SPS discusses challenges of building GameFi amid crypto winter

cointelegraph.com:

Amid a drastic decline in coin prices, shifting player behavior and hard-to-maintain tokenomics, it’s been a difficult year for many GameFi developers. While more established franchises, such as Axie Infinity, have held ground, other lesser-known projects, such as Elexir, have mostly pulled the plug, with a lack of viable game designs being unable to compensate for the “Fi” element in GameFi.

That said, one project that, despite running into all challenges, experienced by its peers, appears to have gained traction anyway. In early February, blockchain multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Superpower Squad (SPS) surpassed 200,000 downloads on the App Store and Google Play. The game previously launched in December 2022 and surpassed the 100,000-download milestone in mid-January. 

SPS features up to 20 players competing in-app in a five-minute combat experience. Players can earn nonfungible token (NFT) heroes and create digital wallets directly in-game to receive and transfer rewards, with no prior crypto experience necessary. The game took nearly three years to perfect before developers said it met their quality for playability. According to SPS’ chief game architect, who wished to be identified as Pony, the team faced quite a few challenges during that time:

Pony explained that despite finalizing investment deals with “several top institutions,” the founding rounds became on hold after “two black swan events” hit the cryptocurrency industry last year. In addition, the game developer said that financing became difficult, as a subset of bad actors had tarnished the reputation of the entire industry.

As told by Pony, SPS came to the market right around the time sentiment was at its nadir. “We faced major bias from