Gamers who actively play the mobile tower defense game Crazy Defense Heroes have a chance to earn a share of $19,000 in TOWER tokens. Animoca Brands announced a new play-to-earn event in June 2021. All players who gain 250,000 experience points next month, will share 750,000 TOWER tokens.
Anybody with a smartphone can start playing Crazy Defense Heroes for free on both iOS and Android devices. The amount of TOWER you earn will depend on the number of people that meets the requirements. The pool of 750,000 TOWER tokens is split between all eligible players, so you end up winning 1 TOWER or maybe 750 TOWER.
In order to win, you do need to gain 250,000 experience points. The word ‘gain’ is important here, because it doesn’t matter which level your avatar currently is. All that matter is that your account increased with 250,000 experience points by the end of June.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Crazy Defense Heroes or the tower defense genre. In this game you need to use towers, heroes and spells to defeat a horde of enemies. The enemies walk a certain route through a level, and by strategically placing the right heroes and towers you’ll be able to stap them.
Not the first play-to-earn event
Animoca Brands already ran two play-to-earn pools in April and May. During these two events players shared 300,000 TOWER each month. However, the threshold was only 25,000 experience points. Even though Animoca hasn’t enabled the redemption methods yet through the official Crazy Defense Heroes website.
They’ve now decided to make the play-to-earn pool bigger. They didn’t provide a reason for this change, but most likely they’ve experienced an influx of new players. This would mean that the rewards for May have been rather small. Now they increased the threshold, while also increasing the rewards 150%. In turn this would suggest that Crazy Defense Heroes is performing very well as a free-to-play game with an additional play-to-earn mechanic. However, keep in mind that this is just speculation from my side.
Gaming x DeFi x Play-to-Earn
The rise of blockchain technology paves the way for new business models in gaming. Play-to-earn is the next evolution of free-to-play, changing consumers from cash machines into economy contributors. It’s not without reason that a project like Axie Infinity labels itself as a digital nation. In a play-to-earn game there can be different layers, where top level players rely on farming activities from smaller players.
Overall we’re seeing a merger between financial markets and gaming, as play-to-earn brings a game economy into the real world. Technically it would be possible to make a living from playing a game. However, philosophically you might wonder whether we would still call this a game.
At the same time we’re seeing financial products adding layers of gamification. Yield farming is an example of that. In addition the user interface of Sushi Swap, Doki Doki Finance and Cometh tap into gaming and geek culture. Companies like Seascape Network make it their business model to gamify decentralized finance.
