How did the pixel-style blockchain game The Beacon achieve over 10,000 players in just one week through influencer live streaming and sales?
Will tokens be issued? How to participate in gold mining?Written by: Cookie, Rhythm BlockBeats
As a chain game built on Arbitrum and launched just a week ago, The Beacon's market performance is astonishing. As of the time of this article, over 10,000 players have entered The Beacon, and more than 17,000 copies of the $40 "Founder's Game Character" have been successfully sold.
In just the past day, The Beacon surged by over 5,000 players and sold more than 6,700 "Founder's Game Characters."
If you are an active NFT player, you have likely seen videos of players battling in "dungeons" within The Beacon in some community. In the current extremely quiet NFT market environment, such success is difficult to achieve on the mainnet, yet The Beacon has broken out from Arbitrum, spreading its popularity from L2 to the mainnet player community. This article will provide a detailed introduction to The Beacon, exploring the magic behind this incredible hit.
What Kind of Game Is This?
The Beacon is a fantasy action RPG that incorporates Roughlite elements. In The Beacon, players can choose a basic weapon to enter dungeon exploration, upgrading their weapons during the exploration to fight better. The dungeons are procedurally generated, ensuring a different exploration experience each time.
What Can You Play Now?
Currently, the game content available includes "Home Mode," "Single Player PVE Mode," and "Tavern Quiz."
"Home Mode" is a "house editor" where you can decorate your initially bare room with various furniture.
"Home Mode"
"Single Player PVE Mode" involves entering a "dungeon" and completing the exploration (reaching the exit) within a specified time to earn item rewards. Each day's "dungeon" is different, and you can challenge it infinitely until you succeed, but you can only claim the loot reward once (meaning you can only collect it once per day). The "dungeon" challenges will be updated daily at 12 PM Beijing time.
If you die in the "dungeon," you must start over, and there is a time limit for clearing it. Therefore, there are three exits in the "dungeon," corresponding to three difficulty choices. The deeper the exit you choose (the higher the difficulty), the greater the chance of obtaining high-level rewards.
"Tavern Quiz" involves answering questions posed by a drunken old man in the inn to earn item rewards. The NPCs in the tavern have different dialogue each day, and you need to talk to them to get clues for the answers. The questions are also updated daily at 12 PM Beijing time, and the first player to answer correctly will receive a whitelist reward for the "Gen 0 Pet Egg."
If you don't want to compete for the top rewards or find the puzzles difficult, you can wait for the answers to be updated here. Note that there are only 5 answering opportunities per day, and exhausting them by answering incorrectly will cause you to miss out on that day's rewards.
Will There Be Tokens?
There will be an in-game token $BCN, but the token mechanism within the TreasureDAO ecosystem is somewhat different from typical chain games.
Simply put, you can think of TreasureDAO's token $MAGIC as a Q coin. Q coins can be exchanged for various in-game credits in QQ games like CrossFire, QQ Speed, and QQ Sonic, while $MAGIC can be exchanged through MagicSwap for in-game tokens like $BCN from The Beacon, $GFLY from Battlefly, and $ELM from Tales of Elleria, among other TreasureDAO ecosystem projects. Of course, the exchange of Q coins for QQ game credits is one-way, while the exchange between $MAGIC and various in-game tokens is two-way.
How to "Make Money"?
To "make money," you must first spend 40U to mint a "Founder's Game Character." Only "Founder's Game Characters" can earn "NFT items," which can be sold on the NFT trading market. You can mint multiple characters under one wallet address, and each character can claim its daily rewards; just switch characters before entering the game.
Currently, the only valuable outputs are the item rewards from "Single Player PVE Mode" and "Tavern Quiz." These items currently have four rarity levels: "Common," "Rare," "Epic," and "Legendary," displayed in the game as "Gray Gear," "Blue Gear," "Purple Gear," and "Gold Gear," respectively.
"Blue Gear," "Purple Gear," and "Gold Gear" are NFT items. Once obtained in the game, you can click on the icons of these three rarity levels in the Profile page on the homepage and then click "WITHDRAW" to bring the items on-chain. This process requires a small gas fee.
After extraction, list the items for sale on the Trove Market.
It must be emphasized that these NFT items are currently just "character costumes" and "furniture," and "spending money" will not make players stronger; it is purely a matter of personal interest. Although these items do not boost performance or make exploring the "dungeons" easier, nearly 250,000 $MAGIC in trading volume (approximately $91,000) has been generated so far, with over 3,300 items changing hands. Some of this is purely for entertainment consumption, while some are preparing for the upcoming "item synthesis" feature (any 10 "Blue Gear" and "Purple Gear" can be synthesized into 1 random higher-level item).
