Creating a champion game in the emerging play-to-earn gaming market

The challenge

To transform Nifty Football from a digital trading card collection into a play-to-earn AI powered football management game. Subsequently, creating an AI Agent, and game that would be a big hit with the crypto-gaming community through its ability to incorporate gaming assets, such as players and stadiums, as NFTs.

The results

Avark has been, and is currently, involved with all aspects of the Nifty Football game. This has seen us work across UX, UI and product development aspects of the game to create what is currently an MVP before the release of the full game later this year.

Combining AI with NFTs to create a play to earn football game

The play-to-earn gaming market is expected to be worth around $10 trillion by 2030 with leading titles like Axie Infinity valued as high as $3 billion.

Recently, Avark were challenged with turning Nifty Football’s NFT trading card game into a play-to-earn, football management game capable of making a scene in this thriving market.

For the love of the game

The challenge for Avark was to create a play-to-earn football game that people would fall in love with.

To achieve this, we knew the importance of appreciating the fact that the savvy, crypto-native target market thrive on unearthing the next big thing. So that’s exactly what we set out to create.

We knew we had to deliver something with enormous potential and unrivalled longevity, capable of becoming web3’s successor to games like Football Manager, Fantasy Football and other such titles that the crypto community grew up with.

A beautiful game for the beautiful game

The play-to-earn gaming world goes deeper than gaming. Creating something exciting and fun was only half the task. We also needed to deliver something that gave power to the gamer, allowing them to take their assets out of the game and grow them in other ways.

With Nifty Football, this starts with the player deck. The fictional players were drawn up by world famous Manchester artist, Stanley Chow, who’s previously illustrated the likes of Paul Pogba, Marcus Rashford and Sir Alex Ferguson.

This ensured the players—which exist as NFTs—were not just typical, in-game assets: they were art – digital art with in-game utility but capable of rising in value as the game grows.

But maybe the bigger utility of the stylish player cards is the potential outside of the game. The fictional player deck plays perfectly into the web3 world. Currently blank faces with algorithm-generated names, the players are waiting to be brought to life by the Nifty Football community à la Bored Apes.

AI-powered football scouting

Working with the Nifty team, Avark developed a concept around a powerful in-game companion for Nifty Football. Gino Mendes is an actual Football AI Agent – the ultimate scout for Nifty Football!

Gino uses AI technology to watch games in the Nifty world, providing you feedback and pointers on players you might need, and highlighting gaps in your team so you can build the strongest squad and rise to the top.

As with any football scout, Gino has a great knack for spotting potential. Any card on Nifty Football has a hidden potential that players can’t access, only Gino can see the hidden potential for players, helping you find the best deals for talented players in the game.

But Gino doesn’t work for free, want all the benefits of your own Nifty Football agent? You’ll need to stake up those Nifty Tokens to gain access and start taking advantage.

The final whistle

Avark’s involvement from branding to product build allowed us to create an original play-to-earn game with seamless UX and pixel-perfect UI.

More importantly, it was a football game created upon web3 principles with web3 communities in mind.