Blankos Block Party, The NFT Trojan Horse For Video Gaming

Mythical Games is now proud to present Blankos Block Party to the gaming world. The co-founders, Rudy Koch and John Linden are pleased to partner with brands like Deadmau5 and Burberry. They got a total of $120 million from investors to develop the game to present players with opportunities to earn NFTs.

To the simple eye, the team is selling Blankos Block Party. But, an in-depth analysis reveals that they are selling an ecosystem of NFT-driven development and gameplay. The team at Mythical decided to use a colorful online world that is filled with user-created cartoons and toys to push blockchain economics on the player base of mainstream brands and kids.

Linden said:

“Blankos is the proving ground. We control all the levers in Blankos, which is great, so we can do a lot of testing and see what’s hitting the community. But the idea behind that is to tune it so that other games can use the same concepts.”

Initially, Blankos was not meant to operate as a full game. It launched as a tech demo for the Mythical developers to demonstrate their NFT marketplace to the interested corporate partners. Currently, it mainly operates on the premises of ownership, accessibility, and scarcity.

In this platform, the players can create game worlds without needing to have any coding skills. They are also allowed to collect, customize, transact, and sell NFTs of the objects and characters created by major brands and developers. Blankos are squashy, Funko-esque toys, that show they are collector’s items, though they are entirely digital.

Mythical is interesting in developing this game since their NFT marketplace seems to be in the heart of Blankos. Koch explained:

“What NFTs allow us to do is to bring the player into the economy so they can participate in the value that they bring to the game. Through the items that they earn, through the levels that they build, through the customizations that they make — they own the NFTs. They own the items, for the first time. And they can play with them, they can sell them.”

Although the idea of selling in-game items for real-world money is not new, the ownership that has been introduced by blockchain technology is quite new. Marketplaces exist where players sell and buy digital weapons, game keys, and rare cosmetic gear. But, players do not own the things they buy, the game developers do.

Koch commented:

“We’ve seen gray markets pop up around most popular games, almost every popular game. Players clearly see the value, and they want to buy and sell things from each other… [but] it’s always been on the fringe, it’s always been illegitimate.”

Linden added:

“When these gray markets pop up, they’re not safe. You don’t know if you’re going to get the assets, there’s a lot of fraud in these things, there’s a lot of laundering, there’s a lot of different things, and negative things have happened in these gray markets. And I think that’s what we want to try and legitimize. We want to make that part of the game, part of the ecosystem, so you can design with that.”

When Mythical was selling the idea of Blankos Block Party, it was three years before the Great NFT Boom (and Bust) of 2021. Today, NFT marketplaces have already become trendy. According to Linden:

“There’s a new generation of collectors, right? And the fact that they’re willing to pay this money for tokenized JPEGs, which — we’ll see what the value is, long-term, but I think what [the NFT craze] did show is it showed the mentality. It showed where consumer interest is heading, that they view digital assets as assets.”

In that context, what matters is that major brands and gamers need to buy into Mythical’s in-game NFT ecosystem. Linden mentioned that the game does not need to be a grand slam:

“We’re not trying to necessarily take on Roblox, but what we’re seeing is the community loves it. The community loves what we’re doing, the brands love where it’s doing, so we’re going to invest heavily behind it, to show this and show all these new concepts that we want to do. How does gameplay affect ownership? How can you play to earn? What does that mean in a game?”

Mythical wants to ensure that its NFT economy is sustainable for the long term. The team has been working on the new technology for years and they are even trying to incorporate the technology into ticketing, live events, and financial networks. Linden concluded:

“Our primary focus is going to be bringing this technology to a lot of other game developers, and we’re already in talks with quite a few to bring this into their worlds as well. We’ll probably have a few announcements later this year, for sure.”

Blankos appears like it just needs to sneak Mythical’s NFT concept into the general gaming sector. For now, there is no coin of crypto for Blankos. The Blanko Bucks are an in-game currency that can be exchanged for fiat while Moola is the in-game grind currency.