WAX Studios, a gaming and blockchain services studio created by the founders of the WAX Blockchain, has partnered with Magic: the Gathering creator Richard Garfield to create a player-versus-player (PvP) gaming experience within WAX Studios’ highly successful play-to-earn (P2E) non-fungible token (NFT) game, Blockchain Brawlers.
The partnership will deliver a new PvP layer within WAX Studios’ Blockchain Brawlers game, which was released to major fanfare earlier this month. In the first two weeks of launch alone, the game’s native token, BRWL, garnered over $431 Million in volume.
Blockchain Brawlers is the first game from WAX Studios, with its gaming initiatives led by Chief Gaming Officer Michael Rubinelli. Rubinelli, a 25-year veteran of the gaming industry, who is cited as being instrumental in the rise of the free-to-play business model that revolutionized gaming.
Into the mix now comes Richard Garfield, a mathematics professor and a game designer whose most successful game, Magic: The Gathering, is credited with ushering in the trading card game genre. WAX Studios’s unique take on Web3 gaming is to combine P2E monetization with the PvP gameplay, alongside the creativity and desirability of Garfield’s game design genius.
Richard Garfield, inventor and game designer, said: "It's a pleasure to bring a PvP element to Blockchain Brawlers. I am aiming for a game that is entertaining and immersive with real strategic choices and opportunity for risk taking — yet easy enough to learn that it opens up Blockchain Brawlers to a broad player audience." Michael Rubinelli, CGO of WAX Studios, said: "We set up WAX Studios because we feel Web3 gaming is in urgent need of redefinition. Right now, it's more about farming than having fun. Bringing in Richard Garfield and his beautiful, mathematical, and strategy-driven mind to the creative team behind our new PvP layer will boost Blockchain Brawlers to entirely new levels and raise the bar on Web3 gaming." Within Blockchain Brawlers, players compete in pro-wrestling style matches, earn BRWL tokens, and craft their way to success. Players can use their earnings to construct better equipment, including wrestling rings and weapons, to earn more BRWL.
WAX Studios has stellar ambitions for Brawlers and is aiming to maximize participation by attracting mainstream gamers to its web3 games. The team says it wants as many people to go head-to-head as possible to create excitement and a variety of opponents. There are also plans to develop secondary market opportunities to ensure users have a solid outlet for crafted items, generally lacking in other P2E games.
Through its carbon-neutral blockchain, WAX is fast becoming a powerhouse in the Play-to-Earn and non-fungible token (NFT) gaming sector. The WAX blockchain currently has over 12,000,000 active user accounts and boasts five blockchain games in the top 25 by users, including the actual top 3. WAX also cites the most activity, with nearly 20 million daily operations according to Blocktivity.
WAX has also had tremendous success onboarding major IPs into early Web3. At the start of 2022, WAX performed the largest NFT drop in history — one to each of the first 10 million accounts registered.