🏹Competition

Who is Mothora's competition? Why will Mothora succeed against other web3 games tackling the same problems?

First, we provide an example of one of the earliest Play-To-Earn games: Axie Infinity. The game, once known for enabling a new way for people to earn while playing, especially relevant in underdeveloped countries, is making efforts to add new entertaining and immersive elements. The purpose is to keep the economy alive and ensure users return to invest in the game after the sharp drop in activity near the end of last year. Our reading of the matter is that, while Sky Mavis has a lot of resources, overhauling a game in its entirety is not enough as once players leave a game it's very costly to make them want to come back. In addition, the web3 gaming player base is increasingly demanding visually impressive and engaging games but the recent pivots of the incumbent P2E games haven’t impressed so far. We have reasons to believe that these games will struggle to bring back peak levels of usage because of the limitations of the engine in which they were coded.

The edge of Mothora against this is that we want to conquer both web3 and web2 gamers right from the outset, with immersive visuals and graphics using Unreal Engine 5 and compelling game modes, while having a game that’s incentivized and more sustainable in its economical design.

Second, traditional gaming studios have the means to enter the web3 space and create a new project more quickly due to their resources and brand. We know that they are already trying to do so. The problem lies in their lack of experience in web3, especially their low understanding of the ethos of decentralization and the importance of a community for a game. Another problem is their current audience, who will be a crucial resistance point for web3 ideas, which has already been proven by the thwarted plans of introducing NFTs and other concepts into games by studios like Ubisoft or Square Enix. If any project goes through and succeeds at releasing, we believe that eventually, it would lose the community's interest. This is due to traditional studios’ natural tendencies of centralizing decisions and profit-keeping rather than listening and giving back to players.

Now, our team has a significant amount of accumulated knowledge in web3 and Unreal Engine / 3D development and, compared to traditional gaming studios, understands that the target player base wants the right to make their wishes come true in the games they love the most. For this purpose, we will enable a direct pipeline from the players to our development team and actively listen to and implement their game governance decisions and what kind of content to create in the game in the future, to make their online experiences as close to intended as possible. Our edge is that within the gamer's target persona, we also focus on developing web3 gamers. This group typically has little friction or problems entering new web3 games. As mentioned above, we believe traditional gamers will have more difficulty in understanding the new business models, so it will take more time to onboard them, but only an organization with the right mindset to abstract away complexity from these groups of people will genuinely succeed at attracting them in the first place.

Third, there are in-development web3 games with advanced visuals, some of them also using Unreal Engine 5 as the central system behind the game. Here we can give examples of Star Atlas, Metalcore, or Shrapnel, to name a few.

However, we haven’t yet seen yet a good balance between true innovation and the time to execution in the game modes being presented by these novel web3 games. Either they are non-innovative MMORPGs with an economic system on top or multi-year sandbox universe simulators that will take a long time to complete. Our edge against this is that we went through a long research phase in the project to understand the best possible game mode that works in conjunction with sustainable economic mechanics and is achievable within a reasonable timeframe. This research indicates that to best create a viable web3 game, it is essential to tie higher potential for rewards with the highest levels of inter-player coordination. This means the focus needs to be on the social component of the game, the degree of interdependence of players and on providing them with the sense of belonging to a real evolving community. And this is precisely what we want to recreate in Mothora, with players having higher chances of success and reward by cooperating with their battle companions and DAO members, coordinating across time zones and understanding that organized, they are much more powerful than alone. In the traditional gaming sense, the closest mode called to this is the so-called Realm vs Realm (RvR) game mode, popularised by games like Dark Age of Camelot, Planetside 2 and Guild Wars 2. We want to transform it into an incentivized large-scale three-way DAO vs DAO vs DAO (DvDvD) Grand Strategy game mode, where battles happen in first person and many players on the screen are possible in an immersive game engine. This is where our edge lies against other novel web3 games.

Finally, a few web3 games are attempting to tackle the poor UX issues that plague them due to the nature of how blockchains work. In particular, some games try to solve these issues while remaining decentralized. In fact, in Starknet, a user could create a session key that lasts a period of time to play a web3 game without having to sign transactions during that time. This allows for a more convenient and pain-free experience of web3 games, closer to how games’ UX should actually be and ultimately transforming how the end users perceive these next generation of games. Examples of specific GameFi experiments making efforts in this field would be Age of Eykar or Realms (for adventurers). Still, none of these have as top priority creating immersive and graphically beautiful worlds and instead opting to prioritize the creation of economic layers first.

For Mothora, our value offer for the game lies in tackling the web3 UX friction and the usage of Unreal Engine 5 for the creation of an immersive world in the most decentralized way possible, at the same time.