Race to Earn with Death Road

With the new gameplay trailer released for Illuvium, one of the most anticipated AAA blockchain games of 2022, I decided to cover one of their partners, Death Road.

Game Platform

• Death Road is a PVE and PVP NFT car racing game. Will be played on mobile and PC. New users will own their cars through buying single car loot crates or buying directly from the marketplace. The marketplace will only take the native game token DRACE. The game will be based on Binance Smart Chain. The game has an interface layout of buildings similar to a community to interact with such as a city hall, garage, race track, and marketplace.

Gameplay

• Initial gameplay is an arcade linear driving game where the player only moves left or right as the obstacles come towards your car. The car has a gun attached with either bullets or a chargeable missile. The car weapons are for occasional attacking cars in addition to the road obstacles. The game ends once your car gets destroyed in order to reach a score. The idea is the user will have limited gas per day to play the game mode to earn rewards. Since this is the PvE mode, which is still in testing, the PvP mode will be released at a later date.

Earning

• Earning on game assets will come from the limited races per day rewards. 53.8% of the DRACE token is listed for play to earn rewards to benefit players. Users will have the option to rent out extra NFT cars. In order to participate in giving out car rentals the player must own five cars and purchase a limited land supply ticket. Having land also allows owners to earn a small percentage of reward shares when PvP racing is implemented. During a PvP race, the loser pays the winner and also the land holder gets a small fee if they own that part of the map. Also, users can stake their cars to farm the partner token xDRACE. xDRACE gives a large discount when buying issued car loot boxes and gets burned. Token investors on the other hand can stake the governance token DRACE to earn xDRACE. Both tokens are exchangeable on Pancakeswap.

Backers of Death Road

• Multiple blockchain games have partnered with Death Road to launch promo cars. Illuvium is one of the most reputable projects to agree to collaborate. In addition, the Co-Founder of Illuvium, Kieran Warwick is listed as an advisor. DeRace, a promising horse racing game, is another blockchain game collaborator. Notable investing groups include Raptor Capital, Magnus Capital, and Icetea Labs.

Drawbacks

• Death Road’s marketplace is hosted on Binance Smart Chain so even small transactions need to be greater than a few cents to beat gas fees. The game may or may not run on Binance Smart Chain. If the game is purely on the blockchain, then gas fees create a bottleneck similar to Cryptoblades, where playing is only practical when rewards are high. One possibility is the game could run separately and just track scores on Binance Smart Chain. Users would only submit their best scores that earn higher submission gas fees. New users will also have to buy or rent cars to participate in the game which is a barrier to start. Especially when daily loot boxes are limited in releases and usually sell out to maintain car values, so players will need to use the marketplace. Also the game is only on the testnet, not released yet, so everything is still proof of concept until the game is live. Until then, some features may not be as expected as the game develops.

Conclusion

• Death Road has a basic game design that can be easily implemented and upgraded from the proof of concept if it works out. Earning opportunities are diverse for token holders and NFT car holders through staking, playing, and renting. One main drawback is relying on binance gas fees for at least the marketplace. On the other hand, limited daily playthroughs with earning rewards thrive on Binance Smart Chain. Basic games seem to do well on Binance Smart Chain due to having direct access to Pancakeswap and whale wallets. Death Road also has solid backers from Illuvium and DeRace, while also offering great promo cars with branding for any future collaborations.