The Steem blockchain has got its very first cryptogame: Steem Monsters

I'm sure most of you are familiar with cryptogames to some extent. It all began with Cryptokitties, and since then hundreds of games have been developed (mainly) on the Ethereum blockchain. Steem has been lagging behind on this front, which is not that strange when you consider how different the Ethereum blockchain is to the Steem blockchain, but now the very first Steem game has been opened up for alpha testing.

Steem Monsters

If you have been looking at the Trending posts, then you have probably already seen the announcement post of Steem Monsters that was published by @aggroed. I suggest reading trough that to get a good feel of what the game is about, but if you just want a quick summary, then just read the next paragraph instead.

The idea behind Steem Monsters is to create a type of RPG card collectible game that runs entirely on the Steem blockchain. You can buy cards to make a collection, then use these cards to play against other players in tournaments (think Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering). Each card can be leveled up, used in your decks and played, or be sold if you don't want it.

A look at some of the cards I got from the packs I bought.

Right now the game is missing some of the key aspects, but keep in mind that they are still in Alpha testing, so this is to be expected. You can pretty much just log in, buy card packs and keep track of your collection right now, and there are no trading, tournaments or leveling up the cards just yet.

The most interesting aspect to me is how they want to use Tournaments to let players earn real rewards! In contrast to when you play Hearthstone, the card packs you win can be sold for Steem to other players, and then traded for fiat, meaning that you will win real money from playing the game! According to the website: "Prizes may consist of direct payments of STEEM or SBD, large upvotes from the @steemmonsters account, and/or free Steem Monsters Cards or Card Packs", which means that it could actually turn out to be pretty profitable to spend some hours on the game to learn how to be good at it.

Want to try out Steem Monsters?

If you want to check it out, then you can head over to steemmonsters.com and log in with your Private posting key. You obviously use your Steem account to do everything there, and all the cards will be tied directly to your account.

The first things you want to do is buy a Starter Pack for $5 to get a good amount of cards to get started. The Starter Pack does not seem to be able to contain any Epic or Legendary cards, but it has a selection of everything you need to get started with the RPG aspects of them game (that is not yet released). After that you can buy additional Booster Packs for $2 each, that holds 5 random cards.

As I mentioned above, it is still missing a lot of features. However, I am pretty exciting to see where this could be going. I'm not a huge fan of card RPGs, but a game like this could potentially bring in a lot of new users to the Steem blockchain, and it might be a nice way to earn some Steem on the side, since it seems to be free to play and level up your cards (which can then probably be sold for more than the low-level cards).

Why have we not seen more games on the Steem blockchain?

I bet some of you wonder why we have hundreds of games on the Ethereum blockchain, but only one here on the Steem blockchain, and the answer all boils down to the fact that Ethereum has ERC20 tokens, which allows developers to create their own token that they can use for their game.

Ethereum; the current home to most cryptogames.

Steem does not have anything like that right at this moment, but that will of course all change once Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) are released. These will allow people to create their own token that can be tied up to the game, allowing the game to create its own ecosystem with its own tokens.

I think that Steem will have a big potential for hosting cryptogames once SMTs are released, and it has a huge advantage that Ethereum does not have: Steem does not have fees. If you want to buy, sell, trade, upgrade etc. any of your game tokens on the Ethereum network, you need to pay Gas (a miner fee). The gas fees is mostly not that high, but often hovers around the $0.2 mark. So it does not cost a lot to do a few transactions, but if you play a lot, then it will easily add up to a few dollars a day, which ends up being a lot in the long run.

As we are all aware, Steem does not have such transaction fees, so games that are run here can be played completely for free if the developers want it to. Just imagine having to pay $0.2 per card you played in a card game like Steem Monsters; that would surely mean everyone who played it would take a loss, and scare away 90 % of all players before they even got going..

I'm sure we will see a lot more games here on the Steem blockchain in the future, and I'm very excited to find out how SMTs can be used as a basis for games like we have been seeing on the other blockchains lately.

Thanks for reading

What do you guys think about having the first game on the Steem blockchain? Are you planning on buying packs, playing in tournaments, or just investing in the most powerful cards for a profit? Let me know, because I would really like to see what others think of this project.