🟪 Crypto game du jour

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Okay, so I played Off the Grid.

Off the Grid is the crypto game du jour, recently profiled by my colleague David over at the Empire newsletter. It’s a battle royale-style third-person shooter set in a militaristic near-future populated by cyborg soldiers. You, the player, are one of these cyborgs, and your mission is to run around the map with your team and shoot other cyborgs. Pretty simple.

Is it fun? Yes. David called the game a "ballsy experiment worthy of your attention," and while I wouldn’t go that far, I do think Off the Grid brings some neat ingredients to the table. 

The cyborgs and the setting look cool, the game’s clear focus on variable movement (looking at you, jet packs and rocket legs) is enjoyable, and while I’m no great shakes at PVP, the matches I played didn’t feel too demoralizing when I was inevitably smoked by a better player. 

There are also cool bits of worldbuilding included throughout. The game shows live-action storytelling videos before each match, focusing on the development of the cyborg soldiers, and each carries the touch of director Neill Blomkamp, Gunzilla’s chief visionary officer. District 9 is one of my favorite movies, so, more of these, please. 

What about the crypto elements? As David pointed out, much of the crypto in this "crypto game" operates in the background.

My assumption is that this is intentional — there’s a school of thought that, in order to make onchain gaming a thing, developers shouldn’t beat players over the head with the crypto-ness of the thing. Off the Grid’s in-house currency, GUN, feels like any other in-game currency. Indeed, a player could be forgiven for thinking this isn’t a crypto game if they weren’t closely reading the terms of service or weren’t familiar with the studio already.

GUN can be used to purchase in-game weapons or Hexes, Off the Grid’s version of a loot box. These boxes can reward you all sorts of items. These items, in turn, can be sold on the marketplace — provided you subscribe to the $11.99 per-month Pro service — for GUN. This framework creates a neat economic incentive, and during one match, my group spent more time trying to extract Hexes than shooting other players. It felt fresh, given how many of these games are chiefly shoot-’em-ups. 

Then there’s the partnership with the popular gaming streamers. The well-known steamer Ninja, for example, has his own content pack (complete with electric blue cosmetics), and the game scored some 150,000 viewers at peak on Twitch last week. How much Gunzilla paid out isn’t clear, though past reporting suggests that Ninja has collected tidy sums in the past. 

Those streaming numbers are down significantly, as might be expected. Thus comes the hard part — building Off the Grid out of early access and into something sustainable, no easy feat in today’s gaming environment. The pending release of Black Ops 6 doesn’t make things easier for new titles like Off the Grid. 

At any rate, this game has my attention — developers, if you’re reading this, please add console and cross-play support — and it’s definitely got a chance, however slim, of taking crypto gaming mainstream. 

And now, on to the roundup.

— Michael McSweeney

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