Skyweaver: Fulfilling the Promise of a Crypto Game
Lessons to learn from the dark horse of crypto gaming
We talk to a lot of projects every week and we’re often asked what crypto games we support. On mentioning how excited we are about Skyweaver, we typically receive two opposing reactions - people are either familiar with the game and echo our sentiments or have barely heard of it and wonder what we’re on about. This post is especially for those in the second category.
See, crypto gaming is in a limbo right now. The first generation of mainstream crypto games, Axie Infinity and its likes, played an important role in attracting capital and eyes to the space but have since almost universally gone through an acute hyperinflation problem. On the other hand, highly talented teams are building a variety of exciting, ambitious, AAA-rated projects. But these are all at least a few months away and by no means guaranteed to succeed.
Amidst this uncertainty, there is an overarching fear. Blockchain technology promised to be the next frontier for video games, one that would take an already booming industry to the next level. But will these promises go unfulfilled? Will crypto for video games and gamers turn out to be more of a passing fad than a messiah?
Enter Skyweaver - the true dark horse of this space that not only fulfills the promise of blockchain technology for games, but tackles predominant criticisms and serves as a guiding light for projects to follow. Also, it’s live to play.
In this post, we’ll introduce Skyweaver, talk about its gameplay, adoption, and economy, and how other crypto games can learn a lesson two from it.
What is Skyweaver
Skyweaver is a free to play, cross-platform trading card game (TCG) that is, as the team likes to call it, from another dimension. The game has been in development for four years and is currently in open beta. It is created by Horizon Blockchain Gaming, a studio based out of Canada and led by Peter Kieltyka, who has co-founded and sold Pressly and Nulayer in the past.
Skyweaver represents a new generation of TCGs, best outlined by Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit and investor in Skyweaver) in this post.
OG TCGs like Magic: The Gathering featured physical cards (over 20 billion of them!) that players could collect, sell, and trade with their friends or with strangers on the internet. Some of these cards sold for over $100,000 and became a part of video game folklore. Then came digital TCGs, pioneered by the likes of Hearthstone. These were highly scalable (Hearthstone had 100 million+ registered players) but missed a vital feature - card ownership. Players could purchase and play with their cards but do little else.
Skyweaver, enabled by blockchain technology, combines the scalability of digital games with the ownership of physical ones. Cards in the game are NFTs that can be bought, sold, traded, or gifted on an open marketplace. Players truly own their assets and can do whatever they want with them.
But Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone only became popular because they were great games. How does Skyweaver do in that department?
Gameplay
Each Skyweaver game is an online 1v1 battle. Players start with a chosen hero and a deck of 25 other cards, made up of units and spells, which can alter the match in a variety of ways. The goal of the game is to get the enemy hero’s health to 0 points.
Skyweaver has two game modes:
Ranked mode: There are seven ranks in Skyweaver. Over the course of a four-week season, players battle each other to win points. Accumulating points helps players rank up. Top players on the competitive leaderboard are rewarded. The ranks and leaderboards are reset at the end of each season.
Conquest mode: This is a single elimination tournament-style mode. A player buys a ticket to enter with one life and can play a maximum of three matches. Losing even once eliminates the player. Winning all three brings superior rewards.
Complexity
Skyweaver, like any good TCG, is complex.
Players choose one of 15 heroes, each with a different combination of five prisms that defines their powers. The game has over 530 unique cards (with an expansion set of 50 new cards underway) that carry one or more of seven effects and six traits. Additionally, there are 16 enchantments that strengthen or weaken the card they are attached to. This variety makes Skyweaver deeply strategic, almost chess-like. Every choice matters. A player has to spend hours playing to gain a grasp over the nuances and intricacies of the game.
Skyweaver stands out from other crypto games, which are often criticized for being shallow, boring, and in some cases, pure simulations!
Skill-Based
We’ve seen crypto games where players are rewarded for losing or even just showing up. We’ve also seen games that are pay-to-win, where one can purchase more powerful NFTs and beat better players.
Skyweaver is different and heavily skill-based. Players have to spend hours completing tutorials, practicing against bots, and getting beaten by stronger opponents before they can even begin to get good. Yes, more affluent players can purchase cards and decks from the marketplace but they don’t guarantee wins. A skilled player with an average deck can beat a not-so-skilled player with a great deck. The best (and not the richest) player wins.
Competitiveness
Every bit of Skyweaver is highly competitive.
Both the Ranked and Conquest mode pit players against each other. The only way to make progress and gain rewards is to defeat your enemies. Players can use the leaderboard to see how they rank against others, both globally and within their region. Like chess, they are assigned an ELO score that changes based on their performance. Each of these elements adds to the competitiveness of the game and entices players to keep playing and become better than others.
