We are bullish on crypto gaming. We believe that it will act as a gateway to onboard new users to the web3 space. We also believe that it could facilitate widespread adoption of the metaverse and blockchain technology, and that it can offer everything that traditional gamers want from the industry — and more.
Not everyone agrees. This is perhaps best exemplified by the backlash Ubisoft received following the announcement of their NFT platform, “Quartz.” The YouTube video revealing the platform received 1,700 likes and over 40,000 dislikes before it was delisted by Ubisoft’s team. Most of these criticisms stem from a lack of understanding about what NFTs are and what they mean for gaming, citing beliefs that NFTs are just “cash grabs” or “a way for game publishers to further exploit their users” and that “NFT gaming is about money, not fun.”
How do you convince antagonists that they’re the beneficiaries, and that NFTs can empower gamers by providing them with ownership of their assets? How do you persuade people that it is possible to create a game that is both fun and profitable?
By creating a game that is both fun and profitable.
“AAA,” or “triple A,” is a term that has been the cause of considerable excitement among the crypto gaming community over the past year. AAA games can be classified by their high budgets, costing tens of even hundreds of millions of dollars (think Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto). Due to the cost requirements, they are typically produced by large, well-known publishers.
AAA games can’t be spun up overnight. They are incredibly complex and require considerable time, talent and resources to complete. This is precisely why excitement around AAA in web3 is building. Whilst the rest of us spent 2020 and 2021 concerning ourselves searching for alpha and managing our cryptocurrency portfolios, scores of creatives, game developers, designers, crypto-natives and and entrepreneurs have been grinding behind the scenes to bring AAA gaming to the blockchain.
Sidus Heroes, the first-ever AAA play-to-earn (P2E) Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMMORPG) could be the game that bridges the gap between web2 and web3 gaming. The game is currently in beta, and has the support of 50 top venture capitalists, over 200 partners, and an experienced 350-strong team, featuring 150 developers. Sidus ticks every box necessary to create a successful AAA crypto game. It has the manpower, expertise, and budget, a detailed and well-thought out economy, a top-quality technology stack, and an exciting roadmap featuring plans to hand the reins to the community who will be able to take ownership and build their own infrastructure within the game.
The number of active crypto gamers is still tiny compared to the 3 billion plus gamers that exist in web2 to crypto. We believe that Sidus has the necessary elements which will begin to onboard this untapped market to web3.
Blockchain gaming attracted 1.22 million unique active wallets (UAW) last month
Look how much space there is to grow. Can you see why we’ve bet big on Sidus Heroes?
This article will provide an overview of Sidus Heroes. The game is currently in beta, with limited gameplay options by touching on the three elements crucial to the success of a AAA crypto game: fun and complex gameplay, sound economics, and an exciting roadmap.
Sidus Heroes is a multiplayer open world futuristic metaverse inhabited by NFT Heroes. Players begin their journey by purchasing a Genesis Hero or Sidus Academy Card NFT, which transforms into their character. Characters are assigned to one of Sidus’ twelve factions, each with its own planet. Factions include Etheredus, Bitcoione and Solantrum. Sound familiar?
Once in the metaverse, players are transported into a war-torn universe in which a major technological revolution has taken place. Characters can farm resources to build infrastructure and increase their strength, acquire weapons and battle against creatures or other players to win prizes and gain experience to level up, get elected to represent their races and lobby their interests, build spaceships and go on intergalactic missions and colonize new planets, and much more.
All in-game items are represented by NFTs, which are tradeable in Sidus’ marketplace. The game also incorporates a dual-token economy, with SIDUS and SENATE as currencies. SIDUS is used for the vast majority of in-game transactions, whereas SENATE is primarily used in governance.
Sidus is being built with player enjoyment at its core, as opposed to the generation of revenue for the game or its players. This differentiates Sidus from many games both within and beyond the web3 space. To this end, Sidus even includes anti-whale policies whereby players can only own a single plot of land, one spaceship and contribute to one station module. This was introduced to prevent wealthy players from having too much influence within the game and to ensure a fairer, decentralized metaverse experience. Adopting this ethos should help Sidus to onboard gamers to web3 who care less about money, and more about fun.
This will also be achieved by Sidus’ chosen technology stack. Sidus uses Babylon.js with support for WebGL, a JavaScript API for rendering high-performance interactive graphics within any compatible web browser without requiring plug-ins. Babylon.js is one of the most popular 3D game engines used by web2 developers, and will give Sidus a visual edge compared to most other games on the market. Sidus intentionally opted to make gameplay available via a web browser to reduce hardware requirements and make the game accessible to those who cannot afford to spend $500 on a Playstation 5 or Xbox One. As a mechanism to further break down barriers pertaining to cost, Sidus has chosen to make gameplay playable off-chain and allows players to port their tokens to the game from their wallets. This means players can battle and play future game modes without having to constantly submit transactions to the blockchain, making gameplay a smoother and cheaper experience.
To say that Sidus is focusing on fun over profit is not to take away from the game’s complex virtual economy, which has its own 20-page documentation, and is well balanced with sinks and faucets to manage the rate of asset issuance with the rate of asset consumption.
