The Village Is Open For Blood: The Story Thus Far
As night descends upon the gates,
The inky blackness seals their fates;
An evil lays in forest deep,
It rests not and does not sleep.
A place of pain where souls are reaped,
Where vile beings prowl and creep;
War cries echo, loud as thunder,
And all hope is torn asunder.
The heat of forges, steel is born,
And from its birth, ye be warned;
The steel is moulded, swords are formed,
Blood will come before the dawn.
What a fortnight for The Red Village! In what has been an incredibly busy but productive few weeks, The Red Village has exploded onto the NFT Play-to-Earn gaming scene. We thought that it would be a good time to look back and recap some of our achievements for those new (and not-so-new) Villagers, Battlemasters, and their Champions. So grab a mead and gather round; it’s story time.
The Red Village Launch
The Red Village launch was an indisputable success. In a crowded but slow NFT market that is strewn with unsuccessful projects, The Red Village went live with the public sale of Blood Portals at 4:00PM PST Wednesday, 17th November, 2021. By 4:10PM PST Wednesday, 17th November, 2021, all 5,000 Blood Portals were sold.
A 10 minute sell out, in what many were calling an NFT bear market…Clearly, the community is hungry for blood.
With no technical hiccups, our already sky-high confidence in our Melbourne-based technical team (who are fully partnered with us for the long term) at Pellar.io only grew. We’ve since had collectors and players tell us it was the ‘smoothest drop [they’d] ever participated in.’ The user experience from a technical standpoint is imperative to us in the TRV team, and we are thrilled to have opened the Village gates without hiccup.
The Secondary Market
Something that the wider NFT community focuses on a lot, for better or worse, are secondary sales. Whilst we are focused on putting the finishing touches on our game (more on that shortly), we do still keep an eye on these metrics. Importantly for our collectors, we were verified on Opensea at both a collection and account level within a few days of launch, a milestone that a lot of projects are struggling to achieve many months later.
In terms of secondary sales, Blood Portals have traded 312ETH since launch. Genesis Pureblood Champions, which each Blood Portal holder received as an airdrop on the Polygon network shortly after the sale, have traded about 544ETH, giving us a combined total of 856ETH traded. There are already about 1.7k unique wallets in both collections, which is fantastic for our distribution and a sign of our healthy community.
The Red Village Champions are also in the top four traded Polygon NFT projects on OpenSea for the past 30 days (not including the 312ETH traded in Blood Portals!).
Partnership Recap
Partnerships are absolutely vital in the NFT landscape for the long term success of a project. Communities feed off each other, and the energy is infectious. One of the great parts of the utility of The Red Village is our Faction fighting mode; allowing other NFT communities to band together, create a faction and fight side-by-side against each other in high-stakes Tournaments. Before launch, we collaborated with some of the strongest and largest NFT projects in the space including The Sandbox, ZED RUN, Metakey, BYOPills, and Decentraland. We’ve also got great Factions with DeadHeads and SKVLLPVNKZ, plus a few more that we’ll announce in the coming weeks. In the not so distant future, we’ll look at clan fights too. Because who doesn’t want to battle with their friends?
Our partnerships in the metaverse are really important to us — as they will provide the jumping off point for a metaverse gaming future and are a great way for us to host giant Big Purse Tournaments — picture Metakey vs BYOPills on the big screen in The Sandbox, with all the crew in there watching the bloodbath unfold. Excited? Yeah, so are we.
Communication and Engagement
Something that we value really highly, and is a priority for us going forward, is communicating openly, frequently, and honestly with our community. We’ve seen plenty of other NFT projects de-prioritise communication, and it can hurt them deeply. There’s nothing worse than being kept in the dark, so we are committed to keeping the lights shining. We’ve been semi-regular guests on Doofy’s stream, and have decided to commit to a fortnightly AMA with him to chat about all things The Red Village and give our community an opportunity to engage with us face-to-face. Of course, the founding team is pretty accessible in The Red Village Discord — between Brendan, Matan, Lucien, and community managers Ben and Jahov, there is someone available and chatting 24 hours a day.
Over the next couple of weeks, we are also doing AMAs with Sinvicta (95k Twitch, 280k YouTube) and The Buffessor (57k Twitter, 15k Twitch), plus a few others which we’ll give you plenty of notice about beforehand. We aren’t hard to find — and always welcome input, suggestions and commentary from The Red Village community. In the end, our community drives the project, collects Champions, and plays the game; so important decisions will be made with consultation, and certainly with notice.
The Road Ahead
Speaking of playing the game, let’s talk about the roadmap over the next seven or so weeks. Or, as some people like to say, ‘wen game!’
The Red Village is a project with grand aspirations; we look at one of our strongest collaborators, ZED RUN, and the astronomical growth and success that it has had in the NFT space, and we track our trajectory alongside it. There are currently very, very few playable games in the NFT space and yet we are on track for the beta release of The Red Village Tournament mode in December/January, as per our roadmap. This will let our collectors actually fight, actually bleed, actually win, in the Blood Theatre within 2 months — an awesome achievement for our team, and something that we are working overtime and double-time on to ensure comes to fruition. Trust us, we are as excited as our Battlemasters to see the blood of the Champions begin to pour.
Over the next few weeks, in the lead up to the launch of Tournaments, we will be ramping up the marketing efforts, offering some great goodies to the Blood Portal holder gang for claim, announcing the appointment of a new strategic advisor with some of (if not the) best credentials in NFT and blockchain gaming, and working hard on the development of the native token.
We’re also working hard on bringing apparel forward on the roadmap in time for the winter season in the northern hemisphere. And, of course, focusing on the Mystic drop. Whether Mystics are released before the game, at the same time, or shortly after, is still TBC — the decision will be made based on community feedback, and what we feel is best for the game and the village itself.
The Blood Queen Demands Violence, And Violence She Shall Have
The Blood Queen has an insatiable appetite for violence and for pain, and she is ready for her Champions to bleed for her in the arena. The opening of the Village gates was incredibly successful, and the interest in the game and the vibrancy of our community has been incredibly powerful. All the markers for a huge 2022 are certainly there.
As the sun fades behind the mountains surrounding the village, darkness descends, and the Champions sharpen their swords for battle.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
Blood is coming.
