Current and upcoming changes on Heroes & Empires economy

To keep the game survive

We have received some feedback from our players about the latest version 1.16 updates, especially for the price increase of hero’s level Limit Break in high level. To give you an overview of the game’s economy change, I will detail the major changes here.

When we released Heroes & Empires more than 1 year ago, it was a heavy-crypto game:

• Requires player to have at least 5 NFTs to play the game

• Player had to connect the wallet for every on-chain action

• Almost all the players are crypto users which focus on Play to Earn

But the crypto market is (extremely) down and Play to Earn is already dead. We have to find a better approach to survive and to onboarding new players, especially traditional web2 players. Actually, we made the change before the market was down by adding many beginner-friendly features. Some of them are:

• Release mobile versions

• Play the game without using a wallet

• Free heroes

• Tutorials with those free heroes

• Increase the rewarded gem when you complete the stages in the first chapter

• Adding in-game marketplaces for heroes and gear

Our Ultimate Goal is to make the project survive

More than 95% of NFT games founded from last year are dead or in zombie mode. Some of them raised and sold the NFT for $20M-$100M+ but haven’t (or never) delivered the game yet. Our team only raised $1.5M and delivered the game within 2 months of we raised the fund. We sold only one NFT sale for around $900K (in $HE at that time). And we didn’t sell those HE until now. You know these values are very small now.

We initially use a big part of the fund for token listing fees, NFT sale fees and liquidity. Then we have used most of the fund for development costs, which we deliver a new big update every 2 weeks. No NFT game could do that. Please also notice that our in development game OverSpell doesn’t use HE’s fund.

Since the revenue from NFT marketplace is down while we use all this revenue for buy back, we have to add more ways to monetize the game without counting on NFT marketplace. That’s the reason we added:

• Gem packs

• Daily offers

• Battle Pass

But these don’t guarantee the project’s survival. Although the revenue from IAP is increased but we (and all other NFT games) are still in loss. And if we don’t have a strong improvement, we will use all the existing fund within less than next 6 months.

Therefore, we made some big changes in game economy for only 2 goals:

• Onboarding and keeping the new players in the game.

• Make players spend. Yes, let’s be transparent here.

We make the changes based on the analytics data and lessons we learn from I Am Hero (the old non-blockchain version of HE), which was successful in monetization in the past. Here are what we have done and are doing:

Increased the “free” rewards

• Added Newcomer Challenge with many free rewards for new players

• Increased the Gem rewards from Progression quests up to 30 times. The total Gem you could receive from Progression Quests alone is 50,000+

• Doubled the Gem rewards on Bounty Hunter

• Doubled Gem rewards from Arena win

Increased the cost for some operation on high level

Because we increased the Gem rewards, we will need to adjust the Gem cost on some operation, focusing on the high level:

• Increased the Gem for limit break on the high levels. The amount is a half of what we used in I Am hero.

• Increased the price of Arena ticket

• Increased the Gem pricing of the item in the store

Set the required chapter to mint the NFTs and withdraw tokens to 20

We also have to increased this requirement to prevent hacking and cheating activities. Currently we have to deal with many frauds, refunds and cheating every day. Anyways, you could easily reach this chapter with 1-2 immortal heroes in your squad.

What will come in the upcoming updates

Anyways, we always listen to our players and have the suitable adjustments. Our short-term plan is to increase the rewards for the rest of game activities. For example:

• Increase the Gem rewards in Dungeon of Trials

• Increase the Gem rewards in Towers of Madness

• Increase the Gem rewards in Matrix of Deity

• Reduce the Gem cost for limit break a half as current

We will also add more features to improve the game monetization, to survive. For example:

• Welcome back package: Which give you many good reward and heavy discount if you come back to the game after a period of time

• Rewarded video ads: Give you some rewards if you watch the video. It is optional and you only watch if you need the reward

• Personal offers, newcomer offers

• Weekly deals, monthly deals

• Membership (NFT): Give you some benefits for the period of time. It could be an NFT pass

Last but not least, don’t forget the upcoming features, which are already in development:

• New server on DOS Chain with zero gas fee

• Brand new marketplace OverMint with much better UI/UX, new features, support multiple network and multiple games

• And some features already on I Am Hero, we will migrate to Heroes & Empires

Thank you and have great holidays ahead!
JOY