We are particularly drawn to the concept of investing in the game’s infrastructure, an economic innovation unique to Sidus Heroes. Sidus lets players invest in infrastructure, like the game’s marketplace. Investors hand over their assets to receive a proportional share of the revenue generated by the infrastructure they invest in as royalties in perpetuity. The feature has been very popular, with user numbers doubling since the launch of the first module: the marketplace. There are indications of optimism about the game’s future since people are willing to permanently part with their assets for future protocol revenue. The team plans to attach these royalty rights to NFTs in the future. This feature is similar to what music NFT platforms like Royal have been experimenting with and rolling out for music royalties. If Sidus is as successful as we think it will be, NFT holders will be able to sell their NFTs for a substantial premium as they provide rights to revenue streams in perpetuity. Introducing modules is fun and provides players with another earning mechanism. At the same time, it acts as an effective token sink, permanently taking large quantities of in-game assets off the market.
Like Axie Infinity, which is currently the most popular crypto game with around 2 million players, Sidus has a dual-token system. SIDUS is the in-game currency, similar to Axie’s SLP, and SENATE is the governance token, like Axie’s AXS. Those familiar with Axie will know that a flaw in their tokenomics model led to a substantial drop in the price of SLP.
The problem with SLP was that there was a lack of token sinks. SLP was produced by playing the game, but players were not incentivized to keep their tokens. There was no demand to counteract the impact of increasing supply.
Sidus has had the benefit of being able to witness and learn from successes and failures within the crypto gaming space. This has influenced their tokenomics design. Sidus has carefully woven SIDUS into the game to the extent that character development and game progression are contingent on owning the token. This innovation on Axie’s design for SLP will prevent a similar event from happening to SIDUS. The long list of partnerships Sidus has from top gaming guilds like Merit Circle and Good Games Guild is a further testament to the economic potential of the game.
Sidus Heroes is one of the most complex games we’ve seen both in and outside of the crypto gaming space.
Gameplay options include, but are not limited to:
Sidus is building an open metaverse. This means that while they will roll out the planned features above, community members are also able to build within the game. To this end, Sidus is developing a launchpad to help community members bootstrap capital for their ideas. We believe that this key feature is what makes crypto gaming so exciting, and will see the sector outgrow its web2 counterpart, helping to onboard millions of users. Within the limits of the chosen technology stack, the possibilities are quite literally endless. Community members can build minigames, businesses, new worlds, items, and infrastructure. Companies can set up offices in Sidus’ metaverse (Sidus have been in talks with an undisclosed space company that might do exactly that). Famous artists can enter the metaverse and perform in concert halls. Combine the above with decentralized community governance, and Sidus will become a virtual nation state, restricted only by the creativity of its community.
Sidus has the most comprehensive roadmap we’ve ever seen. One might expect a detailed roadmap to cover a whole page and outline a project’s plans for the next year or two. Even this is rare for a lot of projects. Sidus’ roadmap is 17 pages long and covers the project’s plans up until Q3 2025. Sidus is releasing the game in three stages. We are currently in stage one, the primitive stage, where gameplay options are limited and represent just 1% of where the game plans to be in the future. Gameplay will become far more complex as the game progresses into stages two and three and the team introduces more races, adds new gear and other NFTs, expands gameplay, makes technological improvements, goes multi-chain, and creates new planets and social elements. The roadmap even ends with plans to develop a movie. We love the ambition and look forward to immersing ourselves in Sidus’ metaverse as the game matures.
Sidus’ roadmap highlights the longevity of the project, attention to detail, and systemic thinking that has and will continue to influence decision-making. However, due to the shocking ongoing situation in Ukraine, Sidus has been unable to conform to a number of the deadlines on the roadmap. This is because a number of team members are Ukrainian and Russian. These delays have manifested themselves in the price of Sidus’ tokens. Fortunately, Sidus has done an incredible job at relocating their Ukrainian colleagues and their families so that, most importantly, they are safe, and are also able to continue to work on delivering their shared vision. Sidus will be releasing an updated roadmap in the near future.
A new era of AAA gaming is coming to crypto. If anything will begin to onboard large portions of the 3 billion plus gamers to crypto, it is AAA crypto games. And games like Sidus Heroes are leading the charge.
With their impressive team and budget, well-planned economics, exciting game with a focus on fun, and plans to hand over control to the community, Sidus has big plans for the future. We look forward to being there for the ride and are willing to bet that, if games are analogous virtual nation states, Sidus may well end up being Utopia.
Metaverse Insider. (2022, February 20). Sidus Heroes Interview | Ambitious Browser Based NFT-Game and Metaverse. Retrieved from:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Up6fmEkZ4m5fyOBzkRtX9?si=17009802b4844578&nd=1
Sidus Heores Litepaper. (n.d.). Retrieved from:
https://sidusheroes.com/docs/litepaper.pdf
Sidus Heroes Medium. (n.d.). SIDUS HEROES modules attract over 30% of the total investment capacity in just 2 days. Retrieved from:
Sidus Heroes Wiki. (n.d.). Retrieved from:
Yaqub, A. (2022, February 4). SIDUS HEROES Receives Investment From Animoca Brands, Alameda Research, Bloktopia, OKEX, Polygon and Master Ventures. Retrieved from:
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