Most other crypto games lack this element of meaningful competition.
Beautiful Gameplay
Finally, playing Skyweaver is a stunning experience. Each of the 15 heroes, 530+ cards, and other spells and enchantments have beautiful, unique artwork. The animations, graphics, and intense soundtrack befit the wonderful gameplay. Everything about the game screams high quality. This, again, is a welcome upgrade from the first generation of crypto games. Here’s a glimpse:
These four elements make Skyweaver a great game - something gamers would play with or without the added incentive of crypto. It competes with Hearthstone and other illustrious predecessors. Unsurprisingly, their player base includes world champions of Hearthstone, Pokemon, and the best Magic: The Gathering players.
Making a Game Gamer-Friendly
Most web2 gamers are repulsed by the thought of web3 games. There are five main reasons for this: bad games, a foreign onboarding process, high startup costs, the negative perception of NFTs, and speculative trading by various economic agents. We’ve already spoken about how Skyweaver has fundamentally addressed the first. Let’s now look at the other four.
Onboarding Process
Signing up to play crypto games is a task. Most games require a multi step process to set up a browser wallet like Metamask or Phantom before one can start playing the game. The problem is that these wallets:
are not intuitive to web2 native gamers
are not integrated into the game itself and need to be installed externally
require the safe storage of a multi-word secret seed phrase to keep one’s assets safe
need to be funded (on-ramp) via an exchange or another wallet
have terrible mobile integration
It is just too much work and not worth the hassle for most gamers, who’d rather put their efforts into playing other fun games.
The Horizon team recognized this as a major hurdle and created their own wallet solution - Sequence.
Users can create unique Sequence wallets by signing up using their preexisting Google, Email, Facebook, Discord, Twitch, or Apple accounts. This provides a significantly improved and web2-like intuitive experience for the average gamer. While other external wallet solutions are being built along similar lines, they are not integrated into games like Sequence is into Skyweaver.
Sequence has all the features of a typical browser wallet but also goes further - providing a fiat on-ramp, multi-sig support, and native mobile integration within Skyweaver mobile apps. The best part? Creating a Sequence wallet requires just two clicks and no seed phrase business.
Thus, getting started with Skyweaver becomes a simple four step process:
Here is how that compares to the typical onboarding process for most crypto games:
The difference is monumental.
Startup Costs
Most existing crypto games require users to spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars to purchase assets before even playing. Typical gamers are not going to spend that much money upfront (or ever) to play any game - no matter how good it is.
Skyweaver is completely free to play. In fact, a player can keep playing without ever paying a cent.
Those who want to spend money can do so by:
Entering Conquests with a 1.5 USDC ticket
Buying cards ( 2-10 USDC) or decks (upto 40 USDC)
These prices are not exorbitant and similar to what players are used to paying in micro-transactions and marketplace purchases in existing video games.
Perception of NFTs
The biggest barrier to mainstream adoption for crypto games remains the disdain gamers have for NFTs or anything crypto related.
They think NFTs are:
get quick rich schemes by scammers
a new way for gaming companies to dress up micro-transactions
bad for the environment
Before discussing how Skyweaver is changing this perception, it is important to clarify that none of these concerns apply to Skyweaver.
The first one is perhaps the most valid. The crypto space is chock-full of bad actors and scammers. People are lured into making purchases with promises of extravagant returns, chances of winning lambos, or any of the other shady tactics used by illegitimate projects. Skyweaver makes only one promise - you will be able to own your assets. Their vision is to create a “player-owned economy” with the team providing the tools for players to participate in the vision.
The second concern is also valid. Developers love micro-transactions. Gamers hate them. It is understandable why gamers think of NFTs as a way for developers to use the latest trend under the pretence of “ownership” to extract more money out of them.
Skyweaver, however, doesn’t sell NFTs to players. All cards are generated by players themselves through gameplay. Skyweaver earns money by charging a 6% fee (+1% for the Niftyswap AMM, more on this later) on all trades made in their marketplace. This is similar to the marketplace fee charged by Steam and much lower than the 30% fee charged by Apple for in-app transactions.
Finally, Skyweaver NFTs don’t harm the environment as they are minted on Polygon, a carbon-negative blockchain. Moreover, Polygon currently works in tandem with the Ethereum blockchain, which itself is transitioning from the energy intensive proof-of-work validation mechanism to proof-of-stake, further reducing the environmental impact.
