Following a surge of interest beginning mid-2021, a plethora of blockchain-based games have appeared seemingly out of nowhere, offering numerous lucrative opportunities for speculative NFT enthusiasts to buy-in. The issue, however, is that very few of these projects have any actual gameplay to showcase — a legitimate game takes a long time to develop (let alone factoring in building it on the blockchain), so only a small handful of games are actually playable in some form.
But among the few playable games in this space which have found their audience, the “play to earn” model is clearly working, with projects like Axie Infinity bringing in millions per month while simultaneously creating hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of jobs around the world, especially in lower-income areas.
Interested in learning more about some of these projects on the bleeding edge of the NFT gaming space, we reached out to Dr. Harry J. Malinski of PennyFly Entertainment. Known in the crypto community as “CryptoVet” and often featured on some of the largest crypto podcasts including Around the Blockchain, he is one of the lead consultants on DashLeague.io, a fast-growing NFT based MMORPG that recently made its alpha gameplay available to the public.
Harry, we’ve seen DashLeague emerge as one of the only NFT MMORPG style games that people can actually play and test for themselves. With over 170 Ethereum (~ $550,000+) worth of characters minted at the time of this writing, the organic interest in the project is impressive. Can you shed any light on how your team’s efforts behind the scenes have contributed to these results?
“It has been quite an undertaking since the project’s inception back in September, when the original founder and lead dev known as ‘Spaceman’ invited PennyFly’s CEO Tyler Prescott and myself to meet with him in San Diego. We were originally meeting in regards to a different project, but DashLeague ended up driving a lot of our conversation. Long story short we decided to partner up, and we now have over a dozen people working on game development as well as on the marketing and community management side. More or less everything has been bootstrapped but we’ve still been able to generate significant organic interest, which I believe is possible in part because we’re one of the only NFT games showcasing actual gameplay, and are actually letting people test out the game. We didn’t want this to be just another copycat NFT project — bottom line, the idea behind DashLeague was to build a great game that people will actually enjoy playing. I think that goes a long way in this space due to the overwhelming amount of scams from people who start projects with zero team visibility, show no real proof of their concept, and then disappear after people start putting money in. Because of this, we strive to be highly active in both our Discord as well as Twitter Spaces, so people have the opportunity to get to know our team and have their questions answered in real-time.”
Projects getting “rugged” continues to be a major issue, and has plagued the cryptocurrency space for some time now, adding an extra layer of difficulty that newcomers have to navigate. Despite having gameplay, there are of course plenty of games in the non-blockchain world that look and sound great in their initial stages, only to fall flat later. What elements of DashLeague do you believe will set it apart from other similar ventures?
“There are some highly unique play-to-earn tokenomics we’re implementing, which will soon be revealed in detail in our forthcoming white paper — for starters, once a player or group of players complete a dungeon, they’ll have the ability to claim it for themselves, redesign it in any way they like with their own traps and enemies, and ultimately earn actual money for creating more difficult dungeons. Those who play the most and achieve the highest rankings will actually share in a revenue pool each month, generating passive income rewards for their time. It has clearly been proven with standard MMORPGs that very real economies can be created when enough people are willing to trade real money for items and services that help them progress more quickly within a game. Gold farming alone is a billion-dollar industry worldwide. If we simply create an environment where the players are actually encouraged to make real money from their time and effort (standard games prohibit this), then I imagine we’ll see something really special with DashLeague.”
Thank you for the insight Harry, we saw Mr. Prescott discussing NFT gaming with Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, where similar important points were brought up. The play-to-earn model is clearly here to stay (and likely just getting started), so we’ll be following the blockchain gaming space with heavy interest. Are there any final closing thoughts you’d like to leave our readers with, Dr. Malinski?
“Sure, and thanks again for having me. I firmly believe the NFT gaming space is going to be incredible for the entertainment industry in general. For anyone interested in checking out DashLeague.io, there is still time to join our community, though there aren’t many genesis characters left for minting as can be seen on OpenSea. But the good news is that anyone who mints during this timeframe stands to have a much higher chance at minting a rare character, which yields a huge head start on progression at launch — the official beta is just around the corner as soon as this presale concludes. On behalf of the entire DashLeague family, we are beyond thankful for the support of our incredible community and can’t wait to show you what’s next!”
