I've been following and writing articles about Cryptobrewmaster ever since it hit the mainnet. Development had been slow initially and there were some issues with bots and scammers creating dozens if not hundreds of accounts, trying to leech as much CBM from the game as possible. Ever since, Cryptobrewmaster has come a long way. Many features have been added to the game and it seems the basic economy is almost fully crafted now, with only some more buildings missing.
While the developer repeatedly said that there are features planned for years to come, I feel like it's a good time to take a closer look at how the economy panned out so far and without giving away too much, in my opinion, Cryptobrewmaster sports a brilliantly crafted economy that certainly is a breath of fresh air to the genre!
Most if not all games similar to Cryptobrewmaster follow the same routine. When you first register with them, you don't own anything and you slowly start to build up your what ever the game is about. This usually involves either a lot of time, a lot of money, or both spent on the game. In return, you earn more and more rewards up to the point where you, theoretically, are ahead of the pack and start to really reap in all the rewards.
This is not bad in general and it really is a proven formula. Take Rising Star for example. When you start the game, you'll earn like 5 Starbits on average per mission and you'll run out of energy eventually. With enough time or money spent, this slowly changes towards a situation where you'll never run out of energy and potentially earn tens of thousands of Starbits each day. There's steady progress in that game and people enjoy progress for obvious reason. It does something to our brain seeing these little numbers slowly grow bigger and in terms of blockchain games, it also means our earnings increase over time.
The downside to this is that people that invested time and/or money into the game are drifting further and further away from people picking up the game at a later stage. This creates a lot of issues, but two of them are the most glaring ones:
- New players are discouraged to keep playing right from the start because they are looking at older players earning a thousand times of what they do without ever hoping to catch up to them unless they shell out a lot of money.
- The game balancing has to keep up with the growing numbers of its top players. That means that they'll either have to further decrease the earnings of everybody else or they'll have to limit what their whales can earn. Since these are the ones earning them the most money, though, most developers are going to shy away from that option.
Consequently, this leads to a situation where the game becomes unsustainable because some top players are earning the lion's share while the rest receives almost nothing. New people stop joining the game and more and more players quit playing it. This is not to say that it's impossible to build these games in a sustainable way, but it has to be done right and it's something a surprisingly large number of games fail to ever achieve.
So how is Cryptobrewmaster different in that regard? Simply put, it removes the inherent advantages you gain from simply grinding the game. There are different ingredient producing buildings like the Water Tower and the Hops Farm which can be seen above. In a classical game economy, you'd buy these buildings for a set sum once and then profit from them for ever. In Cryptobrewmaster, this is not how things work. Instead of buying a building, you only rent it for a given amount of time. Each time you want to rent it again, you have to pay some CBM again.
And that's not even all. Buildings deteriorate the more you use them and thus have decreasing chances of providing you with high quality ingredients. This creates an environment where you can't simply invest a lump sum once and profit from it for years to come. Instead, you always have to watch the market and decide what move is going to help you the most. Because of that, new players can come in and compete right away. There's no advantage to being in the game for months other than having more experience and more CBM to work with.
To me personally, this is a really cool and somewhat unique design. You can still choose to just grind the basic quests and sell these ingredients for a profit if you want to, but the more engaged you get with the game, the more interesting it gets. To use the production buildings, you will need water. To get water, you need a water tower. You can always choose to buy that from the market as well, though. So ultimately, you always have to calculate the different costs and benefits of each action. Combined with the different events all running at the same time, you end up with a really deep and complex economy.
While I really enjoy that approach, I fully understand that this is not for everybody. Many players feel like they don't see any progress because of the way the game is build. No matter if you joined today or 6 months ago, the game is going to look exactly the same for you. While I'd be cool with that, it's probably not what the majority of players wants. Luckily, Cryptobrewmaster has us covered in that regard as well.
There are already Update buttons in all the buildings and we've also heard of unique buildings and artifact NFTs coming to the game. As always, we'll have to wait and see how things are working out in the end, but personally, I'm quite hopeful that the developer is going to implement it just the right way. If done right, we'll end up with an environment where there is some form of notable progress but new players will still have a shot at competing with the older ones. As long as renting buildings remains a thing, the game has one of most interesting economies in the blockchain world!
And that's all from me for today. In case you didn't play the game yet, you might really want to give it a shot. It's easy to play, free to pick up, yet has a surprisingly deep economy once you start to dig deeper. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!