NFTs are going to change the face of gaming and the only way for legitimate projects to differentiate themselves from bad actors and protect gamers is by mass education. Skyweaver does a great job of correctly messaging their use of NFTs via multiple touch points in their landing page, docs, and onboarding process. They are also working with guilds like IndiGG to create educational content.
Speculative Trading
There are two types of agents who trade crypto game assets, gamers and financial agents, each with very different motives.
Gamers purchase assets to play the game, without a financial motivation. They only sell when they’re either through with the game or have added value to the NFT via gameplay, if ever. They typically have longer holding times, and contribute to a more stable market. On the other hand, financial agents, primarily motivated by profits, partake in speculative trading and asset flipping. They also hoard rarer assets, artificially inflating their value, as seen in other games like Axie Infinity where rare Mystic Axies trade north of $100,000 each.
Crypto games are unattractive to gamers because of the influence these financial agents exert over a game economy. They are not healthy for the long term sustainability of a game and most crypto games haven’t done a good job of protecting players from them.
Skyweaver goes some way in solving this problem by using Niftyswap, an NFT marketplace protocol developed by the Horizon team themselves.
Niftyswap uses the automatic market making mechanics pioneered by Uniswap, creating pools of each ERC-1155 token card with USDC. Players swap their cards or tokens with these liquidity pairs when they want to make a trade.
There is a 1% protocol fee paid to liquidity providers on each trade. Of course, players can always trade their cards in a more traditional manner on marketplaces like OpenSea if they wish to.
The Niftyswap mechanism (any by extension, the ERC-1155 standard) provides three notable advantages over the open order book based NFT exchanges used by other games:
Here is how the price movement for Skyweaver cards compares to that of Parallel, a popular crypto TCG traded on OpenSea.
Niftyswap doesn’t fully protect players from predatory and financially motivated behavior of speculators but helps in significantly reducing it. While it is easier to implement for TCGs compared to other genres, this AMM based marketplace is an interesting case study for games to analyze and improve player experience.
Skyweaver does a lot of things right to reduce the onboarding friction for mainstream gamers and give them a more web2-like experience. However, to survive and become a great game for the ages, it has one more hurdle to cross - something even the best crypto games and teams have struggled with - creating a sustainable economy.
The Skyweaver Economy
In 2018, Horizon Games founder Peter Kieltyka announced Skyweaver through this post. It’s worth reading the entire post to understand Horizon’s vision but we will focus on what Peter has to say about “play-to-earn” in games:
Through the power of smart contracts together with cryptoeconomic design, we can now give players the opportunity to participate in gaming experiences that generate and distribute digital assets based on their outcome. We can create worlds in which winning battles, completing quests, and defeating opponents award digital assets securely. Whether players keep the rewards, trade them, or sell them for cryptocurrency is entirely their choice.
The last word is also the most important one - “choice”. Once players earn tokens in a game (fungible or otherwise), they have a choice: do I sell these tokens to earn money or do I use them in other forms to make further progress in the game?
The primary problem with first-generation crypto games is that a majority of their player base think of them as a means to earn an income. The gameplay, economy, and narrative are designed to entice users to make the choice of exchanging their tokens for money. Investments in games are made not with the intention of having fun playing but with the expectation of an ‘ROI’.
To make a ‘play-to-earn’ economy sustainable, other choices given to players need to be more or as compelling as exchanging their tokens for money. Furthermore, only players with skill or ability should be able to earn tokens and not everyone. The vision for crypto in games was not only about earning money playing games but also about true digital ownership, provable fairness, and interoperable economies.
Economy Loop
The Skyweaver economy hinges around five key elements - base cards, silver cards, gold cards, Conquest tickets, and Hero Skins. There are over 530 base cards. These are free, non-tradable, and unlocked for all players as they gain XP and level up. The other four represent the monetary aspects of the game.
The top weekly players in the Ranked mode are rewarded with 800 Silver Cards and 2400 Conquest tickets. The higher a player ranks, the more they win. Importantly, these numbers can be adjusted by the devs depending on demand and active players in the game.
To enter the Conquest mode, players must burn a Conquest ticket. This can be acquired by:
Ranking high in the Ranked mode
Burning a Silver Card
Spending 1.5 USDC
Players play a maximum of three matches in the Conquest mode and are eliminated if they lose even once. The rewards:
0 wins: No Cards
1 win: 1 Silver
2 wins: 2 Silver
3 wins: 1 Gold + 1 Silver
The only way to win a Gold card is beating three other players in Conquest mode, not an easy feat by any means. Additionally, the supply of Gold cards is limited. Every week, eight different Gold cards are made available to win via Conquest. Once the week ends, these eight Gold cards won’t be available to win ever again.
