Big Time is an MMORPG game with the theme of time travel. Judging from its production level and playability, it has the potential to become a 3A game masterpiece. This article will introduce in detail the game background story, team, financing, and economic model of Big Time. and analysis of product pros and cons. Blockchain DeFiNFTs
introduction
Encouraged by the last bull market, the emerging field of GameFi has emerged, with projects such as Axie and StepN bringing forth new ideas and presenting a variety of gameplay and concepts. GameFi not only significantly lowers the entry threshold for Web3, but also meets users' daily entertainment needs, thereby attracting more users to participate and opening a broad "traffic door" for Web3.
There is no doubt that in the last bull market, many excellent GameFi projects created huge wealth. From the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022, GameFi reached its peak, with StepN triggering the wave of XtoEarn. With the withdrawal of Chinese users, its decline was out of control, and GameFi's prosperity gradually declined. Nowadays, the entire GameFi market value has dropped by more than 95%, and the overall market environment is still not improving. Unlike projects such as public chains and NFTs, the recovery of GameFi projects seems to be more difficult. GameFi urgently needs a "new star" to change this situation.
Game story background introduction
Wormholes accidentally descended on the earth, causing time and space to become chaotic and monsters to run rampant. Survivors gather at the edge of time and space, in a refuge called "BIGTIME'S END".
In order to protect time and space, the Evermore Academy took the first step. Heroes summoned by scientist Albert Einstein fought for the stability of the universe and solved the crisis facing the universe.
In Big Time, players are time travelers summoned to the end of the universe. Multiple players will go to ancient Egypt, the American West and other places to eliminate monsters together. Future versions of the game will continue to reveal more plot content. The game uses multiple time and space narratives to allow players to travel through different eras to complete tasks.
As an RPG game, Big Time uses a multi-time and space narrative. The game characters will travel through time and have conversations with historical figures from different civilizations. Through the cross-contrast of different time and space, this background story is made more powerful and extended.
Introduction to Big Time
Big Time was established in April 2021. It is a time travel-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) built on Ethereum. It has an industry-leading team and financing, and its gameplay is similar to World of Warcraft plus Diablo. and the gathering of time travel.
Big Time combines fast combat with time and space adventure to explore ancient mysteries and future civilizations in a battle through history. The game supports a team of up to 6 people. By fighting together with warriors from other professions, you can pick up rare trophies, decorations and tokens in the process of fighting and defeating enemies. At present, the game is still in the internal testing stage, and it has basically developed the prototype of an RPG game, and has completed the construction of the game's sustainable economic mechanism.
Big Time Team Introduction
Big Time's team lineup can be regarded as luxurious among all chain games. Most team members have rich industry experience in the traditional game industry and have resumes with major companies:
Ari Meilich, CEO, former co-founder and CEO of Decentraland, previously worked as a market research analyst at Silicon Valley venture capital fund Charles River Ventures, and founded the big data company Benchrise as concurrently CEO. He has extensive experience in venture capital and data analysis experience of.
Matt Tonks, CTO, has 18 years of experience in the game industry. He has worked as a software engineer at Electronic Arts, a senior artificial intelligence programmer at Epic Games, and as a technical director at Drifter Entertainment, where he co-founded the well-known game company BitMonster.
Thor Alexander, CPO, served as Decentraland's Vice President of Product and has more than 25 years of experience in the traditional gaming field.
Martin Sweitzer, CMO, is also the co-founder of BitMonster. He has worked in multiple game companies and has more than 20 years of game development experience.
Ken Harsha, the team's chief animator and creative director, has participated in many Disney, DreamWorks, and Warner Bros. productions, and has provided art direction for many well-known games such as the Call of Duty series. He has more than 31 years of experience in feature animation, TV animation, and games. Making experience.
Judging from the resume of the team's lineup, the team has professional game development experience and has participated in the design and development of a number of top games, including: League of Legends, Fortnite, God of War, Call of Duty, Overwatch, etc.
Big Time Financing Status
In May 2021, Big Time Studios completed Series A financing of US$21 million. Led by FBG Capital, North Island Ventures, Digital Currency Group, DFG, OKEx Blockdream Ventures, Alameda Research, Circle Financial and Sound Ventures founded by Ashton Kutcher also participated.