Item Sales Statistics
This player spent about 6,000 $MAGIC (approximately $1,800) to get a full set of legendary gold gear. Just for fun, just for entertainment.
Without spending money to mint a "Founder's Game Character," you cannot receive NFT item rewards in the game, meaning you can only obtain "Gray Gear." Collecting 10 "Gray Gear" allows you to use "item synthesis" to get 50 lottery tickets, which will be drawn weekly for "Gen 0 Pet Egg" whitelists and high-rarity NFT items; the number of lottery tickets will affect the probability of winning.
In the future, with the introduction of the in-game token $BCN, the "money-making" logic may change significantly. As for now, there isn't much profit to be made; consider it a small game crowdfunded on Kickstarter—if you're interested, spend a little money to support it, and it's more appropriate to participate with the mindset of enjoying the game, as the cost is not hard to recover. It is worth mentioning that this "tip" style of release may become popular in the future, as seen in the NFT project Prometheans, which mimicked Reddit's "The Button" social experiment.
What is the "Gen 0 Pet Egg"?
Hatching a "Gen 0 Pet Egg" will yield the genesis pets of The Beacon game, with a total of 4,096 available. Genesis pets can provide players with a 10% to 20% yield bonus (the official has not specified what this yield specifically is), priority access to future new activities and new versions, and certain exclusive rights within Discord.
Genesis Pets
Since "Founder's Game Characters" are "limited time and unlimited quantity" (unlimited quantity until December 13, after which they will no longer be sold), the limited-time and limited-quantity genesis pets clearly have greater speculation potential. Currently, there are not many ways to obtain the whitelist for "Gen 0 Pet Egg," aside from the weekly lottery mentioned above and participating in some official activities.
Why Did It Become Popular?
By observing recent successful chain game cases, we find that project teams have begun to find suitable positioning and methods to solve the operational challenges posed by the longer development cycles of chain games. Taking the mainnet games Castaways and Pixels as examples, both have released a "playable" demo, blurring the boundaries of testing and gameplay, incentivizing player participation, and maintaining project heat and community engagement through tangible product iterations.
The Beacon generally follows this operational model—what everyone is participating in is actually a 3-week event called "Settlement Launch." After three weeks, the "dungeons" will temporarily close. Although the overall model is not significantly different, The Beacon has made unique highlights, achieving greater success.
First, the demo has risen from "playable" to "somewhat fun." Whether it's Castaways' "fishing" or Pixels' "farming," both involve a lot of repetitive actions. However, for the sake of airdrops, players can tolerate it. In contrast, The Beacon's "dungeon" challenges offer new variations every day, occupying only about 10-20 minutes of player time, and are filled with tension and fun. Most importantly, for game streamers on YouTube and Twitch, The Beacon's "dungeon" challenges can create "ups and downs" in their broadcasts, making for entertaining content.
Second, the reward opening mechanism is absolutely brilliant. Seeing lucky players continuously draw good items, even those who have drawn nothing after several days will be unable to resist and will mint another character, then immediately head to the tavern to find the old man and go to the dungeon to fix the toxic explosion bug. Although reason is screaming that this is just decoration, they want to prove that human determination can overcome fate. Don't ask me if I'm that unlucky player; just look at Brycent below, who opened three junk items and almost had his eyes pop out…
Conclusion
The Beacon still has a lot of information that has not been released, such as important token economics, so we cannot provide an introduction or evaluation of the economic mechanism. According to the roadmap, they will continue to refine the "Single Player PVE Mode" and launch a "Multiplayer Cooperative PVE Mode." If they do not delay, players will be able to team up for dungeons at some point next year.
For TreasureDAO, The Beacon has taken a breakthrough step in playability. Will easy-to-learn, hard-to-master, small yet refined games become a new direction for the development of TreasureDAO and even chain games? Although we do not know what future The Beacon envisions, their recently held community event "Speed Competition" (to see who can clear the "dungeon" the fastest) provides a good idea: use "speed competitions" to meet the needs of hardcore players, use "daily challenges" to meet the needs of casual players, and enrich the game's internal mechanisms, perhaps even moving to mobile…
No more dreaming; let's all try to battle in the "dungeons" of The Beacon!
Special thanks to: TreasureDAO Chinese Community Gavin, WF