Hero skins are not yet introduced in the game but will be minted by the burning of 10-20 Gold cards. This will make them the rarest items in the game, reserved only for the best or the most affluent players and will become the ultimate bragging rights.
It is important to note that Silver Cards, Gold Cards, and Hero skins are cosmetics and do not give players a competitive advantage. Once players win them, they have a choice. They can either keep them as a status symbol in gameplay, trade them for USDC on the marketplace, or in the case of Silver cards, burn them to get a Conquest ticket and the chance of winning Gold cards.
Sustainability
The Skyweaver economy will be sustainable if these four elements can hold their value. The value which is a function of demand and supply.
The demand depends on:
number of players in the game
how desirable these cosmetic upgrades are for players
The number of players will depend on network effects and game marketing. The smooth adoption measures should certainly help Skyweaver in this aspect. The desirability, on the other hand, will depend on the value players place on these cosmetic upgrades. More on this later.
On the supply side, it becomes important for game designers to have control and actively manage the supply of tokens in response to demand. For Skyweaver, the main lever is the number of Silver cards and Conquest tickets given out to Ranked players. If demand increases, these rewards can be increased. This would also mean more players taking part in Conquest mode, increasing the supply of Gold cards. The opposite happens when demand decreases.
Other control levers could be:
Number of Gold cards burned to acquire a Hero Skin
Number of Silver cards burned to get a Conquest Ticket
Rewards from winning matches in Conquest mode
Designing game economies is tough. Designing game economies that interact with open financial markets is 10x tougher. The more control devs have over their economy, the easier it will be for them to adjust to the market (and game demand). The Skyweaver devs have significant control over key levers of their economy.
Thus, unlike most other crypto games, Skyweaver’s economy is fundamentally strong and not driven by ponzinomics. The supply side will be controlled by the devs in response to the demand, which becomes the only variable. The economy will remain sustainable as long as they have a large user base that love playing the game. This makes it a marketing problem rather than a tokenomics one, as is the case for any web2 game.
Wen Token?
Wait, we’ve spoken at length about a crypto game economy without mentioning a token? A little bit on that.
Most crypto gaming projects release their token before the game. Skyweaver, on the other hand, is live but has no immediate plans for a token. We think this is a practice more games should follow for two reasons:
Games are meant for gamers. An on-chain token exposes the game economy to open markets and financial players, increasing speculation and volatility and potentially driving gamers away.
No one has cracked a sustainable token economy for crypto games yet.
Skyweaver is free-to-play with top players rewarded in NFTs that they can sell to earn an income. Since these NFTs have direct utility in the game, they are bought by other players. This makes earnings skill-based and player-driven, the building blocks of a sustainable economy. They don’t need a token at this stage.
If and when they do launch a token, they will already have a large user base, a mature economy, and more projects to learn from. The token then would act as a catalyst to supercharge growth.
Final Thoughts
Skyweaver is by far the most gamer-friendly crypto game currently live. They’ve done this by focussing on getting the basics right.
It is a solid and addictive game that is constantly expanding and evolving
Sequence wallet and Niftyswap reduce the blockchain-induced friction for traditional gamers, easing adoption
The economy is fundamentally sound and potentially on the path of sustainability
TCGs are probably the most skeuomorphic fit for games implementing blockchain technology. Games in other genres have to be more cautious and innovative when integrating crypto. That being said, crypto gaming projects can and should pick up a lot of these gamer-friendly practices and industry innovations used by Skyweaver to make their games more attractive to the masses.
The bigger question is - can Skyweaver become the first truly mainstream crypto game, on par with its prestigious TCG predecessors? It’ll come down to marketing, the global perception of NFT games, and their ability to create a solid IP. The Horizon team, however, has proved that they are innovators and visionaries building for the long-term and we wouldn’t put it past them to make all of this happen.
Our mission at IndiGG is to become the hub of crypto gaming in India. We will achieve this by partnering with the best blockchain games in the world and bringing them to India’s 400 million+ gamers. Since Skyweaver is free-to-play without a token, it doesn’t fit the typical guild-scholar model. So, to bootstrap adoption of the game in the country, we created a $100,000 reward pool for community initiatives like a leaderboard reward program, esports tournaments, and onboarding India’s top TCG player as a game ambassador. If you’re building in the crypto gaming space and want to collectively make a game big in India, my DMs on Twitter are open.
Shoutout to my colleagues Abhishek, Aman, Abhir, and Sumanth for their feedback on this piece. <3