Crazy Defense Heroes celebrated its fourth birthday yesterday. Today, it reigns supreme over the play-to-earn landscape
Crazy Defense Heroes began four years ago as a simple tower defense game. Now it dominates the world of play-to-earn gaming with 139,798 unique active wallets interacting with the platform on a daily basis.
Tower defense (TD) games have a history that goes back as far as the early-80s. The premise is simple: stop a stream of enemies as they attempt to travel from point A to point B across a map. Players have a range of defensive weapons they can strategically deploy to halt the opponent in its tracks.
Crazy Defense Heroes was one of many such free-to-play games when it first launched four years ago as the sequel to Crazy Kings. But in May 2020, the game’s developer Animoca Brands began to weave blockchain technology into the game to produce a new experience that has steadily taken over the world of play-to-earn. They dubbed the project the Tower Experiment, an initiative to revamp existing mobile games into play-to-earn blockchain games.
The chart above shows the number of unique active wallets that have interacted with Crazy Defense Heroes since the beginning of December 2021. In that period, average daily interactions have gone up from 20,655 UAWs in December 2021 to 139,798 in March 2022.
The move from free-to-play to play-to-earn
Many people see the move from free-to-play to play-to-earn as one of the defining differences between web2 and web3. Free-to-play games are enclosed bundles of software housed in a centralized server which users can play without charge. The host of the game will usually make money from advertising, micro-transactions and content expansions. Think about the candies in Candy Crush and the character skins in Fortnite.
Play-to-earn gaming contains elements, to a greater or lesser extent, of blockchain technology. Users can earn rewards and trade assets within the ecosystem, thus earning tokens, cryptocurrency and real-world money. In May 2020, Animoca Brands launched a sale of 100 Super Value Chests. These contained in-game content and resources as well as a single Crazy Defense Heroes collectible NFT card. This was the first introduction to NFTs for players of the game.
On February 25th 2021, Animoca Brands introduced tokenomics to the Crazy Defense Heroes by minting 10 billion TOWER, the in-game ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. The token release is scheduled to run until the beginning of 2026 and tokens are allocated like this:
- Play-to-earn: 3 billion tokens
- Marketing fund pool: 1.5 billion tokens
- Liquidity pool: 1.5 billion tokens
- Team and Advisors pool: 1.5 billion tokens
- Company reserve pool: 1.5 billion tokens
- Community Development Fund: 1 billion tokens
Players can win experience points by completing in-game monthly tasks. Then, by linking their cryptocurrency wallet to Crazy Defense Heroes, they can claim a share of the prize pool of TOWER tokens. This March and next April, the prize pool will be 1.8 million TOWER ($352,000). TOWER rewards are now paid on the Polygon blockchain.
How Crazy Defense Heroes compares to the field
To say that Crazy Defense Heroes reigns supreme over the play-to-earn landscape isn’t hyperbole. Looking at DappRadar’s rankings page for blockchain gaming, we can see that the game sits near the top across multiple analytical categories.
In terms of the total value of assets in the dapp’s smart contracts, Crazy Defense Heroes ranks sixth out of all blockchain games with a balance of $156.55 million.
And the platform ranks third behind Splinterlands and Alien Worlds for the highest number of unique active wallets interacting with the dapp over the past week.
These impressive rankings are testament to Animoca Brands’ continued development of Crazy Defense Heroes. They plan to release a new blockchain-powered tower defense as the latest entry in the franchise. It too will allow players to use their Crazy Kings franchise NFTs and earn TOWER tokens through gaming.
DappRadar will be keeping you updated with more developments on Crazy Defense Heroes as and when they are released. For all other news about the world of blockchain gaming and decentralized apps, stay tuned with DappRadar and follow us on Twitter. You can also join our weekly Discord every Thursday at 4pm GMT.