In March 2022, Big Time has completed two sales of the core virtual asset Space NFT, with a total revenue of US$70 million. It is available for purchase in leading game guilds around the world, such as YGG, Merit Circle, Avocado Guild, BlackPool, Polkastarter, YGG Sea, ReadyPlayerDAO, 3D Gamers Guild DAO, etc.
In December 2022, Big Time completed its third NFT sale, selling 4,500 functional NFT blind boxes, which were sold out within 5 minutes.
Big Time Economic Model Analysis
Big Time is a "game skin-based economy" mode. In a typical free skins economy, such as League of Legends, Fortnite, or Valorant, game studios sell skins directly to players. In contrast, in Big Time, players can participate in the skin economy by acquiring space and functional NFTs (such as furnaces, armories, and time guards). Space is the virtual land of Big Time, and functional NFT is a place where skin production can be realized.
Source: https://www.yuque.com/dacheng-bezg5/bigtime/economy#Z4eGE
The $TIME token is the primary cryptocurrency driving the Big Time economy.
The $TIME token mainly has the following functions:
1. Used to refine armor/weapon skin fragments in furnaces and armories or to create and upgrade skin-type NFTs.
2. It is consumed when accelerating the production speed of (function 1).
3. It needs to be consumed when accessing the advanced copy.
The total number of $TIME tokens is 5 billion. Theoretically, they will be completely generated within the game through game behaviors, rather than entering the game through issuance, and there will be no reservation for the team or distribution to investors (only There are a few airdrops for early players).
There are three specific ways to obtain $TIME tokens:
1) A broken time hourglass will randomly drop through personal SPACE. As a one-time prop, it can be equipped to produce $TIME tokens. The broken time hourglass will disappear when the countdown ends.
2) Make time hourglasses and equip them by spending time crystals in functional NFT time guards. They will be randomly dropped in the dungeon when completing the following actions (such as killing enemies, completing tasks, completing dungeons, etc.).
3) Obtain the produced $TIME tokens through market purchase or team airdrop.
The supply and demand dynamics of $TIME tokens depend on the size of the player base. $TIME is a cryptocurrency that acts as the glue for the game’s economy. Due to the limited supply of Time Hourglasses, only a fixed number of players can equip them at any given moment, regardless of the number of active players. Therefore, the output of $TIME tokens is limited. In the game, all game players' normal game behaviors need to consume $TIME tokens, and their consumption is theoretically unlimited.
Source: https://www.yuque.com/dacheng-bezg5/bigtime/economy#Z4eGE
As a $TIME token producer in the game, players must invest resources, the direct costs of which mainly include time hourglasses and time crystals. The price of the Time Crystal is fixed in U.S. dollars, while the price of the Time Hourglass fluctuates based on market supply and demand. This mechanism ensures that the supply of $TIME tokens will be controlled by player input costs to maintain the stability of the game economy. At the same time, the fluctuation of the time hourglass price also means that there is a certain correlation between the output of $TIME tokens, market activity and player demand. This design increases the flexibility of the game economy. The creation mechanism of $TIME tokens means that in most cases, the token supply will be consistent with the allocation of in-game resources. This helps maintain the stability and adaptability of the game's economic model and provides players with a richer gaming experience.
In general, Big Time's economic mechanism is well designed and can inject a certain degree of flexibility into the economic cycle within the game while maintaining stability. However, this also places higher requirements on players to formulate resource allocation strategies. They need to invest resources to find a game positioning that suits them, which will bring players a deeper game participation experience.
Big Time product pros and cons analysis
Advantage
1. Token distribution method
Except for airdrops to early players, Big Time does not have any team-oriented reservations or token distribution to investors.
2. Game production level
Compared with chain games represented by Axie Infinity, Big Time has greatly improved the playability and game quality. Developed by a team with luxurious configurations, Big Time presents 3A-level quality, and its difference from Axie Infinity is that , the web game is too rigid to support the expansion of subsequent gameplay.
3. Game economic mechanism
The game economic mechanism of Big Time is very cleverly designed, which can ensure that the internal economic cycle of the game has a certain degree of flexibility on a stable basis, and can also ensure that players of various game positions can have a richer gaming experience.
