Kieran Warwick created the play-to-earn game Illuvium with his brothers Aaron and Grant — all siblings of DeFi maverick Kain, the founder of Synthetix. He shares his alpha on how NFT game mechanics can be designed in such a way that playing them can be fun and profitable in the long term.
Warwick entered the retail world right out of high school, eventually becoming an online shopping entrepreneur. He got his start in the crypto world at brother Kain’s company BlueShyft, which first made Bitcoin and crypto exchange payments available over-the-counter at more than one thousand physical retailers around Australia in 2015.
Years later, with a number of business projects under his belt, Kain encouraged him to reenter the space, which led to the creation of Illuvium, a Pokemon-like play-to-earn NFT game. Unlike contemporaries such as Axie Infinity, which experienced dramatic in-game inflation, Warwick believes Illuvium will have a decade of staying power. In June 2022, the game brought in $72 million through the sale of 20,000 plots of NFT land, laying the literal groundwork for what Warwick envisions as a longstanding playing field.
Designing deflation
He explains the setup of Illuvium. When players first arrive or “crash” onto the planet, they find out that “there’s this society that’s been built, and it’s your job to be a hunter and to go out and catch creatures known as Illuvials.”
Like Pokemon cards, these Illuvials, which live in certain regions of the map, are limited edition. And much like the original 1999 Charizard or Pikachu cards, Genesis Illuvials are no longer available. Whenever a new set of Illuvials becomes available, they get progressively more difficult to find and capture based on a bonding curve comparable to the one that governs Bitcoin’s halvings and makes Bitcoins progressively rarer and more difficult to “capture” by way of mining. “That’s what makes them valuable,” Warwick notes.
In addition to being limited in “mintage” and increasingly difficult to “mine,” Illuvials are deflationary due to a game mechanic termed “Fusing,” which consists of destroying lower-level characters to create higher levels.
Three level-one Illuvials can fuse into a single level-two version, whereas summoning a level-three Illuvial requires a sacrifice of three level-twos, equivalent to nine basic creatures that are forever…
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