New Game From 'CryptoKitties' Creator Nets Nearly $200K in First-Week Spending

Dapper Labs, the company behind the 2017 CryptoKitties craze, unveiled its newest ethereum-based gaming experience - "Cheeze Wizards" - last Friday.

The game has already attracted 973 players who purchased 4,470 fighters, according to Dapper Labs co-founder Bryce Bladon.

Since this online game involves monetary prizes, users from Canada, Arkansas, Arizona, Kentucky, Maryland, South Carolina and Tennessee are unable to participate in tournaments because the relevant regulations in those jurisdictions are unclear.

Gamers from these areas have already found ways to develop external applications so they can participate in the ecosystem.

At least five different projects have already been built on the cheesetastic game, from a prediction market to a decentralized exchange platform for trading wizards.

Like the studio's debut game CryptoKitties, the self-custodied NFTs in "Cheeze Wizards" are designed to acquire unique traits that could provide opportunities for usage beyond the Dapper Labs tournament itself.

One Canadian player, Glenn Eggleton, has already created a leader board and external battle game in order to experiment with the partially open-source project.

Bladon agreed that extensibility - meaning the ability to take the asset away from the original game and use it elsewhere - is the determining factor for Dapper Labs' crypto games.

He said the most salient lesson the gaming startup learned from CryptoKitties was the importance of fostering a community that will build on and contribute to a robust ecosystem.

"A lot of blockchain games are trying to appeal to the mass market by sacrificing the decentralization and using side chains or hosted solutions. We want to go to the other side of the spectrum and create a game with the community for an experiment with user behavior in crypto networks."