It’s almost 1 year to the day that I made my first crypto transaction. As an avid football manager gamer, I was intrigued after seeing an advert for ‘Soccer Manager Crypto’ and over the last 12 months, I’ve enjoyed what can only be described as a steep learning curve into the world of Crypto Gaming!
Needing to convert £ to BTC — CHI (the ICO token for Chimaera now XAYA) wasn’t an easy first transaction. By April 2018 there were numerous warnings about the legitimacy of ICO’s and had Soccer Manager not been a game I’d been familiar with and played for almost a decade, I would have likely just let this pass me by. The lure of the game starting in Q4, 2018 got me thinking this was plenty of time to get me prepared and my mind started planning ahead on how I could get off to the best possible start in my quest to become one of the games top players (similar feeling to FM Worlds in which my ‘Kopites’ dominated for multiple seasons!)
Fast forward 12 months and the promise of the game launching soon is ever closer, but the fascinating part of my journey so far is what has happened in between.
After acquiring CHI my quest for knowledge led me down many new dApp Rabbit Holes… some of which I am still stuck in today! I set out to learn more and when confident get involved in other sport-related crypto games in the belief that this sector of the gaming market was something I could turn my hand to and excel in.
School of Hard Knocks
Accepting that my learning curve would come at an expense with not every company or game succeeding, it was still a disappointment when CryptoSoccr and now CryptoStrikers didn’t fulfil their early promise. The term ‘hot potato’ was relatively new to me and is, in essence, the foundation on which the game CryptoSoccr was built on. On the other hand, CrytpoStrikers was my first introduction to the world of ‘crypto collectibles’ which just happened to use the World Cup 2018 and the key players from that as their subject matter.
Being football related, both dApps fostered an interest in the gaming community amongst fans of the beautiful game before fizzling out and leaving people with NFT’s that now have little or no current value.
MLB Champions
Whilst there are new dApps launching all the time, I tend to only get drawn towards the sports-related games. Had the value of ETH not continued to slide vs the pound and had I not been shown the sign-up form for MLB Crypto (now MLB Champions) in August, I’m pretty certain I’d have returned back to the traditional gaming world of FIFA and PES.
Armed with only basic knowledge and no real affinity to baseball, I joined a new NFT community of fans and investors on a journey that is now in its second season. The game continues to show equal levels of promise and frustration during which time I’ve made over 6,500 trades and micro-transactions.
Like others, I’m now waiting patiently to see if Lucid Sight can indeed attract a much broader audience of baseball fanatics to join in 2019. If they can, then I believe this will have a huge knock-on effect for many other companies that are also developing games for large sporting fan bases.
Sorare — Digital Football Collectibles
Simply put, a utopia for me is to find and better still, be involved in a Football equivalent to MLB Champions and it was via Discord that the founders of Sorare first initiated contact with me.
I can only imagine it was baffling for them to witness how someone with a fairly linear passion towards one sport was so heavily into a game related to a sport they’d never played before (unless you count rounders!)
The rest, as they say, is history. Over the last 6 months along with many of the games early adopters, I’ve been able to be part of a really rewarding process that has culminated in seeing the launch of a game that is in line with what I dreamt to be part of when I first entered this space.
At the time of writing, the game is now into its 3rd month of Alpha Testing during which time approximately 1,000 Licensed Player NFTs have been sold. Players are being competed for in a 24/7 market place and are already being used by gamers to compete in Fantasy Leagues (powered by OPTA stats) for scarcer Player Card prizes.
The Future of Sports Collectibles
With Horse Racing (ZED Run) and Formula One (Delta Time) games close to launching, I am looking forward to diversifying further in my second year as a ‘Crypto Gamer’ with various profits across some of my main holdings.
I’m sure it won’t be long before all major sports and sports franchises start offering fans collectible and gaming experiences that are built on the blockchain and with that more opportunities to build a sustainable income from Crypto-Gaming.
I’d welcome to connect with fellow gamers that resonate with my journey so far and invite you to follow or make contact with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/blockchainYNWA
