TLDR:
- What you’ve been playing up until now is a Demo version of the game. A small taste of what’s coming.
- The Industry is still nascent, but very exciting and promising.
- We need to focus on the big picture. The first and most important milestone to deliver being the Alpha launch of The Beacon on Q1 2024.
- Our plans as a studio extend far beyond The Beacon:
- Seasonal content and expansions
- The Beacon’s universe with asset interoperability
- More games and IPs
- We will make short term changes to achieve our goals:
- Lux shard system will be sunset and participants will be taken into consideration
- The content and item drop cadence will change
- The Harvester Event is coming up next week. It will enable an item burning mechanic. As we move on, we will focus heavily on reducing item supply.
- We will soon announce a new initiative that aligns with our vision as a company. The community will be able to actively participate on this, our assets included.
- Plenty more information to be released soon
Dear community,
While things may have seemed quiet on the surface, the reality behind the scenes is a vastly different story. Over the past weeks we've been refining our overall strategy for The Beacon and the studio as a whole. Today, I want to share with you our vision into what lies ahead for our company.
Let’s start with a small retrospect.
The Settlement Launch and subsequent events that followed were a wild ride, one that -needless to say- exceeded our expectations. The Beacon quickly became one of the most popular games in the space, and we like to believe we are pioneering a new trend in web3 gaming, one that focuses on a game-first approach.
Looking back, it’s crazy to see what has been achieved, and you, our beloved community, have played an essential role in the process.
However, it's of paramount importance to remember that our original goal with The Settlement Launch was to introduce a prototype of our game. Our aim was to demonstrate that we had a viable product in progress, that we were actually building something fun. We wanted to allow our community to engage and take part in the very first stage of the project that we were pouring our hearts into.
But let me be clear: what we launched was a prototype, a Demo, an initial preview of what we truly envision for the game. As we've always stated, what you've seen of the game so far represents merely a really small fraction of the actual game we're developing. While the Demo served its purpose for The Settlement Launch, it is incapable of retaining engagement long-term. It was never intended to do so, it’s just not a complete game yet. For that same reason, our initial intention was to close things down after The Settlement Launch to keep on developing.
Yet, in response to the incredible traction, we decided to keep the game “open” for existing users to play, and new users to try. We introduced experimental features, organized collaboration events, and gathered feedback to keep the community engaged while we were hard at work on the game's core infrastructure and design.
We now realize that this led some people to believe they were playing a finished game, which just plainly isn’t the case. By focusing on the present, we didn’t adequately align our actions with our goals. It's critical that we rectify this.
However, before we get into what the next months will look like for The Beacon, let’s take a moment to appreciate the current state of the industry we're part of.
State of the Industry
First of all, it’s crucial to understand that web3 gaming is still in its infancy. It's so early, in fact, that as an industry we've barely begun to scratch the surface of what this technology can contribute to the gaming sector. I firmly believe that web3 has the potential of changing gaming forever.
It’s fascinating to observe how we are gradually transitioning from arguably unsustainable narratives, such as pure P2E, towards a more mature, product-focused strategy for web3 game development. We like to believe that we are at the forefront of this trend.
Although things seem to be heading towards a more reasonable direction, most games are in their initial development stage. As an industry, we still haven’t fully exploited the potential of web3. We still haven’t bridged the chasm that separates us from the enormous, untapped and very coveted traditional web2 gaming audience.
There’s still plenty to figure out in web3 gaming. There’s no playbook on how to launch a successful game in here, and the amount of failed projects are a testament to the challenges inherent to this industry. However, even though it’s early, things are moving, and rather quickly at that.
Things might seem quiet right now. Market conditions and the overall state of crypto and web3 gaming make it look like there’s not too much happening at the moment.
However, this feels to me like one of those “calm before the storm” moments.
During the past months, I’ve been attending several events and meeting dozens of builders. The truth is that there’s tons of projects in the works, boatloads of money being invested and hordes of capable teams that are recognizing the golden opportunity that web3 gaming currently offers, and are looking to capitalize on it.
