Recently, I’ve been diving down the rabbit hole of the rapidly growing market of blockchain-based games. I think gaming is one of the segments where blockchain technology actually makes a lot of sense, for a time, however, the tech and benefits were mostly theoretical and there were few games actually based on blockchain technology.
That’s been changing a lot the last couple of years. Today there are a growing number of games that you can play right now. One of those, and the subject of this post, is Alien Worlds.
What is Alien Worlds?
Alien Worlds describes itself as a free-to-play, blockchain-based, DeFi-metaverse game where you can earn Trilium and NFT game cards through mining.
How does it work?
In Alien Worlds, you start out mining Trilium on alien planets with a basic tool. After selecting a planet to mine on, you then select a piece of land. Every piece of land is owned by a player and is represented by an NFT card. Land NFTs have different rarities and attributes which, along with the stats on your tools, determine your TLM rewards, your "charge time" (how long you need to wait between mining operations), and your chances of finding new NFTs.
Your choice of land and your equipped tools is considered your "build" in Alien Worlds
Where a lot of other blockchain games more or less force new players to invest to start playing the game, Alien Worlds instead gives every player a basic tool to start mining for free, and this, I’d argue is Alien Worlds’ foremost strength to attract new players. This is reflected by its huge growth recently, reaching over 500,000 players. It's not without issues, however. Markets are currently flooded with shovels (the starting tool) and while these can also drop from mining, it's pretty safe to assume that a lot of these are probably from people creating multiple accounts and listing the base items. Furthermore, even if you ban players, they still own the items on the blockchain and can still list them on the marketplace. I'm sure the team has thought of this, but I'd like to see them make the base items untradeable. There are, as with almost every online game, a lot of botting going on in the game, there are some systems in place such as having to solve a captcha every time you mine. The effectiveness of these systems, however, is a regular talking point on the games' discord, with many players venting their frustrations over both the botting and having to solve captchas.
There are a lot of new miners finding their way to the planets of Alien Worlds every day
If being free-to-play is Alien Worlds’ strength, the actual gameplay is its weakness. The mining “game” is basically waiting for the mining cooldown timer to reach 0, click on the “Mine” button, wait for a bit, and then claim whatever TLM, and, if you’re lucky, NFTs, you’ve managed to mine, and then you repeat this process. While it’s not very engaging, I should probably not underestimate the appeal of watching a number go up as you click a button. There’s a reason why clicker games are continually topping the charts on phones.
Apart from mining, you can stake your Trillium to “boost your planet’s rewards” which isn’t explained all too well in the game nor on the website what it actually means. From what I can tell, you currently don’t earn any direct rewards from staking, instead, it determines how much TLM each planet is allocated each day. The tokens you receive for staking for a planet are, at some point in the future, going to be used to vote for players to be on a planet’s council. There is a separate site to become or vote on a candidate but it seems like the voting hasn’t started yet either.
Another feature in the works is the fighting game called “Thunderdome” where you use minion and weapon NFTs to fight against other players. There's a medium post from the team in January that describes how the game mode will function, but as far as I know, there still hasn't been a date announced for when it will be available to players.
The community eagerly awaits the release of the "Thunderdome" fighting game
Is it any good?
Like a lot of other blockchain-based games, the underlying tech of Alien Worlds is arguably more interesting than the actual gameplay loop. This, along with the vague roadmap hasn’t inspired me with a lot of confidence so far. While there are some cool ideas here, they haven’t yet quite come together to form a cohesive game experience that plays well. I think a lot of the success currently stems from it being one of the few free-to-play blockchain-based games and the allure of potentially being able to earn real money from it without investing. My views might be a bit cynical, and I’d love to see these games develop and turn into something more, but until that actually happens, I will remain skeptical.
As Alien Worlds is free-to-play, you can always try it yourself and form your own opinion. If you do have a different experience than me, let me know, it’s always interesting to hear some different opinions on these things.
If you’re mostly interested in the play-to-earn aspect of Alien Worlds, the exchange rate as of writing this is 0.25 USD for 1 TLM. So far I’ve managed to mine around 35 TLM and managed to find a handful of NFTs. I'm not entirely sure what the process would be to convert any of this into fiat, and I'm probably not going to bother unless I somehow gain a ridiculous amount of TLM/WAX.
TLM has stayed somewhere around $0.2 to $0.3 during my time with the game
The problem with TLM as it stands is that the only thing you can use it for in the game currently is staking it towards a planet. As staking doesn’t carry any direct rewards yet, I don’t really see any reason for someone to buy TLM other than purely for speculation. Most players seem to exchange TLM for WAX since that is what is used to buy and sell NFTs for the game, and, because of the way the WAX blockchain operates, you will probably need some amount of WAX to stake for more resources if you play somewhat actively.
While starting out as a free-to-play player can be slow, it’s entirely possible, with some luck and dedication, to gather some NFTs and get a somewhat effective mining setup and I didn’t feel any need to put money into the game. If you want to become a landowner and make larger amounts of TLM, that’s a different story though considering even the cheapest piece of land trades for around $8000 currently.
Land does not come cheap in Alien Worlds
Bear in mind that there’s a lot of hype surrounding both crypto in general and play-to-earn blockchain-based games currently and there’s a lot of volatility in these markets. As such, a lot of this information reflects the current state, but most likely won’t be accurate for long. If you wish to know the current prices, you can take a look at the current price on CoinMarketCap and NFT prices on AtomicHub.
The one takeaway I do have from all of this is that the barebones game that actually is there at the moment seems to work and, while the user might only click a button, there are some more complex systems underneath the surface which has to come together to make sure, for example, that planets don’t run out of available TLM to mine during the day. If you’re interested in reading about some of these systems they are detailed in Alien Worlds’ tech blueprint.
Looking outside the game, there’s a friendly community forming around it, arranging their own events and games that players can partake in and some of them even have rewards to earn in the form of NFTs. I believe these games will live and die by their communities since they are the ones developing tools, writing guides, and, in the case of Alien Worlds, creating events that make a very bare-bones game a bit more interesting.
It’ll be interesting to see how well the WAX chain scales with the increasing player count and how the game and its economy develop moving forward. I’ll make sure to keep an eye on the project, and even if I’m critical of the simplicity and lack of development of the game, there’s still something that keeps pulling me back to the mining on the planets of Alien Worlds, and hopefully, the team and developers are dedicated to growing it into something bigger.
Alien Worlds website
Alien Worlds on Medium
Alien Worlds on Twitter
Technical blueprint
Atomic Hub (marketplace)
