(BlockBar) Last Friday, Dapper Labs unveiled its newest ethereum-based gaming experience called “Cheeze Wizards”. According to Dapper Labs co-founder Bryce Bladon, the game has already attracted 973 players who purchased 4,470 fighters.
Most of the ether spent on these digital wizards goes toward prizes, with 607 ETH collected so far for a combined total of roughly $190,977 at the current market price.
Last year, Dapper Labs itself had attracted more than $15 million in investment from funds like Samsung Next, Google’s GV, Venrock, and Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures. Like the studio’s debut game CryptoKitties, “Cheeze Wizards” are also designed to acquire unique traits that could provide opportunities for usage beyond the Dapper Labs tournament itself.
“Building decentralized applications [dapps] is extremely time-consuming because the industry is so very young,” Eggleton said. “With each new dapp the technology gets better and better. As a community we are funding the development of that technology by playing, which I think is super cool.”
Bladon agreed that extensibility is the determining factor for Dapper Labs’ crypto games.Extensibility means the ability to take the asset away from the original game and use it elsewhere. It is to be noted that “Cheeze Wizards” uses Dapper which is the ethereum wallet of the startup. But it is also compatible with most crypto wallets.
According to Bladon the importance of fostering a community that will build on and contribute to a robust ecosystem was the most salient lesson the gaming startup learned from CryptoKitties was. This is what distinguishes dapps from other gaming experiences.
Bladon also said Dapper Labs plans to create opportunities and support for developers who want to build tools, features, and parallel experiences related to “Cheeze Wizards.”
He said“[Community] is the one thing you can’t really fake at scale.” He also added:
“A lot of blockchain games are trying to appeal to the mass market by sacrificing the decentralization and using side chains or hosted solutions. We want to go to the other side of the spectrum and create a game with the community for an experiment with user behavior in crypto networks.”