At this precise moment there are several actually good games being built, as well as numerous gaming platforms, tools and infrastructure that aim to bring an unprecedented amount of new users to the space. My hunch is that the industry will change radically within the next 1-3 years as these projects are released.
Although I’d like to elaborate further about the benefits I see for web3 in games, doing so now would make this letter dreadfully long. But in short, ownership is just a fraction of it, and more and more people are realizing the opportunity that web3 gaming offers as games enter the domain of globally accessible digital assets and networks, in whichever form those may take. The potential can’t be overstated.
At The Beacon, we are highly aware of the trend that is emerging amidst the current calm and we plan to to leverage our position to seize the opportunity.
There’s a gigantic wave in the horizon, and we intend to ride it.
The future of our company
As laid out before, preparing for the future is essential. Many projects will fail to adapt to this new transition and it’ll likely be an interesting period of innovation and market movements.
Based on everything that’s happening, I think it’s crucial to tell you what our plans are for the future as a company.
But first, allow me to provide some context. We are Skillcap, a game development studio. The Beacon is our first and (currently) only title. But we aim to be much more.
Simply put, Skillcap aims to become one of the preeminent studios in this space. A process that we believe will take place in three stages:
Stage 1
Our primary goal is to usher The Beacon towards its Alpha launch and the subsequent V1 release, where we intend The Beacon to be one of the landmark projects of web3 gaming.
So, what does The Beacon aspire to be?
Essentially, it aims to combine elements from three distinct game genres, illustrated by the following well-known games:
- a) The adrenaline-fueled fast-paced gameplay of a roguelike game akin to Hades.
- b) The immersive social interaction of an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, featuring online gameplay, open cities, trading, group dungeon adventures, PvP, and other MMORPG elements.
- c) The deep, creative gameplay of games like Stardew Valley, where players can carve out their own home within our world, express it as they may and share it with friends.
This blend of genres aims to offer a diverse and rich gaming experience for our players, merging everything seamlessly with web3 integration and maybe even user-generated content (more on this in the future).
We've been actively working to bring this vision to life, with an expected Alpha release of our game slated for Q1 of 2024.
Once our game is complete, we will consistently release meaningful updates that add fresh content, affect the existing meta and keep the game novel and highly competitive, much like Dota2 or Path of Exile manage their games, an approach that has proven to be very effective.
Stage 2
Once The Beacon is fully established, we plan to broaden its universe. Essentially, we envision creating more games that are based on The Beacon. For instance, our cherished Moonfae collection could be incorporated into its own pet battle game.
The cool part of this strategy lies in the substantial interoperability opportunities it offers. Assets across our various games could interact, so that owning a pet in The Beacon would be instantly recognized in the Moonfae game. An asset in game A can hold properties in game B and C, and so on.
We envision these games as standalone, yet capable of interacting with The Beacon as a hub. Wouldn't it be cool to meet someone in the tavern and challenge them to a pet duel?
It’s too early still to define what these secondary games will look like however, but we see this as a great opportunity to broaden our user base, and target diverse player types and audiences.
Leveraging our existing architecture and game assets will make building these way faster than what it would otherwise be. We believe this will help us onboard thousands, if not millions, of users in the future.
But our journey doesn’t end with just The Beacon’s universe.
Stage 3
In the coming years, we see ourselves becoming a game studio with multiple universes under our belt, much like Blizzard, which boasts diverse IPs such as Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo etc. We envision our company following a similar path.
Even though this is a long-term goal, we have no intentions stopping whatsoever. It’s an understatement to say that we absolutely love building games. Guys, this is basically our dream job, one that we plan to continue devoting our hearts and souls into as we grow into the future.
Thanks to web3 we get to have the community to be involved in every step of the journey. Our vision is to break down the traditional walls between developers and players, treating our community members as stakeholders, contributors, and creators.
