Mythical Games Launches Web3 Title Blankos Block Party on Epic Games Store

Mythical Games launched its Blankos Block Party on the Epic Games Storemaking it the first Web3 game to launch on the platform.

The game is free to play and can be downloaded in early access today with the full game launch on September 28, which will feature Blankos Block Party season one content. It is the first blockchain game specifically approved for sale on the Epic Games Store. The hope is that this will lead to much greater awareness of the game and an opportunity to be part of a mass market.

“It took a long time,” said John Linden, CEO of Mythical Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We’ve been working on some of these networks for years now. We’ve been working with Epic on this for over a year.”

The promise of the opportunity to bring blockchain technology into mainstream gaming has enabled Mythical to raise a lot of money.

Blankos Block Party, co-developed by Mythical Games and Third Kind Games, is a multiplayer party game set in a crazy online world, with a focus on custom art design, world building, collecting and personalizing unique Blankos characters. characters. It has a black vinyl art style and a lot of attitude.

Linden calls these characters “playable NFTs” that players can own. The NFTs allow players, creators, artists, brands and game developers to become stakeholders and owners in new “play and earn” game economies, where they can choose to sell the characters for a profit if they wish. You level the characters, merge them and create new characters. And you can sell them in a market.

New players can expect a wide selection of developer and player-created maps, offering a huge amount of immersion, creativity and fun.

Blankos are collectible digital vinyl toys brought to life. They inhabit their own ever-changing, unusual world and love good vibes and good times. Players can expect different types of gameplay including racing, shooting, collecting and fighting.

“We’ve had a blast watching the Blankos community grow in size and creativity since our launch,” Jamie Jackson, chief creative officer at Mythical Games, said in a statement. “On the eve of our full launch, we are excited to welcome the Epic Games Store community to our vibrant player base that has already created over a million accounts to date.”

While not required to play, Blankos Block Party offers players the freedom to sell their digital items in the game’s store. In other words, the things you earn and buy in Blankos are yours in the game. Now those players could see a broader market.

“The game did really well outside the stores. The challenge is that so many of the mainstream gamers are being aggregated to the stores,” Linden said. “It’s what they’re used to, accessing games through Steam or Epic or Xbox.”

Powered by the Mythical platform, the marketplace provides an opportunity for players who wish to exercise the freedom of digital ownership to sell or buy in-game items. Led by game industry veterans, Mythical’s team has helped develop major franchises including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, Marvel Strike Force and Skylanders.

Third Kind Games is one of the largest independent game developer studios in the UK and has studios in Poland and Spain.

To get approval

Asked about the challenges Mythical was working on with Epic, Linden said he couldn’t talk about the exact details, but it was a matter of coming up with the right practices and language for user agreements. It helped that the Blankos game didn’t have its own cryptocurrency token. You can buy digital items in the game with US dollars or with cryptocurrency, but players do not buy and sell the game’s own token because there is none. About 85% of sales are made via US dollars, although players can buy with cryptocurrency.

Instead, the characters themselves come with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which establishes the player’s ownership and the right to sell on a mythical marketplace that exists outside of the Epic Games Store.
On this policy, “We agreed with Epic very early,” Linden said. “We shared many principles and I am delighted that we were able to achieve that. We are solely focused on the digital assets, the NFTs themselves.”

One thing Mythical had to do at Epic’s request was to have the game rated by several rating agencies around the world, including the Entertainment Software Ratings Board in the US. That was something Mythical didn’t have to do when it sold items through its own web site. And the board had questions about protecting children during the transaction process. Because you can buy and sell items in the game, the title has a teen rating in the US

The ESRB process took months and the company had to talk to PEGI in Europe and the International Age Rating Coalition. This process took months, and it was training for Mythical, Linden said. But he noted that the company had many people who had gone through these processes before making console games. Still, Mythical got through the process first, figuring out what happens if someone asks for a refund or if there’s a claim of fraud in the sales process.

“We wanted to be sure and we worked with them on best practices. It took longer because it was not a normal game.” said Linden. “We’re excited about how this plays out and we’re quite optimistic.”

The game, which was sold on the Internet, was quite successful. It led to the creation of more than a million player accounts, Linden said.

As for other stores, Mythical does not make a mobile version of Blankos. But it’s working on other games – Nitro Nation and NFL Rivals – that will likely be played on mobile devices. There are also problems getting through with the mobile app stores.

“Everyone will be different,” Linden said.

Not touting the blockchain

Mythical realizes that many players are against NFTs and therefore it will not promote that part of them. Instead, it will focus on how fun the game is and how players have ownership rights and the right to resell the characters.

“We are not patting our backs and saying this is a Web3 game and this is on the blockchain. We are unique in that. You don’t need to know what a wallet is. You don’t need to know what cryptocurrency is,” said he. “You can literally just play it.”

Linden added: “But from an access perspective, it’s a big deal. It is the first time that the new economies are played in a mainstream game in the App Store.”