Off the Grid’s popularity is about ‘best of breed technologies’ 

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The Off the Grid hype is still going strong, and anecdotally, I have to say that even my non-crypto husband has been playing it.

Anyway, on Empire today, Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos sat down with Gunzilla’s Theodore Agranat. 

Some of Agranat’s answers really help explain the popularity of Off the Grid — specifically, that’s it’s not necessarily about crypto.

Instead, “it is about best of breed technologies. In this case, blockchain technologies that will enhance the user experience. It’s all about the gamer and it’s all about the gamer experience.”

The team also had to innovate in order to incorporate the crypto elements. 

“To build up the marketplace, but we had to build our own blockchain because we didn’t find anything out there that really was up to the standards that we had … we ended up going with an Avalanche subnet that we highly customized, that we built on top of,” Agranat explained.

One of the things helping to differentiate Off the Grid is the use of a storyline. In a battle royale game like Fortnite, storylines aren’t always incorporated, but — putting aside the crypto of it all— perhaps that’s also what speaks to players. 

Admittedly, I’m not a PC player and I stick to my consoles, so I haven’t picked up the keyboard to test it out, unlike David. However, I am a sucker for a good storyline and that would be enough to get me into a battle royale game, which isn’t normally my cup of tea. 

Remember the a16z State of Crypto report from last month? I went back in and looked for gaming-related data to see if the data backs up a potential boom or if Off the Grid is alone on its own island, kind of like its in-game characters. 

Hot crypto subcategories — i.e. where everyone’s building this year — remain pretty focused: we have DeFi, blockchain infrastructure and socials at the top of the list. Gaming is a much smaller piece of that pie at 6.3%.

Source: a16z State of Crypto

To be fair, creating a AAA game takes time, and a decent amount of money. So perhaps we just needed a game like Off the Grid to prove the interest before we saw some pickup.

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