One would be excused for thinking it’s an exceptionally bad time to launch a web3 game, but after more than three years in development, football MMO Soccerverse launched in January 2025 on the Polygon blockchain.
Unlike many blockchain based games, however, Soccerverse has roots spanning back decades, with an onchain economy equally founded on tried and tested principles, in combination with real world football.
As such, it’s not aiming to increase token value or boost audience by signing up bots via social farming events, but instead grow sustainably and for the long term.
So as the team evaluates the game’s initial performance during its first season, we checked in with Andy Gore, the co-founder and CEO of Soccerverse.
If you are going to invest loads of your time into a forever game that spans months, years or even decades like some users did with SM Worlds, it’s comforting to know that it can never get turned off.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Take us back to the original roots of Soccerverse, and how you’ve evolved the game by adopting blockchain technology.
Andy Gore: The original roots of Soccerverse was the fusion between what is now a 20-year-old MMO game called Soccer Manager Worlds and the Xaya fully onchain gaming technology.
People playing SM Worlds always felt that they owned the clubs that they managed, so by adding the blockchain technology to a game like that, it now means they really do own the clubs. But going further than that, they own the actual game too.
Fully onchain games saw an upswing in 2023/24 but you’ve had this vision since Soccerverse’s inception in 2018. How does deploying the game fully onchain benefit its players?
The game can not be turned off. This gives true value to the gaming assets; the clubs, the player and their career histories of what they achieved in the game. Additionally, it’s not just about the value of the game assets. If you are going to invest loads of your time into a forever game that spans months, years or even decades like some users did with SM Worlds, it’s comforting to know that it can never get turned off.
Alongside this, the game’s code will eventually all be fully open sourced, allowing anyone to download it, setup a node and run the game fully decentralised.
It’s currently becoming more apparent that most games are failing to execute sustainable tokenomics. How is your economic model designed differently to avoid speculative hype and extractive player behaviour?
Our core aim was first and foremost to have a game economy that would work in a sustainable and balanced way for the good of the game. The approach was not to try and design something around increasing the value of a token. The design of the economy was based on the tried and proven economy from SM Worlds, which itself had already evolved by going through many mistakes and learning curves.
Finally, looking how the economy works in the real world of football and seeing if elements of that could be incorporated whilst keeping to the core requirement of game balance.
Can you buy your way to the top in Soccerverse? Where’s the skill?
You certainly can just like with real life club football, although even then it will always be a challenge as each club is capped at 32 player squads. This means that many other clubs will also have enough top players to be a serious competitor to the club “buying its way to the top,” again, just like real life.
Skill will also always be required; from being the first in scouting and finding the next top talents, managing the squad, keeping the players happy and managing the finances for the short and long term.
Soccerverse has been in development for many years with a prolonged time in beta testing. What’s been the biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge has been how the game world was deployed out to live. It operates off network effects and still has many chicken-and-egg scenarios to overcome as it scales out.
What are your early takeaways from the launch?
It has gone down very well with the current loyal fanbase of users that it has built up over the years from the beta versions. With strong early retention numbers coming through it is working as intended from a game point of view.
What can players expect in terms of the game’s development going forward?
There will be a lot of polish first and foremost, mainly to the game’s interface. Following on from that will be key features that the community are requesting, such as a player loan system and a matchday viewer.
In the longer term we intend to open source all the code which will on one hand make the whole game more robust, whilst on the other it will open it up for the users (or any third parties) to build upon it themselves and make an ecosystem around it.
Discover more via Soccerverse’s official website, and follow the game on X.
Comments are closed.