too difficult to develop a good GameFi project, and people didn’t realize that it would take a huge investment of time and money. Some GameFi users lost a lot of money with the drop right after the first wave of GameFi.”

As told by Pony, SPS came into the market right when sentiment was at its lowest. “We encountered great biases from organizations and many of them refused to introduce our project to users,” they said. “Therefore, we are grateful to the partners who stood by us, such as KuCoin, OKX and BNB Chain, and their support throughout this time.”

Since its launch, SPS has already created its own marketplace for in-game NFTs and listed its namesake, SQUAD, on KuCoin. For next steps, Pony said the development team would finalize the rental feature for its marketplace. “In this way, users who have a large amount of NFTs can rent them out to earn money, and users who do not have enough money to buy them can earn through renting.” Currently, the game has approximately 42,000 on-chain transactions per day and a daily active user count of 4,400, with over 44,000 in-game wallets.