MapleStory is the rare 2003 game that still exists today, despite its reputation for being a pay-to-win grind-fest. So perhaps it’s fitting that the developers want to bring the title to the blockchain next, complete with non-fungible tokens, its own cryptocurrency, and the possibility of playable Bored Apes.
Why classic gaming names like Atari and MapleStory still make it onto the blockchain
Many games have died in the time frame that MapleStory has existed. I grew up playing the side-scrolling multiplayer game in elementary school and decided to revisit it in college. Back in 2015, I was surprised to find that the game still had a robust community powered by a few “whales”, or people who tend to spend significant amounts of real money on the game.
It’s still alive in 2023 and considered a top MMO, but lately some players have migrated over to Reboot, an in-game server where players don’t have to spend real money to get better gear and weapons to take down bosses . Fans have also designed private servers, which infringe on parent company Nexon’s intellectual property rights. Nexon declined to comment on these servers, citing their illegalities.
So when MapleStory developers attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March to talk about how they took the game to the next level, it was a nostalgic experience for the audience, many of them game developers who had grown up playing MapleStory themselves. What was less well known were the brand’s ambitious blockchain plans, which include giving players the ability to build their own decentralized applications on Polygon.
“Considering the average active tenure of the top 50 percent of players is 15 years, it’s safe to say that MapleStory is a generational game now,” said Sunyoung Hwang, Nexon’s director of production spearheading the MapleStory Web3 effort. “What we really want is to continue this successful journey for the next 10 years as well. Of course, it wouldn’t just magically happen by itself.”
Blockchain and video games have existed in the same place for the past few years. At GDC, I attended parties attended by ex-Twitch executives who are now big into blockchain gaming investments, and after a panel I moderated at Twitch HQ, Web3 employees showered me with invitations to events.
The former head of YouTube Gaming, Ryan Wyatt, is now the president of Polygon Labs, which helps people build on the Ethereum-powered Polygon protocol. Polygon and Nexon work together to bring MapleStory to the blockchain, as Nexon is what Wyatt calls a “high impact brand.”
“I was never interested in crypto. I didn’t read any white paper on Bitcoin,” Wyatt said of the transition from YouTube to Web3. Instead, he became interested in digital assets because he felt it was unfair to buy in-game items but never get to own them.
Wyatt and Nexon developers are well aware of the vocal faction of players who hate NFTs. Nexon is part of a group of nostalgic brands, including NeopetsAtari and Habbo Hotelwho have chosen the blockchain route, even while receiving discouraging feedback from fans.
After eyebrow-raising headlines like “Zombie Atari screw up 50-year legacy with NFT Loot Boxes” from earlier this year, Atari staff took a purposeful approach to describing their Web3 efforts. “We did an audit of everything to see where everything stood. And it was pretty messy, says Tyler Drewitz, director of Atari’s Web3 initiative, Atari X, who joined the team after some of Atari’s initial blockchain projects had already launched.
“We have tried to explain to users that it is not a scam.”
“Loot box is definitely not a term we’ve ever used internally, nor has it ever been a goal,” David Lowey, a marketing manager at Atari, told me in the same video call. “There was a fear that there was going to be this invasion of NFTs and blockchain into the games,” Lowey said. “Anytime there are changes, people are skeptical or anxious.” Lowey said Atari is not building Web3 games right now nor is it integrating existing games into the blockchain.
The temperature surrounding blockchain games has cooled significantly since their heyday in 2021. Over the past year and a half, players have been vocal about their hatred of NFTs.
In October 2021, for example Neopets the community was in an uproar over 1990s browser games now entering NFTs. Users criticized the company for prioritizing making a quick buck over fixing the site, which still had bugs and missing features due to the retirement of Adobe Flash. Neopets CEO James Czulewicz told me at the time that there was a different team working on fixing the website compared to the team working on NFTs. “Personally, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” Czulewicz told me in October 2021. “We’ve tried to explain to users that it’s not a scam. There’s nothing fraudulent about it.”
