Superpower Squad Brings Battle Royale GameFi to BNB Chain

Just as GameFi gained momentum in last year's bull market, it has rapidly lost steam in the bear market. A combination of player churn from excess botting, lackluster gaming experience, and pushback from traditional gamers, has impacted the industry's bottom line. But not all projects have been abandoned.

Superpower Squad is an upcoming MOBA or Battle Royale style game built on BNB Chain. for mobile devices. Players compete in fast-paced five-minute contests, with the goal of surviving against 20 or so other players dropped on the same map.

There are four free-to-play elements and one play-to-earn element. Players pay a small fee to play the latter, and all players receive experience at the end of each round.

The top five players of every game will win money. In an interview with BSC News, Greg Gopman, CEO of Superpower Squad, explains that the mechanism will serve as a deterrent against an overpopulation of bots that plague GameFi projects:

"Bots are not good skill-wise. And it will cost them money to join all these tournaments, where they will be losing money. We simply don't want them in the game,” he said.

Before joining SPS, Gopman served as the CMO of Ankr and the head of product for Ethernity chain. He began his career in blockchain as the co-founder of the Akash protocol on the Cosmos network. According to Gopman, the Superpower Squad game has been in development for two years.

Initially starting out as a Web 2.0 project, Superpower Squad developers incorporated elements of tokenomics, play-to-earn and NFT character customization into their work, driven by the recent rise of GameFi. Since then, the studio has grown to a team of about 40 people.

Superpower Squad has surpassed 10,000 downloads after an initial testing phase in July. The full game is scheduled to launch in December.

"It's really a beta-testing version of the game at this point," Gopman told BSC News. "Testers will be given NFTs and tokens as incentives. But the game doesn't have a lot of elements that will keep users coming back and back again at the moment."

But Gopman said the whole experience has nevertheless been fruitful for the team.

"We've been able to figure out how to make in-app purchases within the TOS [Terms of Sale] in the app store so that we can have our end game token sellable," he said. "We have also built custodial wallets into all the accounts so that users can buy and hold NFTs directly in-game."

In terms of user rewards, Gopman said it's akin to winning a poker tournament.

"Let's say you have 10 people play, and everyone pays $0.25. Then, the pot will be $2.50, which will be distributed to the most skillful players every round."

In addition, different side quests and mini-games will be there along with the main feature.

"There are also four free-to-play elements of our game, where players can receive loot and use them to mint NFT heroes. But the main goal is to get players to sign up for play-to-earn," Gopman added.

At first, the source of the reward comes from reserves via a small-presale Superpower Squad completed in June. Crypto exchange KuCoin led the funding round at a valuation of $10 million. After that, the company plans an initial NFT offering and a token generation event to continue the incentives.

To sustain long-term ecosystem development, Gopman intends to incorporate a game editor into the Superpower Squad platform:

"Different users will be able to create their own game modes and their own game rules and characters to create their own version of a MOBA that will live inside of [Superpower Squad]. Users with no coding experience will be able to create their own game modes just like that create their own maps and edit the maps, create their own items, and create their own game rules."

Gopman believes Superpower Squad will be a unique GameFi experience due to:

• the customizable experience
• in-game custodial wallet
• dual elements of free-to-play and play-to-earn, and
• reimbursing users’ in-game gas fees.

"If we do it right, it allows us to be the first game to put a lot of money and marketing effort into attracting standard mobile gamers and having them go through tournaments or free-to-play modes without them even knowing that it's a Web 3.0 experience,” he said.

On his hopes for what the project can achieve, Gopman remarked:

"In the bear market, some people think that anything GameFi related is a bad game. But there's a lot of good in it, and we hope we can be the catalyst for change."

The core features of Superpower Squad are scheduled to launch this December. Meanwhile, test versions of the game are available on Google Play and the App Store.