The Web3 wallet, infrastructure and gaming company Horizon Blockchain Games has launched the Open Beta for Skyweaver; a free-to-play cross-platform Web3 trading card game. The game has opened to a waitlist that’s 345,000 users-strong.
Skyweaver Open Beta launched officially on 8 February 2022, establishing itself as a card game from a completely different dimension. It’s free to play, and grants users the experience of a new kind of trading game in which players are able to gain tangible, digitally verified ownership over the Silver and Gold cards they win.
The card game offers novel gameplay mechanics and intuitive deck building via a user-owned market. With over 500 unique cards available, players can unlock every single card in the game for free.
In addition, only one copy of a card exists in the deck played with, making for more varied gameplay strategies and unexpected plays. A diverse collection of Heroes and cards makes for fresh dual-deck combinations and unique card interactions.
Players can win, own, trade, sell, and gift trading cards via Skyweaver’s built-in peer-to-peer decentralised marketplace. The Skyweaver Market harnesses Horizon’s in-house developed Niftyswap Protocol — the first NFT automated market maker (AMM) designed to bolster liquidity in the otherwise highly illiquid NFT market. The protocol makes buying and selling NFTs easy and intuitive for players, with prices algorithmically calculated with no-bid or sell orders — allowing users to buy and sell NFT trading cards instantly.
Skyweaver has garnered one of Web3’s largest communities, with more than 3 million matches played — accounting for over 920,000 hours racked up in the private beta alone.
Having cultivated a total of $13.3million in funding from a host of Web3’s most prominent VCs, including Coinbase, Initialized Capital, BITKRAFT, ConsenSys and Polychain, Skyweaver holds the potential to be the first Web3 game to break into the Web2 mass gaming market.
Skyweaver has been building for four years and has undergone rigorous gameplay tests via private beta for the past three.
Organic growth during this period has delivered one of the largest user bases in Web3 — and even Web2 — gaming. At 99,000 members, Skyweaver’s discord has already outmatched the reach of other popular Web2 trading card contemporaries.
With over 233,000 app installs to date, Skyweaver’s community continues to attract trading card game fans worldwide.
Since Skyweaver’s code-gated Soft Launch back in 25 November 2021, when the economy went live on Polygon mainnet, players have clocked up over 484,000 gameplay hours across more than 1.8 million games, spending over $1.9million via Skyweaver’s marketplace. Players have been competing and winning tradable NFT cards in the weekly-ranked leaderboards and the competitive Conquest game mode — the only mode where the ultra-rare ‘Gold’ cards can be minted through gameplay.
Skyweaver is also cited by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, Initialized Capital and 776, as the game that tipped him off to the potential of Web3 gaming: “I’ve been fortunate to be an investor in Skyweaver from the start, but most importantly, I was a fan first. It was the first game that really opened my eyes to the vast potential of play-to-earn and NFT gaming. I wrote about play-to-earn three years ago and the trend is even more obvious now. The future of this space will be dictated by companies like Horizon, who have been hard at work building a community and meticulously refining their product to not only appeal to Web3 gamers but to gaming audiences at large.”
Peter Kieltyka, Co-Founder and CEO at Horizon Blockchain Games, added: “We’ve been crafting Skyweaver for the past four years, fine-tuning the mechanics and user experience to ensure everyone can enjoy — while maintaining the purity of Web3. We’re committed to providing millions of people with easy and secure access to Web3, where everyone can own, use and enjoy digital assets. We see Skyweaver as bridging the gap that currently exists between the Web2 and Web3 gaming communities, with all the potential that holds for mass-market adoption and growth of the Skyweaver ecosystem.”
Additional features of the game are slated for release in 2022, including match replays and observer mode, in-game guilds, new cards, expansion sets, “Lethal Puzzle Games,” customisation of private matches, and cosmetics to personalise player experiences.
