A lot of Web3 video games have built their systems around the sale and trade of NFTs. Castaways, on the other hand, simply gives them away, and it’s rapidly grown its audience as a result.
Made in Seattle by the startup company Branch, Castaways is a massively-multiplayer, free-to-play survival game for web browsers that’s currently in alpha. Players enter the in-game world as shipwrecked survivors on a small, remote island, with a goal to build a home for yourself and others. It’s a peaceful game that’s equal parts Animal Crossing and Minecraft.
Castaways plays its Web3 integration remarkably low-key, particularly by comparison to other games in its lane. At first glance, I didn’t realize it was a Web3 game until I found the option in the menus to connect a crypto wallet to it.
Despite the “crypto winter” that struck in late 2022, Castaways enjoyed meteoric growth in the last quarter of the year. It went from 1,000 users in September to 300,000 in November, the same month that founder Dayton Mills was selected as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2022.
Mills dropped out of high school in Missouri in 2015 (“it just felt like such a waste of time to me,” he says) to pursue a career in game design, and initially began by running private Minecraft servers for profit.
“I taught myself how to code at 12, 13, by watching YouTube videos, and that was kind of my thing,” Mills told GeekWire. “Everything I did in the Minecraft world was just things I learned through the internet. I always knew, even since that age, that I wanted to run a game studio.”
Mills subsequently coded Statscraft, a software-as-a-service plug-in that provides user analytics for the operators of Minecraft servers, and sold it in 2016 to the commerce platform Tebex. From there, he joined a crypto startup in San Diego, then built a now-defunct app called Beekn.
In 2020, Mills co-founded Branch in Seattle with Connor Hollasch, another Forbes 30 under 30 awardee. They raised a $15 million round of funding from investors including Dragonfly, Coinbase, and Evernew Capital.
Mills said his broader goal with Branch is to “prove the viability of Web3 gaming.”
“I want to build the first real popular game that actually implements it,” Mills said. “Right now, there’s a great disdain for NFTs. A lot of gamers, especially, hate NFTs. I think it’s understandable; if you look at gaming history, people have hated monetization since the invention of the arcade machine.”
Mills pointed out the irony of NFT-related criticism from gamers, given that it’s “technology that was invented to liberate them from the thing that they hate.”
“[NFTs] are almost like taking away from the corporations and spreading things out into the community, allowing them to own bigger pieces of it,” he said. “At least, that’s the promise, and I don’t think anyone’s actually executed on it well yet.”
With Castaways, Mills’ aim is to deliver on that promise, with some of the lessons he took away from his time as a Minecraft server admin.
Castaways takes a lot of inspiration from the custom experiences that users and admins created on private Minecraft servers, such as the popular user-created map Skyblock. Rather than having a full world to mine for resources, Castaways limits its players to a small island and asks them to build that up from scratch.
Castaways players who are done with the game can subsequently sell their islands and inventories to one another as NFTs, in exchange for varying sums in Ethereum. Using an established token for Castaways, rather than minting a unique currency for the game, is part of Branch’s ambition to ensure the game’s overall sustainability.
Mills credits Castaways‘ sudden growth in 2022 to Branch’s “free to own” initiative, under which the company minted a line of NFTs and gave them away for free to active, engaged members of the Castaways community.
“We’ve been building this game iteratively, in public, for many months,” Mills said. “A few months ago, there wasn’t anything to do in the game except float around on a raft and talk to people. We had 100 daily active users. We said, ‘All right, you 100, we’re going to mint you this raft NFT. That’s gonna be yours. Thanks for playing.’ That was our first collection.”
By the end of August, due to word of mouth and social media attention, the value of those free raft NFTs had risen to roughly 20 ETH each. Subsequently, when Branch prepared to add islands to Castaways, it minted a set of 500 island NFTs that it pledged to airdrop to regular players of the game. Suddenly, Castaways had 25,000 users competing to score an island NFT.
“We have a lot of collections planned,” Mills said. “They’re always free. There are a lot of things for us to make, and so any time we make something, we just give it out for free. A lot of Web3 people come to the game for that, and then they stay for the actual game.”
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