The Beacon, if you are a veteran player, you must be familiar with this phenomenon-level blockchain game that emerged at the end of 2022. For those players who haven’t paid attention to blockchain games for a long time, their first reaction to this old project might be, “It’s still alive?”

After all, even the platform where this game was once located, Treasure DAO, announced a comprehensive termination of game development stack and publishing, opting for an AI transformation back in April last year. The last blockchain game that attracted market attention was the MapleStory blockchain version from the traditional game giant Nexon, which was a year ago.

Yet, this old game is finally going to tokenize after 4 years. In the first week of the final pre-token sale event, “Season 1,” it received over $460,000 in player deposits. In the current sluggish market environment, with almost no one paying attention to blockchain games anymore, how did The Beacon manage to do it?

As before, one of The Beacon’s core gameplays is still “dungeon crawling,” but with changes in the mechanics. Firstly, the daily “dungeon” requires stamina to enter, with a minimum cost of 20 points per run and a maximum of 1000 points. If 1000 points are spent in a single run, the rewards after completion will be 50 times the cost of 20 points. Additionally, there is an extra 1.5x settlement reward for completion. If unfortunate players die in the dungeon without completing it, they will only receive rewards up to the point of death.

To enter a dungeon with a stamina cost of 1000 points, players need to purchase a $19.99 Premium membership. Players can also enhance their stamina limit by purchasing in-game items with real money. By purchasing the highest-tier $499.99 package, players can raise their stamina limit to over 4000 points. Without a Premium membership, players are limited to spending 20 points per run, meaning they have to complete 200 runs in a day. An average player with moderate skills might take about 10 minutes to complete one run and will play until nauseated.

Therefore, obtaining a Premium membership is the basic requirement to participate in the Season 1 event and receive $BCN tokens. This is because, besides consuming more stamina per run to save time, completing dungeons does not directly yield $BCN tokens but instead produces “Shadow Shards.” Zero scraping is not impossible. There is a basic chest in the in-game store that can be exchanged for 1000 Shadow Shards, but the token output of this chest is extremely low, almost negligible. If you want to earn more tokens, you must exchange the Shadow Shards for chips and participate in the “Roulette Game.”

This roulette game is very similar to a slot machine. Players need to place bets, predict which square the roulette will land on when the countdown ends, and receive the corresponding multiplier reward. You cannot avoid playing because the exchanged chips are in a locked state. Only by winning in the “Roulette Game” will the returned chips become unlocked, allowing you to exchange them for the main chest that produces $BCN, the “Kraken Chests.”

So, let’s summarize the current mechanics of this game: The entire Season 1 event is actually a race to obtain tokens before the TGE. The token acquisition path is: “Raid Dungeon” -> Obtain “Shadow Shards” -> Exchange for chips to participate in the Roulette Game -> Exchange the chips from the Roulette Game for the highest-level chest -> Open the chest to receive the tokens awaiting TGE. Zero scraping is possible, but it has almost no cost-effectiveness, and the project team has already taken this into account. The $19.99 Premium membership is almost a hard threshold, as the highest-level chest that can be obtained by exchanging chips, the “Premium Kraken Chests,” is also exclusive to Premium members. Due to the randomness of the roulette game and the randomness of the token amount obtained when opening the chest, even if everyone tops up the same amount, the final token amount obtained will fluctuate. Although the final token amount obtained is variable, the more you top up, the greater the advantage.

As we explained earlier, we discussed why the Premium membership is a hard threshold. Therefore, Premium members are basically considered users who believe that the game token is worth playing for. According to @ClaeysXBT’s statistics, as of yesterday, the total number of addresses that have activated Premium membership is 4333.

In the game’s web version store, there are 5 tiers of packages available for purchase, priced at $9.99, $19.99, $59.99, $99.99, and $499.99 respectively. Purchasing these packages grants “Glint,” and most players choose to exchange the received “Glint” for energy limit in the game to increase their daily “Shadow Fragments”/”Chips” output. For example, buying a $499.99 package + activating Premium membership can raise the daily energy limit to over 4000, yielding approximately 150,000 “Shadow Fragments,” which can be exchanged for nearly 5000 chips. Additionally, for every $1 spent on purchasing a package, players receive about 2.33 $BCN (at the current stage). As players recharge more, the amount of $BCN obtained per $1 spent will decrease, with the previous stage offering around 2.67 $BCN per $1.

Currently, the revenue from activating Premium memberships is $86,600, and the revenue from package sales is approximately $378,000, totaling around $465,000. From a holistic perspective, Season 1 can be understood as a gamified token fundraising event. The package sales essentially represent a phased token sale, where although the package prices remain constant, the direct token quantity given will decrease as sales volume increases. For instance, with the $499.99 package, purchasing a day later may result in receiving 20 fewer of the highest-tier chests, “Premium Kraken Chests,” in the game.

The total $BCN supply is 100 million: Season 1 Rewards: 10.2%, TGE Release 25%, remaining 9 months linear unlock; Past Event Rewards: 1%, TGE Release 15%, remaining 12 months linear unlock; NFT Holders: 19%, TGE Release 15%, remaining 18 months linear unlock; Liquidity and LPs: 7%, TGE fully released; Future Community Reward: 22.3%, TGE non-release; Team: 15%, TGE non-release, Cliff unlock after 24 months, fully unlocked after 36 months; Ecosystem Fund: 25.5%, TGE releases 15%, remaining portion linearly unlocked over 36 months. The circulating portion at launch accounts for 16.375% of the total supply, with an opening price of 1U corresponding to a market cap of $16.375 million and 0.5U corresponding to $8.1875 million.

The Beacon’s recent craze was mainly driven by the built-in roulette game, which got players really excited. It is often jokingly referred to as the “slot machine,” and the public chat in crowded channels is often filled with banter or comments like “I’m getting rich.”

Going forward, the game plan for this project will evolve into a full-fledged slot machine, MMORPG (multiplayer cooperative dungeons, etc.), resource gathering (item enhancement, etc.), and PVP, with plans to introduce AI elements. However, the timeline for all this is unclear. Nevertheless, for a native crypto chain game project to endure for 4 years and still attract market attention 4 years later, is indeed quite remarkable.

[BlockBeats]