The last one year has seen a lot of real-world applications and games developed within the cryptosphere. These decentralized applications utilize smart contracts and cryptocurrency tokens to store ownership information and many other useful game properties. CryptoKitties made the biggest waves last year when it clogged up the entire Ethereum network due to its popularity. Developers have certainly taken the hint and realized that Crypto Collectibles are valuable and now to capture that market, they have released the crypto-based Pokemon game Etheremon. Here’s a look at how the two games are similar and what Etheremon brings to the table.
What is CryptoKitties?
CryptoKitties was a unique insight into how blockchains can be used to facilitate this transfer of digital assets over the blockchain. At its peak popularity in December last year, some of the collectable CryptoKitties were selling for upwards of $100,000. This goes to show that crypto-based collectables have a huge market to be captured. With CyptoKitties users can buy, collect and trade digital kittens similar to baseball trading cards. Each cat has different characteristics which they can pass on to their offspring. CryptoKitties runs as a smart contract on the Ethereum platform and uses the benefits of blockchain technology to secure the ownership of CryptoKitties. Within a week of its launch, CryptoKitties had already seen over $3 million exchanged and accounted for about 15% of the total Ethereum usage. People like the idea of really owning their in-game avatars and are willing to pay large amounts of money for some rare digital collectables.
What’s New With Etheremon?
Etheremon, the first ethereum based virtual monster game is similar to CryptoKitties in many respects. Players can buy and sell virtual monsters, each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. The game uses Ethereum’s smart contracts to store the ownership of Mons in the game. This is groundbreaking because this is the first time that players would get to own their video game avatars. Additionally, the value of the Mons comes from the fact that not all of the characters are equally common. In fact, there are a few characters that only have 2 or 3 instances in the entire game. Over time, this would translate to these rarer Mons commanding very high prices as collectors want to buy them, similar to rare baseball cards.
CryptoKitties also provides all of the functionality described above. What makes Etheremon stand out is that it gives the players the ability to train their characters in battle. They would earn experience points by training and will, therefore, be worth more money in the market. The more the Mons are trained, the more value they will accumulate. Level-1 Mons are available in the game store. The can be trained to evolve and lay eggs. Most kinds of Mon are limited in supply, hence, once all Mons of a type are bought, they will only be available on the trade market. Also, Mons in Form 2 and 3 can only be acquired from evolving, making them even more scarce. The scarcity of Mons will drive up their value over time. After training the Mons, players can also use their Mons in a battle against other players. Similar to Pokemon Go, this type of arcade gaming is very popular among all age groups as it makes the entire experience much more engaging compared to simply collecting CryptoKitties. The ultimate goal of the game is to collect all of the available Mons and become the Pokemaster.
The game has included different features like random encounters as a way for the players to capture Mons. The Mons will be captured with Pokeballs. The Pokeballs have to be bought in the in-game store with Ethereum, with a starting price of 0.005 ETH for the basic ball, going all the way up to 0.15 ETH for a ball that is guaranteed to capture the Pokemon. Playing Etheremon lets players mine in-game cryptocurrency called EMONT. EMONT, an ERC-20 token, is capped at 20 million tokens. Accumulating EMONTs is useful because it can be traded for Ether or used in-game.
