This pay-to-spawn NFT shooter rewards you with crypto for kills
Have you ever successfully played a round COD, Fortnite, or another shooter and felt that your achievement should have been financially rewarded? This question lies at the heart of BR1“the world’s first risk-based shooter” that uses the blockchain to allow users to earn real benefits from the time they spend gaming.
BR1 lifts concepts from battle royale games such as PUBG but instead of a diminishing map, players pay to spawn on the edge of a giant island, eventually reaching the center (obstacles pull players towards this direction) where there is a higher frequency of opposing players and items.
It will be $1 – Players buy into a game mode called Infinite Royale for $1, and it has no start or end time. They can then earn Solana tokens for every kill they get. Eliminating opposing players allows users to either capture the spawn fee or secure more than 10 percent of the value (items, money they have accumulated, etc.) the enemy was wearing at the time. When players are eliminated, they still get to keep 85 percent of their earnings.
The experience is stored on the Solana blockchain, and in order to play, users must acquire an operational NFT, currently one of two types: monkey and droid characters that are available for as little as 50 cents on Fractal, an NFT gaming platform. These operators then act as a player’s avatar.
The gameplay itself resembles an early 2000s third-person shooter.
Who is this for? — Evan Ryer, CEO of Bravo Ready, the studio behind BR1, acknowledged in an interview with VentureBeat that the existing player pool is mostly limited to “speculators and NFT buyers” and that attracting real players is still something his team is working on.
Based on footage of BR1 out there, the mechanics and overall gameplay seem stilted and a bit rough. But Ryer seems to envision his project as the next evolution of poker—in a video interview with Fractal co-founder Justin Kan, he notes that over his years of playing, he was always looking for some kind of real-world edge to compensate. for his efforts.
Accordingly, he describes BR1 as introducing “tangible secondary market value for the time people commit to video games.” While the subsection of crypto players appears to be a minority when juxtaposed with the wider gaming community, this type of experience translates well to streaming platforms, with people tuning in to essentially watch a more dynamic version of Texas Hold ‘Em.
However, I can’t imagine this type of game taking off, especially because if BR1 were to explode in popularity, hackers would almost certainly participate in pay-to-play matches to exploit others. If AAA shooters like COD and Apex Legends deal with people using aimbot and wallhacks, you can imagine a game with actual financial stakes will experience the same in droves.
