Himo World Aims to Entice Gamers With a Creative Create-to-Earn Model
The concept of play-and-earn (P2E) gaming has gradually given rise to a booming crypto-powered world known as the metaverse, an immersive milieu where players complete tasks, defeat opponents, and trade tokenized commodities on integrated marketplaces.
The price of admission, though, is alienating a generation of gamers who are either clueless about digital assets or unwilling to risk their hard-earned currency playing an online game. For these reticent gamers, free-to-play is a much more digestible and familiar notion than P2E.
If they become confident operating in a particular metaverse, though, they might eventually take the plunge by creating a Web3 wallet, loading it with crypto, and embarking on a lucrative gaming odyssey. Which is why some studios are investing time and money into building both F2P and P2E models into their releases.
Studios such as Gamefox, whose latest venture Himo World aims to popularize a new concept entirely: create to earn.
Create to Earn in Himo World
Designed to appeal to novice blockchain gamers and profit-seeking veterans alike, Himo World is built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and offers several forms of immersive gameplay including a turn-based Match-3 feature, where players retain control of their board and must strategically influence the boards of others to triumph. With a low learning curve, it’s easy to get up to speed and start playing — though mastering Himo World is the tricky part.
At the outset, each player creates a team composed of four ‘heroes’ with which they explore and engage in battle, and each (corresponding to red, yellow, green and blue gems) has different abilities based on half a dozen ‘skill slots’ in their corresponding skill cards. Needless to say, heroes and skill cards are NFTs that can be traded with other players. Hence, create to earn.
Because of the various races and classes of heroes, not to mention the multiple skills, players can exercise a huge amount of creative license in Himo World: ultimately, the plan is to have a virtually limitless number of hero variants, with those deemed extremely rare priced accordingly on the open market.
The game’s native $HIMO token, meanwhile, functions as the primary in-game currency: it’s what players receive for winning tournaments or selling heroes or skills. $HIMO can also be used to pay tournament fees, level up skills, and place wagers on tournaments.
A secondary currency, Gold, has its own properties in terms of earning and spending, and although it cannot be used for trading, it can be bundled with other NFTs and sold on the marketplace. This graphic below gives a clear insight into the game loop of Himo World:
Although P2E and F2P are now ubiquitous concepts in the gamefi world, Himo World’s create to earn model is different to what has gone before, enticing incentive players to construct formidable heroes for the express purpose of selling at a profit. Creating valuable heroes isn’t as easy as it might sound, since skill cards don’t always guarantee that the abilities you want will enter the skill slot. This is where $HIMO tokens are useful — they’re used to increase your prospects of acquiring higher-tier skills.
Calling All Creatives
Naturally if you’ve chosen free-to-play over play-to-earn, you’ll be more focused on the gameplay than the earning possibilities. That said, F2P players can actually participate in activities you might more readily associate with P2E: tournaments and events (including, in the future, esports leagues) offering payouts are not off-limits, meaning you can still win prizes.
Of course, the major rewards are reserved for those who’ve put ‘skin in the game.’ Not least since high-stake players can invest additional capital to boost their teams and enhance their prospects of winning battles.
Himo World is expected to launch in early March, and there are already plans to introduce features such as virtual real estate a la Decentraland; as with heroes, players can create to earn by constructing properties tokenized as NFTs and selling onward. A staking system will also be incorporated, giving players even more opportunities to generate passive income. Naturally, the F2P model remains the best gateway for those merely keen to see what all the fuss is about.
Who knows, create to earn might eventually be as ubiquitous in the gaming world as F2P and P2E. Himo World certainly represents an excellent proving ground for a model that brings something unique to the growing blockchain gaming sector.
