A couple of days ago I had the opportunity to talk with Alex Fedd from 0xGames and discuss around their existing and upcoming titles as well as the success of their company.
Hi Alex! It’s an honor to have you with us today! 0xGames is the company to watch out for and the success of your games is something that can’t go unnoticed!
Hey George! Thank you for having me and thank you for the kind words! It’s a pleasure to be talking with you.
To begin with, our first question, give us some information about your role in 0xGames and the company itself. How many employees are working for 0xGames, how many games do you have?
My role is something I’d call the go-to guy in terms of anything related to community management and certain aspects of marketing. I have to say I’m assisted a great deal by our Chief Product Officer as well as our CEO Sergey himself. To be more precise, I try to ensure that 0xGames has PR coverage and I’m helping all our games’ communities with any matters that may need resolving.
As of now our development studio has released three games: 0xUniverse, 0xWarriors and 0xRacers. And there are 17 of us all in all. We do have a couple of girls too, so it’s not an all-male kingdom. Most of the guys started working in late 2017 and some joined in 2018.
Great to see your team growing! 0xGames focus on creating games with the decentralized economies, how does this work for you so far?
Yes, I would even say the focus is on making open economy games, as our latest racing manager states on its main page.
Our founder Sergey Kopov had worked for 10 years in traditional game development and created games within his own studio before he gathered our team and went into crypto. Then in 2016, and especially 2017, he decided to start making blockchain games because he saw the market as full of great potential. So as some of our players may know, we were first inspired to create our flagship project 0xUniverse after the kitties game showed what they were capable of. However, we examined the kitties and decided to expand on what they had done.
Talking about decentralized economies, that is one of the things our community loves about 0xUniverse. Almost all actions and logic are done on-chain (except for our story plot and knowledge calculation needed for ships). As for 0xWarriors, we decided to allow the smart contracts to take care of the equipment, chests purchases and trade between the players. And a centralized server handles the fighting mechanics, i.e. leveling up and arena battles.
Let’s talk about 0xRacers, you held a successful presale that raised over 100k. How’s the game development going so far? Still on early version, what players should expect from Beta and Main Launch?
Yes, that was a major success. Since then the development has been going at a steady pace. We’re expecting the beta version to hit the roads in the near future. So far our developers have introduced special “activity hubs”. These are going to be fully implemented to accommodate for future in-game events and new features. One thing that stands out among the activity hubs is the Spaceport. It is featuring a 0xUniverse logo and, well, we are encouraging our community to keep on guessing as to how it will work.
Also, we’ve recently added support for the mobile versions as well as OpenSea. So now every car owner can contemplate or trade their pretty rides and parts right there. Right now our team is working hard on the much-awaited racing events that will actually see beta participants fighting it out to be the best racing manager.
0xBattleships is one of your titles too. What can you tell us about this one?
- Yes, this project was announced a while ago, and right now it will most likely have its concept redesigned to a certain extent because our team has much bigger ambitions for the game. What we can reveal is that we hope to expand on the initial idea of allowing players to build their own fighter ships with various blockchain modules (lasers, force shields, physical armor, energy generators, engines, etc). So we invite everyone to join our community and stay tuned to learn more about that.
Now on the 0xUniverse side, I’m the proud owner of two planets and two spaceships! What are your plans for the future of the game? Can you give us some details of what someone can do in 0xUniverse?
Great question. An update should come out pretty soon and you will yourself see what it will bring to the game!
Aside from that, we are working on planetary buildings now which will allow players to extract something of value (not disclosing this one yet) and make the gaming experience more engaging. Besides, as some of our fans may know, we are developing the “Wars of Corporations” update. The thing is, while there are no military operations per se, the situation is slowly heating up in the universe as the corporate clans are gathering resources for what’s to come. We do expect some buzz to be about sector control: corporations will be able to take control of various sectors of the galaxy and gain proceeds from that. And if you want my opinion on all that, I’m really excited to see the wars part. As there is going to be strategy involved. Imagine clashes between strategic battle fleets of different corporations.
Moreover, there will be a lot for them to do beyond the known galaxy. This is what should come along with the so-called “Expansion beyond” update (who knows, maybe you will meet a small NEO galaxy).
Also expect more stories as the storyline will go on with more legendary planets to be found. After the Hidden one was discovered some people believed they mastered the galaxy’s mysteries. That is far from the truth though as that discovery was only the beginning of a grand quest yet to come.
Now a more geeky question, you develop games on various blockchains. What difficulties have you encountered so far and which one is your personal favorite?
There have been several indeed. One of the difficulties that had bothered our community for a long time before it was solved was high gas consumption during ship invention, for instance. So basically 0xUniverse players struggled to invent past ship 16 or 17, depending on how luck would have it, and thus were unable to get better ships to keep exploring. And I will say outright that this issue is my favorite. The amount of time it took our blockchain lead and other developers to get on top of that problem was quite enormous. But we successfully overcame that despite our team having to revise a lot of the calculation logic.
Integrating EOS into our games posed a certain challenge in the beginning too. The platform is very different from Ethereum, so we had to hire new guys proficient in that field. However, EOS has an active community that helps a lot in onboarding new players. And we do hope to see more enthusiasts joining 0xWarriors and 0xRacers where this platform is fully functional.
Blockchain field is still an undiscovered area. The difficulties can be enormous indeed. What are your future plans for 0xGames?
We’re planning to strengthen our positions and make all our games much more interesting. For example, our team intends to integrate fiat payments so that, on the one hand, our player base can grow significantly and, on the other hand, players less familiar with blockchain have a chance to ease into it.
One more thing that has been in our plans is to up the game, so to speak, in terms of marketing: we want to do more cross-promotions with other crypto games (yes, it is quite possible you will see a token from a different project displayed on, let’s say, 0xUniverse planets). Generating a greater number of mobile installs is of significance to us as well. And our studio will also be participating in various major events, like the one we’re doing now with Cryptogamingpool. Keep in mind that UX is one of the areas that will be heavily focused on too. All in all, these are just some of the things we’ll be doing.
The last question I always like to ask people, where do you see blockchain gaming in 5 years from now?
We have great hopes that blockchain will encompass many more fields and bring in many more traditional gamers. The technology has great potential and we are looking forward to seeing the blockchain gaming industry flourish.
Thank you Alex for being with us today! It was a pleasure to discuss with you and learn more about 0xGames!
Thank you, George, for your questions. We hope to be able to talk with you again in the future!