Key Insights
- Season 3 is now live with the launch of Fusion and upgrades to visual design and gameplay. Coming soon: land development.
- Fusion allows players to burn less rare NFTs from previous seasons to convert to a rarer Season 3 playable character.
- Mini Royale perceives open-economy gaming as the future of gaming whilst continuing to maintain a focus on high quality gameplay.
Faraway, a gaming company partnered with Magic Eden, has just launched Season 3 of Mini Royale: Nations – an open economy browser based FPS and land strategy game. Co-founders and best friends, Alex Paley and Dennis Zdonov have over 15 years of game dev experience, creating some of the most well-known free-to-play mobile games on the market today at top studios such as Scopely and Glu Mobile.
The team at Faraway and Mini Royale have been working diligently in the background this year to distance themselves from the typical NFT gaming narrative by prioritizing fun gameplay and utility over speculation. While Faraway operates as a more traditional game studio, they differentiate themselves by prioritizing community engagement, retention, and growth through a strong user feedback loop and constant player involvement in key decisions.
With over 2 million registered users and over 600,000 monthly active players, they continue to pioneer open-economy gaming enabled by blockchain technology.
Although Season 3 launched at the height of the bear market, Faraway has continued to stay heads down and build. “We learned how to engage with a community whose focus may be shifting. It’s really about connecting with the people here who are deeply interested in gaming,” noted Grace Walz, Head of Growth & Community at Faraway.
In tandem with their community's needs, they’ve kept them engaged by consistently tweaking their game with major upgrades and altering the way they reward their community. The results are clear: the average Mini Royale registered player logs over 2 hours daily, there’s over 1M matches monthly, and since launching their rental platform in June, there’s been over 7,000 completed rentals of Mini Royale skins.
Mini Royale’s new Season 3 map - Invasion
ME: Since launch, Faraway has used the term “open-economy gaming” and avoids the “play-to-earn” narrative. Could you elaborate?
F: Gaming has evolved from coin operated arcade games to purchasing the entire game up front (Steam) to now playing some of the biggest games in the world completely for free. The one thing missing from the free-to-play model was ownership. We believe the next evolution in gaming will be around ownership and an open-economy model.
Since the beginning, more than ever, we’ve presented ourselves as a fun game with this added open economy element, rather than as just a game with NFTs and where players can “earn”. In our minds, we’re starting to see a big divergence between play-to-earn games, PFP projects, and games with open economies enabled by blockchain technology, which is where we see ourselves.
ME: Tell us about Fusion. What are the most exciting features?
F: Fusion unlocks higher rarity heroes in the game through a burn mechanism. The thought process was to create a mechanic that could both control NFT supply inflation while continuing to incentivize players to expand their weapon and character collections. Fusion will allow players to burn multiple NFTs from previous seasons to generate a rarer Season 3 NFT.
Mini Royale’s Fusion mechanic lets players fuse characters and weapons to unlock higher rarities
We have also introduced Clan Wars where players can stake NFTs for boosts during recurring multi-day events. Clans are able to raid and soon, with the launch of World Domination, attack enemy cities to win rare items that can be distributed within your Clan inside your Clan Treasury.
“The glow up is real — Our graphics have dramatically improved from Season 1 - Vikings, which were low-poly, to a whole new higher poly design standard. ”
ME: What other updates does Season 3 have in store for players?
F: An important upgrade this season was our update to visual design. Our graphics have dramatically improved since Season 1 and we’re really proud of our new design direction.
We also launched a new Battle Pass, with a Premium Tier that can be unlocked by staking any S1, S2 or S3 Premier or Sank Special Hero.
Coming up on the roadmap is a Gear system utilizing what we call “NFT Imprinting,” an innovative mechanic where NFTs can own other NFTs - this ownership tree is preserved even when NFTs are traded.
We have also started on the next major update to our game – land development — which our community is obsessed with!
Mini Royale is live and free to play. Check out all of the Season 3 updates and jump into a match on miniroyale.io
