An Interview with Imperium Empires: What Makes a Good Blockchain Game?

Over 2021 GameFi has taken the crypto world into new frontiers. The space is still very nascent and not too many GameFi games are really that playable. GBV has been very privileged to have spoken to the team at Imperium Empires, a new and upcoming space-themed blockchain game, and have discussed what they think about GameFi, tokenomics, and blockchain gameplay experience. In this interview with Cliff, the CEO and founder of Imperium Empires, we learn more about the thought process and philosophy behind the design of this space battle blockchain game, on Avalanche.

Hi Cliff! Can you introduce yourself and what is Imperium Empires? 

Sure! I’m Cliff, the founder and CEO of Imperium Empires! Imperium Empires is the world’s first AAA space metaverse with a robust NFT-burn economy in PvP battles that also gamifies DeFi mechanics for the 3 billion gamers on Earth. The Imperium metaverse features a wide variety of PvE and PvP gameplay, where players earn by joining a guild of friends to conquer the metaverse and carve out their space empires. 

Imperium Empires is really the child of the marriage of two great passions of crypto and gaming. 

I have been a hardcore gamer since I was 8 years old and I have been in crypto since 2017. I also used to be a crypto lawyer with PwC. To build this game, I have put together a fantastic team of seasoned game and smart contract developers, many of whom are ex-Animoca and ex-Tencent with more than a decade or more of experience in game development and maintenance under their belt. We are here to build the best blockchain game! 

Can you share a bit of background of Imperium Empires? What motivated you to create this game? 

I was in GameFi pretty early. The first blockchain game I noticed was My Neighbour Alice on the Chromia chain back in Feb 2021. I understand the game to be similar to animal crossing, but on the blockchain. The fact it was blockchain, opened up new possibilities for gaming design, and I got really excited. But I feel many games are still very immature, and leave much to be desired in their game design, graphics, and tokenomics. 

I started to look into many different games, and the more I look the more I feel strongly about just making a good blockchain game myself. My inner-gamer is dying to see a game with high-quality graphics, with a complex and viable in-game economy, and most importantly, a game that’s fun! 

I think there are three major problems that plague current blockchain games - problems that we Imperium Empires have meticulously avoided in our game design. 

The first is that too many blockchain games are really just click-to-earn. It’s just a form of mining, but human-powered! There is really no gameplay - just like Desert Bus! These games can only attract players who come for the rewards, who will then immediately cash-out. Nobody is willing to re-invest the earnings, and once the rewards are gone, the game dies – which resembles a toxic liquidity mining pool.

That’s why we set out to build a AAA-quality game that players will enjoy playing even without the play-to-earn rewards. Through our team-to-earn guild mechanics, we also want players to build personal connections with their guild members, and stick with playing Imperium Empires for the long term – we’re much more focused on player rentention rather than just player acquisition.

The second issue is that many of these games heavily rely on land sales. For example, take Decentraland – one of the most well known metaverses right now. While the lands are highly priced, the utilites are fairly limited, with most land parcels rarely visited and devoid of people. Sure, people may use the land as galleries, and you might have fantastic events like TempleDAO on cryptovoxels, but you need a lot more of those for the metaverse to be lively! For other games that require players to buy land to build on them to earn, oftentimes people would just flip the land to make a quick profit instead of cultivating the land. This made me realise that if one is really here just to sell land, it’s not going to work. Buying and selling land is not a game. It could be part of the game, but it is not the game. 

The third problem is the problem of inflation. Too many blockchain games have inflationary tokenomics, be it for their tokens or their NFT supply. 

A lot of NFT games in the market allows players to take control of the NFT supply, usually through a breeding mechanism, and players make money by selling the NFTs they create. The biggest problem with this model, is that with more NFTs minted every day, the NFTs become less rare, so do the players’ earnings because they are tied to the value of the NFTs they can sell in the market. Such model is only sustainable so long as there’s a continuous influx of new players to buy the NFTs minted.

On the other hand, for the PvE centric games, the play-to-earn rewards are essentially zero sum games between the project foundation and the players – whatever the players earn, the rewards all come from the project foundation. So when there’s an influx of new players, either the rewards pool will dry up fast (for fixed pool P2E rewards), or newly minted tokens will flood the market, so the token price tanks (for uncapped supply P2E rewards). 

What’s needed here is some kind of asset destruction system tied with the gaming experience to create deflationary pressure. And this is what we mean by a deflationary tokenomics. 

Imperium Empires gameplay features space battles that will result in actual asset destruction. We also have a looting mechanism in the game - the idea is that if you go out to the high risk zone, you can destroy other players’ ships and take their wreckage – therefore not all of the rewards come from the Imperium foundation. It also means more people will play together – going out in groups is always preferred unless you risk being destroyed.

