Eternal Dragons Expands Towards Mainstream Mobile Gaming With Super Content
Dear Community,
We are excited to share with you an update about our plans for the next stage of Eternal Dragons.
The journey we started over a year ago has been intense. We have lived together the joy of live tournaments and the challenges of web3. We are thankful and humbled to have you by our side, as we explore the frontier of gaming and digital ownership.
The learnings from this period have helped us identify what we believe is the biggest and most exciting opportunity in gaming: The transition from Free-To-Play towards the Super Economy paradigm, where multiple game economies come together and get integrated through smart, dynamic, interoperable content that we call Super Content.
Growth in the Post Free-To-Play Era
Eternal Dragons is in a unique position to lead the way towards the Super Economy and seize the underlying opportunity. To do that, it must grow beyond web3 and into mainstream gaming. And we believe that we can succeed if we strengthen and combine our unique super powers: high quality mobile games, community and Super Content.
The mobile gaming market is expected to grow 13% in 2023 to 170B USD. It is a mature market several orders of magnitude larger than web3 gaming. While it has its own challenges with regards to user acquisition, our leadership team has decades of combined experience developing and growing mobile games.
But achieving growth in mainstream mobile gaming also means delivering what players on those platforms expect. That is, a player-first, high-quality experience around a fun game. A game they want to play because of its intrinsic entertainment value, not because of incentives. An inclusive experience with a smooth and familiar sign up process, without wallets or web3 language getting in the way. A game they can trust, compliant with App Store policies and global regulation.
The role that you, our community, will play will be crucial to succeed. To grow on mobile we need a supportive and inclusive community that welcomes new players and helps them understand the game. That engages with them. That shares their excitement in Discord and that streams their games. That plays PvP and participates in our Leagues. Our goal is to grow our community and make it truly global and gaming-oriented.
Finally, we believe that Super Content holds the key to bringing everything together and creating something unique and disruptive in gaming. In a nutshell, it will bring the best of web3 to the masses: ownership and interoperability with an unparalleled user experience.
Super Content will supercharge user acquisition on mobile, while improving engagement and retention. It will take the creator economy and the secondary market to the next level. It will help strengthen the bonds within the community. Super Content will power the next era of gaming.
And today, we are excited to share our upcoming steps in that direction.
Eternal Dragons Is Coming to the App Stores
We are excited to announce that we have submitted a new version of Eternal Dragons to the Google Play Store in test markets, which will be followed by a submission to the Apple App Store.
This is a key milestone, towards which we have been working with relentless focus and one that makes us really proud.
This version is focused on delivering an intuitive experience to new players that don’t have any prior knowledge of Eternal Dragons. It will incorporate concepts that are expected by free-to-play games on mobile, including in-game currencies, in-game items, PvE and PvP modes. You can read more about this new release in this post.
We have adopted a gradual approach of launching early and iterating, so this initial version, while well rounded, is limited in scope. Our goal is to learn as fast as possible, optimize the player experience, and expand.
In addition to being available in the app stores in the initial test markets, this version will continue to be available via APK and Testflight to our community on our website. That means that everyone will enjoy the same version at all times, accelerating and simplifying the development process as well as enabling a connected community experience from day one.
As part of this update, the NFT integration and the League rewards will be temporarily disabled. This is needed in order to provide an intuitive, fair and balanced experience to new players, while allowing us to capture the data we need, to ensure that the integration of assets acquired outside the game preserves the game economy balance.
Our goal is to deliver an engaging and inclusive game that is set for success on mobile. The integration of assets acquired externally must be done carefully and thoughtfully, in order to keep the fun and player skills at the center, and avoid experiences that can be considered pay-to-win.
We will re-enable NFT game utility once we have a robust understanding of the performance of the game economy, and after applying all the game design changes needed to keep the economy balanced as well as ensuring compliance with app stores policies and regulation.
The Eternal Dragons NFTs Will Become The First Ever Super Content
When the Eternal Dragons NFTs are integrated back into the game, their functionality will align with our Super Economy vision. They will become in fact the first ever Super Content. Below is an outline of the features or “superpowers” that we are planning for the Eternal Dragons NFTs.
The first one is to reward Eternal Dragons NFT owners with a package of in-game assets (dragons, minions and resources) over a period of time, based on their engagement as well as the amount, type and rarity of the NFTs owned. Think of it as a battle pass, but more flexible and dynamic.
What’s exciting about it, is that since NFTs are tradable, the new owner of those NFTs will be able to enjoy the benefits that are still unclaimed. Our platform will provide a clear view of what rewards have been consumed, what benefits are active and which ones are scheduled for later.
The in-game assets received may include battle units as well as in-game resources. They can be used to play the game and to obtain new assets based on the player achievements. We plan to let certain assets obtained in-game to be mintable on chain, and thus available for trading in web3 marketplaces. We’ll start with support for Solana and roll it out later to all relevant chains.
In addition to web3 marketplaces, we plan to enable mainstream peer-to-peer trading of in-game assets, including a blockchain-less in-game marketplace. With player experience and mobile as key pillars of our strategy, we aim to expand the reach of the secondary market to a much broader and relevant audience. This is one of the most impactful aspects of embracing mobile as our distribution platform.
When it comes to meta-game and progression, we have an exciting progression system planned that will enable not only individual player progression, but also battle units progression.
Therefore, it will be possible for battle units to be leveled up and later fused with other compatible units to permanently generate a higher tier unit. This higher tier unit can then be upgraded again, and fused again, increasing the level (and power) of the resulting unit.
Our goal is to enable a vibrant gaming economy, where in-game items can be traded easily and where these items can also be shared with players or guilds. The units shared with others may receive upgrades based on the role they played, making it more fun and rewarding to team up with other players.
To obtain new units, we are planning a summoning and breeding system that can use the DNA of owned units during the summoning process, passing traits to the resulting unit and becoming a parent as a result. Only owned units can be used to contribute DNA to ensure compliance with securities regulation which prevents generating income passively from the effort of 3rd parties.
Additionally, we plan to offer Eternium holders the ability of exchanging their Eternium for in-game assets, including hard and soft in-game currency and delivered over a period of time — also like a battle pass. This is needed to ensure compliance with e-money regulation that apply to fungible tokens like Eternium and in consideration of the Apple Developer Guidelines that limits the transfer of cryptocurrencies to wallets and licenced exchanges. We will share more details about this exchange offer when we make it available.
One of the most exciting aspects of Super Content is that it will support cross game interoperability. We are designing the integration of Super Content across our current and upcoming titles, while exploring partnerships that would give Super Content owners benefits and utility in 3rd party titles and even beyond the digital realm.
We’re optimistic about the next stage of Eternal Dragons. We believe that these actions will help us reach a much broader audience, and significantly increase the chances of making Eternal Dragons a success. Consequently we’ll adapt our messaging and will update our content to be more relevant, inclusive and welcoming to mainstream players.
We know that our industry will continue to evolve and we all must feel comfortable with it, embracing that change instead of looking back. We’ll continue to learn, adapt and evolve in our relentless pursuit of our vision, because that’s what drives us. That’s our nature.
We look forward to discovering new horizons alongside you.
Alex Arias, CEO.
On behalf of the Trailblazer Games team.
