We founded Battlebound to create games players love and own. Our studio mission is to onboard millions of players into web3 through incredible gameplay experiences. Coming from AAA game studios, we took a gameplay-first approach with the aim of building Evaverse into a game that resonates deeply with players.
We’ve spent the past month genuinely reflecting on feedback from our community, holders, and players and looking back on the updates we’ve made in the Evaverse. Although the team has worked incredibly hard to deliver updates above and beyond our original roadmap, we have yet to significantly increase engagement and player retention in-game. Continuing to develop the Evaverse in its current direction is unsustainable, given the resources available to our team.
While we access the long-term direction of the Evaverse, we’re pivoting our primary development resources to Project A, an immersive open-world creature collecting game.
Project A was the original game Battlebound started building. We crafted a unique and compelling vision for how to innovate on the auto-battler genre and push the boundaries of today’s creature-collecting games. The Evaverse was born from the foundational NFT tech we built initially for Project A. Inspired by the growing adoption of NFT technology in early 2021; we launched the Evaverse First Arrivals to test the market demand for NFT-based gaming.
The revenue from the Evaverse First Arrivals mint has been reinvested into Battlebound to build Evaverse into the product it is today. However, despite our best efforts working non-stop for two years on Evaverse, we have yet to significantly move the needle on player engagement and product market fit.
Despite this, we remain committed to the Evaverse First Arrivals holders, our flagship NFT collection, and our community. We will create a path from Evaverse to Project A, where every contributor to the Evaverse ecosystem, from players, NFT holders, badge earners, scholars, and managers, will have the option to exchange their stake in Evaverse for Project A. We have strong convictions about the potential for Project A to achieve our vision of onboarding millions of players to web3.
The success of Project A will bring new opportunities to explore a reimagined vision of Evaverse in the future as Battlebound’s open metaverse IP. While Evaverse won’t be our primary focus in the near term, we’ll continue to explore smaller scope updates and events while keeping the servers fully operational.
WHAT ABOUT EVAVERSE NFT HOLDERS?
Our holders and community are our most profound champions and supported us before we were doxxed or had a studio name. Focusing on the long-term success of our community and holders is imperative. Creating a successful mainstream game will generate more value in the long run than the short-term hype generation that often fuels web3. Switching priorities from Evaverse to Project A means refocusing our vision for mass web3 adoption through gaming on a new product with tremendous commercial potential.
CHANGES TO FIRST ARRIVALS
The benefits and prestige First Arrivals gave players in the Evaverse will unlock early access and exclusive perks in Project A.
- Early Access and Beta Testing for Project A
- Priority Minting for Project A
- An increased mint rarity for Project A
WHAT ABOUT $EVA TOKEN?
We are planning to launch a game-agnostic token with broad-reaching functionality to potentially support Project A and Evaverse. We are carefully considering the timing for the launch. We suspect currently that a token launch could drive player engagement in the short term, but most players would ultimately play for the token instead of the immersive core game loop. This pattern was a common theme in the first wave of unsustainable blockchain game economies. We aim to avoid this pitfall by postponing a token adoption until we have complete confidence in the product and economy we’re creating.
WHY PROJECT A?
The original vision for Project A inspired our investors who funded Battlebound’s seed funding round. We’ve had this game on ice while focusing on the promises we made to our community during the First Arrivals mint. We executed everything on our roadmap during the original mint and much more with new game modes, free NFT drops, NFT lending, and visual updates to our collections. Ultimately as our roadmap continued to scale, we were forced to make a tough decision, as continuing to invest full-time resources into Evaverse could potentially jeopardize Battlebound’s long-term success. We carefully considered this pivot after deliberating with our largest NFT holders and seeking advice from industry leaders, advisors, and investors. Project A will yield exponentially greater success for our community, holders, company, and players in the long run.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR PROJECT A?
The web3 ownership model works perfectly for the creature collecting genre. Our vision is to innovate and create a social and immersive open-world creature collector combined with brand-new groundbreaking auto-battler mechanics.
The dev team is shifting gears to build a playable combat prototype for Project A to showcase the combination of these mechanics. This prototype will be a key part of our future fundraising.
The art team is well into pre-production and world-building, creating a new, stylized IP that pushes the boundary of creature collectors with a broad range of tones and a more mature take on creature design.
The dev team will be moving fast, building off the foundational tech of the Evaverse and the lessons learned over the previous year. We will share updates with our holders and community as we restructure our discord to account for these changes.
THANK YOU
Thank you to our entire community and supporters who believe in our mission to onboard millions of players into web3 through incredible gameplay experiences. Your feedback and encouragement have been invaluable to us. We hope you will continue supporting us as we progress with Project A.
We welcome everyone to our Battlebound Discord server to learn more about this decision and the next steps we will take.