EVE online is a game I think that has done a great job in solving this inflation problem - though they are not a blockchain game! In fact, there are often stories of space battles in EVE Online costing hundreds of thousands of USD! The fact that they have hired an in-house economist to design the in-game economics and financial system speaks to not just how important this is, but also how well a fit crypto is with gaming! 

Can you tell me more about your team? 

We are currently a team of 40. Our Blockchain and Game Infrastructure team boasts a number of Ex-Animoca blockchain and full-stack developers, each with 15–20 years+ of experience. They have extensive experience building and maintaining low-latency MMO game servers and developing smart contracts. Our Game Development team is formed by a group of experienced Unity Engine devs, game designers, 2D and 3D artists, with our lead game developer and art director having 12 years+ experience developing 8 games across PC, mobile, and console platforms (with a 7m+ total player base and US$6m+ peak monthly grossing). Our Marketing team is led by an Ex-Uber brand ambassador with a strong influencer network in the Philippines and in Thailand (where ~60% Axie Infinity players are based); along with an Ex-Tencent BD and PM with 10+ yrs experience in go-to-market strategies for popular games (such as League of Legends). We are confident in establishing ourselves as a landmark blockchain game targeting the massive crypto and non-crypto gamer population in South East Asia.

You think a lot about gameplay dynamics, so I’d like to pick your brains a little bit more. Given that we are dealing with real money, albeit in a game, is it possible for super guilds that control all resources to emerge? This would ruin the gaming experience, wouldn’t it? 

Will there be a super guild? Not likely. Guild internal conflict is almost destined to happen. It is almost an economic law that once a guild reaches a certain size, the marginal benefit of staying and working inside a guild longer would no longer compare favourably to going out and starting your own guild. The better players may just go out start their own guild. It’s just like how people start their own business. There are plenty of youtube videos documenting the rapid expansion and collapse of territorial holdings in EVE online. One year a corp could be holding a third of all available territory, the next year it could be gone. 

How does Imperium Empires differentiate itself from other blockchain games, say Star Atlas? 

From what I understand about Star Atlas, it is a first-person-view, open-ended game with a metaverse with PvE and PvP gameplay, and it strongly reminded me of Star Citizen, which is a super ambitious project that crowdfunded some US$400 million on since 2012. Like Star Citizen, they’re using cinema grade graphics and adopting a first-person-view game dynamic. 

But given Star Citizen has already spent 10 years in development, with a 600 man strong developer team, even built their own game engine, but it is still in alpha testing, I think it really shows how difficult it is to build a grand open world game like that. The backend and the server matching engineering would be extremely challenging. And for a FPS game to have such high grade graphics, the latency requirement would have to be super strict – you cannot have a bullet fired but it somehow doesn’t arrive on time.

Obviously, the ambition of Star Citizen was something to be admired. The fact that they insisted on high level fidelity and in-game persistence to the point that if you login and put a glass of water on a table, logout, and then still find the glass of water on the table after you log back in, it is really something incredible. But I am worried that the technical demand would prove too stressful to the dev team and players. 

I also feel a first-person-view game is unfriendly for large-scale combat gameplay, imagine the gaming PC build you need to render both the interior and exterior of many spaceships! I’d prefer the kind of epic space battles where you have thousands of players fighting with one another – this is what I think most space gamers would prefer. 

What do you think about other blockchain games like RPG or card games?

I think it is very tricky to build good card games. Game balancing is tricky. 

The thing with card games is that you really need to time the launch of your card sales well, and you have to design them well. You cannot design a card that is overpowering in its specs with a huge supply as you’d devastate the gameplay; you cannot price your cards too low since if you increase the supply later but sell them at a higher price, you’d upset all the players that didn’t get to buy them in the first round. And given your cards are NFTs on the blockchain, you cannot retrospectively change the metadata or the specs of the cards if something went terribly wrong. In short, blockchain card games require very sophisticated and careful in-game economics design. If you screw up there’s little you can do.

I also think it’s difficult to get people excited with card games. It’s just the issue of genre. Be it PC or mobile, few very card games rank amongst the top 50 or 100 in the STEAM charts. 

RPG is not anywhere easier than a card game. For you to have a good RPG game, you need to have a lot  of characters, and animations for all of them. Everyone has an internal model of how a creature walks and how to fight. And everyone shares the same objective standard of whether the animation is good. And as a result of this, a lot of great animators are all fully booked by the AAA gaming studios, so it’s very difficult to source talent!

Generally, the reason why people play games is to escape from reality. if a game has too much Fi, or that a game becomes impossible to play unless you put a lot of money into it, people will just say “screw this goodbye”. How do you balance those two concerns? 