Now like nostalgic gaming brands MapleStory, Neopetsand Atari are still trying to promote their blockchain initiatives while fleshing out their language and expectations (which is becoming increasingly common for blockchain projects outside of gaming as well).
The blockchain project has not been released in Korea or the rest of the world yet, although Nexon first announced it in June 2022 at its own Nexon Developers Conference. Nexon tries to curate developers at these conferences and entice them to build on MapleStory blockchain.
“We’ve been jumping from one developer conference to another because we really wanted to show what we’re trying to get out there MapleStory universe,” Hwang said. “We wanted to be able to communicate how we feel and what we expect to our potential users, creators and developers.”
Nexon plans to continue to support MapleStory on PC while building a blockchain version of the game that resembles the original. In-game items will be NFTs which can then be traded outside of the game as well. Once the blockchain game is released, Nexon plans to open up its ecosystem and invite creators to build decentralized apps based on the Ethereum blockchain. The company also has plans to create a cryptocurrency for gamers, but they declined to share more.
During the GDC talk, Nexon gave a fun example of buying a Bored Ape NFT and then placing it in-game so a player could jump around Kerning City, MapleStory’s tyveby, which looks like a monkey.
MapleStory has managed to stay successful and relevant over the years by consistently updating the game and providing players with fresh updates. It even partnered with the mega-popular K-pop boy band BTS in 2020, selling in-game accessories that players could buy for real money through the cash shop.
Blockchain MapleStory do not want a cash shop. Instead, weapons and equipment will drop from monsters that players defeat, and each region will have NFT rewards. Hwang spent a significant portion of his talk at GDC discussing how the rarity of in-game items affects player enjoyment. Players enjoy winning rare items; Hwang gave the example of unlocking rare loot Diablo III or catch a legendary fish in Animal crossing.
But developers cannot account for changes in the game economy, such as more people fighting a certain boss, therefore increasing the amount of boss loot in the ecosystem and causing the item’s rarity to drop. As the items lose value, players’ enjoyment of the game also diminishes, according to Hwang, and thus, he argued, NFTs, which have a limited supply, can help keep the game fun.
In some ways it feels like MapleStory is a suitable vehicle for a blockchain game with NFTs. The game has already provided players who spend real money for tangible benefits, such as being able to avoid doing boring daily tasks and being able to roll dice to get stronger gear. As earlier MapleStory whale I spent $4000 on MapleStory in the past. When I finished the game, I sold my weapon for real money on a secondary fan forum. With this new technological push, Nexon hopes to bring these secondary sites under its wing. (While Hwang acknowledged that black market players who already buy and sell items with real money may naturally gravitate toward MapleStory NFTs, he said he did not accept trading on black exchanges.)
But Nexon has already drawn criticism from gamers for its pay-to-win reputation in the past, and a cursory glance at Reddit’s response to the blockchain news shows that fans aren’t interested or excited about MapleStory’s cryptocurrency pivot.
“We get a lot of mixed feedback.”
“We’re getting a lot of mixed feedback,” Hwang told me in comments translated from Korean. “If we had to break it down, it’s about 60 percent not so well received, 30 percent neutral, and the remaining 10 percent are very excited and positive about MapleStory on blockchain. But we thought this was inevitable and we expected this kind of reaction. It is our duty and responsibility to slowly increase the 10 percent.”
When it comes to whether MapleStory on the blockchain will be pay-to-win, Hwang said it depends on your perspective. “There is no cash shop, so players have to farm for any item or NFT they want. So in that sense, we don’t think it’s profitable to win, Hwang said. “But if the user chooses to spend their own money to buy an NFT or decorative item, I guess it’s pay to win, right?”
Many long-time fans of the game that I spoke to all expressed ambivalence towards NFTs, but since the project is still not out yet, some said they would reserve judgment.
Hwang said the project has not been released yet because it is still in the final stages of production and the developer is working on the technical issues of moving a game to the blockchain.
Asked if this was all a ploy to win back players who have migrated to the game’s free server, Reboot, and aren’t spending real money, Hwang said: “It would be great if they could move back to MapleStory.”