The path moving forward
I hope that by now you got clearer perspective of our intentions as a company.
We’ve been cautious and refrained from implementing features or prematurely releasing a token that could risk our progress for short term goals, while tirelessly working behind the scenes towards the prize that exists in the long term.
Even though things have seem quiet on our end, we've been focusing on establishing a robust infrastructure for the game and developing the crucial networking layer to support all online initiatives and much more. We've also been building strategic partnerships to ensure the project's prosperity and growth.
Our goal is to make sure the game is fine crafted, entertaining, and engaging enough, timed alongside a series of incentives to achieve a really successful launch. To do this, we need to focus on critical objectives and abandon what isn’t working.
Fortunately, we have an array of strategies – or 'levers to pull' – to address the game’s current issues and community concerns. It's all a matter of timing when implementing these solutions.
This brings us to our experimental feature, The Shards System.
Shards were initially introduced to keep players engaged while we concentrated on developing the core game. However, it soon became apparent that this feature wasn’t really attractive, and it quickly shifted from a solution to a problem. Since the core game and economic loops are still under development, the introduction of shards added more complexity than benefits.
Given the current state of things, we have decided to sunset the shards system.
Starting Today, Monday 29th of May, shards will no longer be obtainable. Regular loot drops will remain available in the meantime until the end of The Harvester Event (Jun 19th).
While shards will no longer be obtainable, players will have until July 5th to exchange their shards for items or chests in the Bazaar.
We've also realized that keeping the prototype live as it is might be more detrimental than beneficial. Releasing features that aren't quite ready will only impact negatively on the perception of our players, and producing more items can harm the value of our assets, something we’ve decided to tackle head on.
We understand that the game is not ready enough to achieve long-term retention and engagement. We need to look beyond the immediate horizon and structure things accordingly.
Hence, we have decided to change the weekly cadence of our game after The Harvester Event. The game will remain partially open—new players will still be able to try the game and participate in dungeons—but item NFTs and shards will no longer be obtainable on a daily basis.
Our strategy is pivoting towards preparing for the alpha launch, and we will soon announce the initiatives we plan to roll out to make sure it’s a wild success.
We're also focusing on reducing item supply rather than increasing it. Starting with the Harvester Event with Bridgeworld, where a number of our assets can be burned to boost and participate towards MAGIC token emissions.
Remember the Harvester event begins on Jun 5th. Featuring limited edition items, a new boss fight, as well as distributing different assets that will be key in the Harvester Mechanics that emit MAGIC tokens.
The promising in between
Don’t get me wrong though, we don’t intend to remain quiet until the Alpha launch. Quite the contrary, we know that this is a long time in crypto.
Remember how I mentioned we have many levers to pull. The good part is that in web3, the sky is the limit.
We soon plan to announce how we will structure the process towards the Alpha launch of our game.
Now that I shared the future plans for our company, it's essential to note that we intend to align and reward our supporters through initiatives that include and benefit not only from The Beacon, but what Skillcap produces. We'll soon announce this initiative. Needless to say, Founding characters and Pets will participate in it.
During this period as well, we'll periodically open new dungeons, host recurrent events for this initiative that I just hinted at, and occasionally release new features for player testing and feedback. We also intend to have much more frequent communication with our community.
Besides this, we intend to reward players who participated in the shards system, with special consideration given to those users who engaged the most.
We’ll be distributing trophies in a tiered system based on total participation. The new initiative will also be involved in this distribution.
Shortly after the Treasure Harvester Event, we'll be revealing our new initiative in a series of announcements. This initiative will play a pivotal role in the future of The Beacon and our company, as well as our path towards the game's launch.
This is just the beginning of a very interesting journey, one that we want you to be part of.
This is one announcement of many and we will be soon hosting an AMA to address community questions. Along with these communications, more information about our Roadmap towards the alpha will soon be released as well.
Thank you for your support, and expect to hear more from us soon! Diego Vidaurre - CEO of The Beacon and Skillcap Studio
