The NFL is creating the league’s first Blockchain game with Mythical
The NFL entrusts Mythical Games to develop the league’s first blockchain game called NFL Rivals, an arcade-style free-to-play football gaming experience where users can buy and sell player NFTs to improve their teams. While Mythical Games is not yet a household name to the sports industry, its financial backers are as A-list as it gets.
Andreessen Horowitz led the funding of Mythical Games’ $150 million Series C round last November, which also included investments from:
- Michael Jordan
- The NFL’s investment arm 32 Equity
- New England Patriots owner Jonathan Kraft and The Kraft Group
- OneTeam partners
- Michael Gordon of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC
Other investors include cryptocurrency firms FTX and Binance, as well as RedBird Capital, D1 Capital and The Raine Group. The Series C round valued Mythical Games at $1.25 billion.
NFL Rivals will enter private beta mode later this year before its worldwide release for mobile and PC online games in early 2023. It will mark the first game from Mythical to be licensed by a major professional sports league, but the NFL was inclined to sign a multi-year contract with the company amid the success of Blanko’s Block Party, an open multiplayer game from Mythical that recently became the first NFT game to be offered through the Epic Games store.
Ahead of NFL Rivals, Mythical Games is also launching the Rarity League, a collection of officially licensed fan-inspired helmet NFTs for all 32 NFL teams. Each team’s helmet drop is limited to 2,500 NFTs costing 0.14 ETH (Ethereum), which is currently equivalent to around $188 USD. Owners of Rarity League NFTs will gain access to the private beta of NFL Rivals.
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Collaboration with Mythical
“Part of the reason we like Mythical so much is what they’ve done with Blankos, they’ve created a really great game design at price levels that consumers can participate in, like $9 and $10 buy-ins paid in Fiat instead of having to pay in ETH . That’s the experience that I think you’re going to see in NFL Rivals,” said NFL VP of video games Ed Kiang. “When we look at Mythical and we look at Web3 games, it tends to be a younger audience with biases. But that’s also not necessarily the people we’re trying to target – people who are older, higher disposable income who are crypto enthusiasts – that’s not really the segment we’re shooting for.”
SportTechie’s Joe Lemire recently spoke with Kiang about the NFL’s new virtual reality game, Pro Era. You can read more here.
Mythical’s deal with the NFL is a joint partnership with the NFLPA, with players expected to help promote NFL Rivals. Typical head-to-head matches on NFL Rivals will last just two minutes and be a mix of simulated gameplay with some on-screen taps to control the players. The bottom line is that fans can act as general managers through collecting player NFTs to build their teams for competition against other teams. NFTs will be available in different tiers, with the rarer player tokens providing stronger in-game achievements.
Part of the reason we like Mythical so much is what they’ve done with Blankos, they’ve created really great game design at price levels that consumers can participate in, like $9 and $10 buy-ins paid in Fiat instead of having to cash in. ETH. That’s the experience I think you’re going to see in NFL Rivals.
The CEO of Mythical Games is John Linden, who was previously the head of studio for Activision and primarily worked on the Call of Duty franchise. Linden spoke on Tuesday at a Twitter Spaces discussion hosted by NFT lately, stating that Mythical’s development of NFL Rivals has been nostalgia-themed, drawing inspiration from the 1990s arcade games NFL Blitz (first released in 1997) and NBA Jam (first released in 1993). He believes the fast-paced NFL Rivals will serve a more casual player than the league’s signature Madden video game series from Electronic Arts.
“The crazy part about the Madden franchise is that even though it’s in its 32nd year, there’s not a huge user base. And the reason for that is just not because it’s not a super accessible game,” said Linden. “It takes a lot of skill, a lot of effort to really understand that game and be really skilled at that game. And what we’re doing with NFL Rivals is the NFL kind of cleared a path with us to build that fan favorite game, let he to under Twitter Space. “You can pick up the game, play a few rounds, put it down and do it again later. Our goal with the NFL is to get this into the hands of tens of millions of players.”
Target market for NFL rivals
Linden painted the NFT players’ ages as generally older than Kiang’s targets for NFL Rivals. “I would say the average age is definitely in that 18 to 34 bracket for Blancos,” Linden said. “We actually saw a lot of players let their kids play with them, we see a lot of videos where they play with their kids. We think the age demographic will be similar in the NFL, like 18 to 34, maybe even 18 to 45, especially with the collector aspects. We have a couple of things that we’re going to announce with sports memorabilia later on, traditional sports memorabilia that we’ve talked about, and I think that will really drive into that demographic as well.”
Linden added, “We see a lot of people that when they sell their Blancos [NFTs], they end up spending that money and they buy more Blancos. So getting liquidity in the game tends to make them buy more, he said. “I think it’s going to be a great trend for web3 to see – where does the money go? Are they just cashing out and taking it, some of them are, and that’s great. We’ve had people pay their bills with the game, and that’s great too.”
A study released in July by the National Research Group found that 67% of sports fans preferred physical memorabilia over digital memorabilia, and that 72% of the 3,250 fans surveyed viewed NFTs as “a way to make money.” A separate recent study by MKTG Sports + Entertainment surveyed 350 professionals working in sports and entertainment, with one in three respondents (30%) saying they “believe NFTs exploit fans.” The study also found that 73% of industry professionals admit to having “some or low knowledge” of non-fungible tokens.
Enter the blockchain gaming space
“What we want to avoid is creating an NFT project that comes across as a speculative NFT art project,” Kiang said. “We’ve never seen this as a big kind of speculative product, so we’re not as affected by fluctuations in the crypto market,” he added. “Our approach has always been to make great games for everyday fans. I think much of what we see in the crypto market also mirrors the stock market in general.”
NFL Rivals will allow fans to purchase NFT player cards and packs using cryptocurrency, but Kiang expects most users to pay in fiat by linking their credit card. Linden estimated that 77% of NFT transactions on Blanko’s Block Party are paid with fiat currency. The entire cryptocurrency market has lost $2 trillion in market capitalization since its peak in 2021.
Related: More about crypto will be covered on SportTechie’s upcoming webinar, “Vetting Crypto Partnerships: Spotting Perils and Building Long-Term Success in a Volatile Market.” Register for free here.
“When it comes to crypto as a payment method, we saw a lot of demand from our customers, let’s say until six months ago,” JPMorgan Chase’s global head of payments Takis Georgakopoulos told Bloomberg this week. – We see very little right now.
Kiang called mobile free-to-play games a “massive part” of the gaming industry and that he expects the NFL to do more in the space. The league also has a collaboration with the mobile game developer Skillz.
“The value is what you perceive it to be,” Kiang said. “Our partnership with Mythical and what we’re doing with NFL Rivals is the opportunity for this to create value built into the quality of the game,” he adds: “if we create really great gaming experiences in the same way that a free-to-play mobile game get people to understand the value of the characters in the game, and the boosts that are available in the game, then I think they’re going to want to use to really express their fandom with the items they can buy . And I think it’s the same with blockchain-based games.”