Imperium Empires is definitely taking a page from the Metaverse playbook. Metaverses are really good in letting people chill. Take Fortnite. Not everyone wants to be shooting people all the time. Sometimes people just want to hang out and chill, show off their skins. And eventually you’d introduce concerts and parties into such an environment. With special events, and private spaces, you’d get to sell tickets - another revenue stream for players and the community. And once you have pedestrian flow, you can set up marketplaces, billboards, ads - like the Citadel in EVE Online. We envision Imperium Empires to be the place for people to come not just for the thrill but also to chill!

What do you think about VR and AR?

It’s an interesting market, but not ripe for mass adoption at this moment, so I don’t think it’s terribly important to integrate VR or AR – the current state of VR and AR is unable to offer the kind of immersive feeling that players look for. In fact, VR and AR installation rates are very low. Only 2.3% of all STEAM players have a VR headset. And not to mention the fact you need to deal with motion-sickness issues. 

What are some features from DeFi that you think could be imported into GameFi?

One thing that many GameFis fail to do, is to really integrate DeFi into the game. One reason why DeFi hasnt been able to reach non-crypto natives is because of the learning curve - it is often difficult for a layman to understand concepts like TVL, liquidity mining and yield farming. Therefore Imperium aims to become be a gamified hub of all major DeFi protocols on Avalanche, bringing the benefits of DeFi to 3 billion+ gamers over the world  - through our gamified interface, DeFi is seamlessly integrated, so players no longer need to grind through the difficult DeFi concepts. 

We also explored how to make use of DeFi 2.0. Olympus is definitely something worth looking into for treasury building. By pricing some of our spaceships in LP tokens of other projects, it is a great synergetic partnership – on one hand we can build our treasury in these LP tokens, while on the other hand, we can share the DeFi and GameFi user base between us and different DeFi protocols.  

We are all familiar with the stereotype of Argentinians playing Runescape to feed themselves in their hyperinflationary economy. This then introduces moral complexities to the concept of play to earn, doesn’t it? If a player destroys that spaceship of an Argentine family, it might be the livelihood of a family that’s getting destroyed. How do you incorporate those concerns into your game design?

I think this is the eternal debate in play-to-earn games – many complain that play-to-earn enslaves people in developing countries who play the games for a living. But I approach this issue from a completely different perspective – I think anyone who’s playing the P2E games, are playing because of their voluntary choices – no one’s forcing them to do so if they’re not willing to. It empowers people to make a living in such a way that is not imaginable before the era of Web 3.0.

As to whether it will be bad for players in developing countries to have their asset destroyed, it really depends on the risk appetite of each player. Any player who wanna avoid conflicts can choose to stay in the safe zone of the Imperium metaverse – where the risk of spaceships or spaceship components being destroyed is zero. 

The reason why we introduce the asset destruction model into the Imperium metaverse, deflationary tokenomics or NFT supply aside, is because we want players to have thrill and have something at stake when they’re playing Imperium Empires. IIf you don’t, where’s the excitement in your game? Few people will put the time and energy and money into perfecting their skill in the game if there are no risks that accompany sizable rewards to be earned. It’d just degenerate into something like casual poker or mahjong - very chill, but also boring and not worth anyone’s time. 

And obviously high rewards must be accompanied by high risk. Once you accept that, the math should work out. 

As for the concept of passive income - I’m pretty against integrating passive income mechanisms into GameFi. It simply becomes DeFi and not GameFi. GameFi is about about playing the game and having fun, feeling a rush of adrenaline. The monetary prize in a chess tournament is to introduce stakes into the game. If you could just sit and earn money in a chess tournament, who would play, let alone really study chess theory? Once you have passive income, people will start pulling out their spreadsheets to calculate ROI, which is very unhealthy for any blockchain game. 

From my observation, most GameFi projects will be released in 2022 spring - and probably all at once. Are you worried about this flood of GameFi projects causing toxic competition for players, eventually resulting in the eutrophication of GameFi? 

I’m not too worried, because the blockchain gaming market is just in its year 0. Even if you look at the most popular blockchain game Axie Ininity, there are only 2 million daily active players, a tiny fraction of the 3 billion gamers in the world. Blockchain games are just going to continue to grow, and will continue to take the pie from traditional games. Everyone’s growing. It’s not like Avalanche’s going to take over Solana. I don’t think there’s going to be cannibalization because the whole space is growing. There will be room for Imperium Empires, and everyone else. 

Thank you so much for answering our questions! Where can we learn more about Imperium Empires? 

You can check out our whitepaper, our medium, our twitter, our TG group and of course our website! Remember, we will have a game demo to show case some gameplay towards the end of Q1 of 2022, followed by alpha testing in Q2, beta testing in Q3 and our official game launch is currently planned to be Q4 2022! Check out our trailers as well!