Words With Friends Creator Previews Wildcard NFT Game on Polygon

Veteran video game creator Paul Bettner, who co-created the mobile game smash Words With Friends and helped develop the classic Age of Empires franchise, has been working on his Web3 the Wildcard game for over five years. Now he is finally ready to share it with the world.

The first public playtest of Wildcard will be launched on February 23rd in an event called “Melee on the Meteor”. The game, which Bettner says was designed with spectators in mind, is a competitive multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game similar to smashes like League of Legends and Dota 2.

Wildcard serves player-versus-player (PvP) gameplay, virtual NFT cards, real-time strategy (RTS) elements, and Web3 integration via Ethereum scaling network Polygon. “Melee on the Meteor” will take place in a virtual location called the Frostburn Arena, and viewers can watch from the in-game 3D arena as two characters duke it out on a grand scale – and even collect NFT rewards in the process.

“We really want an experience where the competitor can literally share rewards with the fans live during the stream, and Web3 is the technology that allows us to do that,” said Bettner Decrypt.

The first public Wildcard exhibition will pit two community testers against each other, drawn from the Discord server with over 30,000 verified members. The second match will be a battle between two Web3 content creators, Brycent and Cryptostache, while the third round will be a final with the winners of the previous two rounds.

During matches, viewers will be able to watch via the game’s Discord server and potentially win POAP-style NFT collectibles called “Wildcard Swag”, or approval list access to create the game’s first full-fledged NFT card collection, which does not yet have a public release date.

Under his Playful Studios banner, Bettner raised 46 million dollars in 2022 in a round led by Paradigm, with Griffin Gaming Partners and VC fund manager Sabrina Hahn also participating. Now, after extensive community engagement and development, Wildcard is ready for its first moments in the spotlight.

The games white paper, called “Wildpaper Lite,” describes Bettner and his team’s ambitious vision for the upcoming game. Bettner believes that esports is hugely important to gaming, and that players watch others play video games almost as much as they play games themselves.

Inspired by these sometimes massive live streaming and esports communities, Bettner and his wife Katy Bettner set out to create a game where fans can participate in a more meaningful (and interactive) way.

The NFT Balance Act

Bettner himself has gone from being a crypto-skeptic to a Web3 advocate – but that doesn’t mean that anything and everything in Wildcard will be an NFT.

“We’re allergic to pay-to-win as a developer,” Bettner said Decrypt in an interview, referring to his stance on only allowing players to buy NFTs that give them an easy path to the top of a game’s leaderboards.

That said, Wildcard want offering virtual cards as NFTs, which are an important part of the game. But Bettner insists that no single card can give a player victory on the battlefield.

“Our game is about collecting, and you use your collection to play,” Bettner said. “That’s what gives us the ability to have a game that both has valuable, collectible cards, but it’s not profitable to win.”

“There’s not a card in Magic: The Gathering, really, that’s pay-to-win. These cards change meta is evolving and they always have to walk this fine line of creating rarity and cards that are desirable but don’t create a pay-to-win economy,” he added, citing Pokémon and Blizzard’s Hearthstone as other examples of competitive card games he believes are not giving the richest players easy wins.

The limits of live streaming

Bettner explained that Wildcard was developed to create a more direct connection between players and viewers, with direct NFT airdrops to see players and engage with their content. He’s well aware of how important live streaming platforms like Twitch are to both gamers and game developers, but wants to solve some of the problems that Twitch can’t (or won’t) solve.

Bettner told Decrypt that his talks with Twitch, its parent company Amazon and Google-owned YouTube did not turn out as he had first hoped.

“It was a little difficult, because these platforms have a specific way they think about the audience,” Bettner said. “They think about making money off the public.”

Bettner said the Wildcard team was “frustrated” by Twitch and YouTube’s “limited” scope and ability to offer game viewers a more immersive and rewarding experience.

“A platform like Twitch, their capacity to deliver that is kind of limited,” Bettner said. “The real magic can happen in a video game where that moment can come to life where the fans can see themselves.”

Why Web3?

Bettner said he sometimes sees Web3 as a “solution in search of a problem,” meaning some crypto enthusiasts may be looking to add crypto whenever possible for purely philosophical or financial reasons without a significant motive .

But in the case of Wildcard, he believes Web3 was necessarily the solution to the game’s biggest problem.

In the future, Wildcard will allow viewers to see themselves in the arena’s audience as an avatar with a specific seat. From their seats, viewers will be able to catch NFT airdrops launched into the crowd.

“When that streamer is connected to their wallet and their fans come in with their wallets,” explained Bettner, “it’s literally a drop of air to do that magical moment of throwing the ball up into the stands, firing a t-shirt cannon and having your fans wear PFP like your brand or whatever.”

“It is moments like these that we are able to build,” he concluded.