4. Lower entry barriers for players
The gameplay mechanism of Big Time determines that the final game players will be mainly free players, which means that players can experience the game without purchasing NFT.
insufficient
1. Game economic mechanism
Big Time tokens can only be obtained through normal game behavior in the game, which often requires players to have high game participation, and there is no strong consumption scenario for tokens.
2. Game rules
The game rules are customized by the team, and the team may change or adjust the game rules at any time according to the current status of the game, resulting in damage to the interests of the players. For example, the output rate of tokens has just been adjusted, which will lengthen the return period for gold players. As can be seen from the figure below, as of October 23, the token output on that day was less than 1/10 of the first day of launch.
Source: https://dune.com/wuhuzai/dollarbigtime
3. Game configuration requirements are too high
At present, the main player group of Big Time is still the WEB3 group. The Big Time official website shows that the minimum computer configuration requirement for the game is a GTX 1060 graphics card and at least 50G of hard drive space. This configuration was too high for previous chain game players.
4. The financial threshold for gold players is too high
It can be seen from the official introduction of the game that players who want to make gold need to purchase a variety of NFTs and props, and the prices of NFT and props change with the market, which has a certain threshold for players who want to participate in gold making.
Looking at the potential of Big Time from the perspective of industry development
According to DappRader’s third quarter chain game report, chain game activities in the third quarter of 2023 averaged 786,766 independent active wallets per day, an increase of 12% from the previous quarter. In the third quarter of 2023, Web3 gaming projects received US$600 million in funding, bringing total investment in 2023 to US$2.3 billion. While this represents only 30% of the funds generated last year, one cannot ignore the current market stage that the crypto space is in.
Source: https://dappradar.com
As can be seen from this year’s financing trends (shown in the chart below), venture capitalists have confidence in the future of the GameFI field.
Source: https://dappradar.com/
It can be seen from various industry data that there is no obvious loss of core players in chain games. Although there has been a significant decline in the amount of financing on the chain game circuit over the past year or so, the number of active chain games has not declined significantly, and is even rising slowly, which means that the entire circuit is still growing. and development, and still has a certain degree of resilience in the bear market.
It can be seen from the daily changes in Big Time’s currency holders that although it is limited by the game’s official strict KYC, which makes it difficult to increase the number of people withdrawing money, it still maintains a steady increase. Currently, compared with the number at the beginning of the pre-season The strong growth has slowed down. Once the overall encryption market picks up, the blockchain game market will recover again, and Big Time will become a shining star in the blockchain game.
Source: https://dune.com/Bigtime
Summarize
Big Time demonstrates the characteristics that a new generation of blockchain games should possess. Compared with previous blockchain games, it has achieved significant improvements in production level and playability. From the perspective of game production, Big Time draws on the characters and growth design of mature MMORPGs to enrich players' gaming experience. From the perspective of the game's economic mechanism, Big Time ensures the stability of the in-game economic system while also providing a richer gaming experience for both free and paid players. In terms of actual game experience, the background story of Big Time is huge, and the game plot can unfold in multiple universes and time and space, showing considerable playability, and the gameplay and plot will continue to be iterated in the future.
However, chain games have always inevitably fallen into a strange cycle, that is, purchasing NFT, completing tasks, and obtaining tokens. This cycle makes the game too financial, which not only weakens the entertainment of the game, but also makes players pay too much attention to the acquisition of tokens, forming the so-called "dig, raise and sell" phenomenon. Unfortunately, Big Time cannot escape this cycle. In addition, BIGTIME only provides ways to obtain tokens and does not design strong consumption scenarios of tokens.
However, MMORPG games have a longer game life and are more scalable than chain games like Axie Infinity. Coupled with the team's excellent operation and development capabilities, BIGTIME is still worth looking forward to. With the launch of the public beta version of the game and subsequent gameplay, BIGTIME will lead the trend of a new generation of chain games.
Author: Snow
Translator: Sonia
Article reviewer: KOWEI, Wayne Zhang, Elisa, Ashley, Joyce BeelenHe
Copyright: Gate.io
