A descent into darkness
The sound of townsfolk slamming shut
Their solid leaden bolts,
Snaps through the air like cracking whips
On the wind of dreaded cold.
To the west, the sunlight danced
Away like embers dying.
And shadows creep now from the dark;
The land grows ever-silent.
In the beginning…
Video games have long dominated the entertainment industry and in many ways shaped the cultural landscape. From humble beginnings, games like Pong and Space Invaders grew cult-like followings, as legions of people all around the world migrated from the chaotic and dangerous outside world to the safety of their home offices and the comfort of their CRT monitors, and the era of gaming began.
From the emergence of the arcade, to the first at-home consoles, to portable devices like the Gameboy and eventually the dominance of mobile, gaming has grown in both popularity and reach across the world at a dramatic rate, becoming pervasive in everyday life. Every year, the titles have become more immersive, the audience has grown larger, the offerings more spectacular.
We’ve come a long way from Pong, but we’ve got a long way yet to go.
There are now estimated to be over 3bn active gamers globally, with 2024 industry revenues around $250bn and growing rapidly year on year, dwarfing the contributions of cinema, books, and music.
We gamify everything; learning languages, our health and fitness, even our finances.
The pie is big, and by all accounts it’s only getting bigger.
The era of web3
At one time the persona non-grata of gaming, web3 gaming has had to shake off an image problem. Touted, for a while, as the ‘next big thing’, there was borderline delirium as games like Axie Infinity and Decentraland took off. Player numbers skyrocketed, ecosystems flourished.
The metaverse, digital asset ownership, player-driven economies; these catch cries dominated the discourse throughout 2020 and 2021. At the time, it was as if we’d just invented the wheel all over again.
Valuations, and expectations, rose parabolically. But, inevitably, the music stopped, and we fell back to earth. But falling back doesn’t mean the industry fell off the earth; just that we found a new equilibrium.
You see, the dirty little secret of the games industry is that games usually take a fair while to build. They are expensive, resource and labour intensive, and usually just flat-out slow to develop. But large amounts of venture capital accrued to web3 gaming back in 2020 and 2021; and has been slowly deployed into gaming ecosystems across the world.
As too did human capital; some of the best and brightest transitioned their careers across to the brave new world of crypto gaming — and, more stealthily, so have some of the largest traditional gaming studios on earth. In fact, according to Immutable, over 70% of them have invested in the space.
A storm is brewing. Two years of bearish calm in the crypto markets left teams to build slowly, steadily, thoughtfully; to deploy capital into well designed gaming ecosystems — to design their dream products. And we believe that 2024 is the year that these will finally begin to hit the market.
And with it, we’ll begin to see the convergence of web2 and crypto gaming into one, indistinguishable industry. The gaming synthesis, if you will.
Gamers never really hated crypto gaming; they don’t hate the idea of owning their assets, nor do they hate the idea of being able to share in the spoils of the worlds that they help design, build, iterate upon, and populate. They hated what they saw as low-effort worlds, half-baked products, and unfinished games. They hated change for the sake of it; profiteering and the wild west.
But there’s no way they’re gonna hate games that slap. The Shrapnels, My Pet Hooligans, Cross the Ages, the Illuviums. The Treeverses, Off The Grids, or the Parallels. There are too many amazing titles just around the corner.
Our vision is for DARKTIMES to be one of them.
The DARKTIMES story
Many don’t know, but web3 giant Animoca Brands funded the TIMES seed round in early 2022, with participation from legends such as Sfermion, GameFi Ventures, KuCoin Ventures, and many more. As part of this deal, the DARKTIMES publisher, Big Kid Studios, entered into a joint development agreement with Animoca’s flagship game studio, the legendary Blowfish Studios, to bring DARKTIMES to life.
Blowfish Studios is a powerhouse; a full service game studio with an incredibly experienced team, they are the real deal. Combining web3 know-how (think The Wanderers, Phantom Galaxies) with ‘meat on the bones’ traditional gaming experience from some of the biggest studios in the world, working with their team is both an honour and a privilege.
As a team, we spent countless hours deep diving the most successful traditional games, thinking back to our childhoods (DARKTIMES founder Lucien once remarked that when he was younger he played Runescape ‘like a full time job,’ and that really stuck with me), and looking for missed opportunities in both web2 and web3, before settling on the design for DARKTIMES. And then still countless more hours refining, brainstorming, and perfecting the concept with the dedicated team at Blowfish before we ever even opened a game engine to start the process of building.
The current Game Design Document for DARKTIMES is well over 150 pages long; and every single page is its own little journey. One day, when the game is live, we might even release it for those who are interested. There’s just a little too much alpha in there to do so right now!
But, as we spoke about earlier, the last three years of blood, sweat, and tears that has gone into DARKTIMES has brought us that much closer to the end goal. We are now less than 6 months away from releasing a playable alpha — and we couldn’t be more excited.
So what exactly is DARKTIMES?
DARKTIMES is a game for gamers. It is a free-to-play Nordic-inspired medieval Brawler Royale, with a physics-based combat system. The best way to think of it is the aesthetic of Diablo (it’s gloomy, it’s moody, it’s dark and demonic), meets the gameplay of Fortnite (it’s fast-paced, it’s chaotic, it’s multiplayer PvP), but it’s all tempered by some British pub humour — think Guy Ritchie or over-the-top-Tarantino. A little bit The Witcher.
Battle Royale is a term that is thrown around a lot — but we prefer to use Brawler Royale, as DARKTIMES is a little more immersive; there are skill trees and progression to keep things interesting and shift the dial a little further towards an RPG than your standard hyper-casual Battle Royale.
Up to 36 players enter a DARKTIMES run, and only one emerges victorious. Players begin with nothing but the tattered rags they begin a round with, and, in the vein of survival games, pick up and equip various cosmetic items, weapons, and garments as they explore the terrain.
The entire DARKTIMES ecosystem is designed to be as seamless as possible for new player onboarding; the development teams are taking care to abstract blockchain friction away wherever possible — think custodial wallets, social logins, and fiat payments. Players should be able to sit down, boot up their device, and play. It’s not a computer science class, or a lesson in coding. DARKTIMES is a game by gamers, for gamers.
The brilliance of DARKTIMES, and where it really weaponises the blockchain elements that underpin the ecosystem, is the ability of players to both win and lose money, if they so choose. While of course the majority of players will be content with the free-to-play leagues, to really work their way up the leaderboards and into the serious seasonal prizepools players will have to be willing to take the ultimate risks.
And in a world that has been plunged into darkness and despair, where friends turn against friends and there is nowhere safe to hide, only those willing to die will ever really live.
Times are changing.
