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Photostack a dragonfly3/23/2023 ![]() Suddenly, Castaways had 25,000 users competing to score an island NFT. 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. Thanks for playing.’ That was our first collection.”īy 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. We said, ‘All right, you 100, we’re going to mint you this raft NFT. “A few months ago, there wasn’t anything to do in the game except float around on a raft and talk to people. “We’ve been building this game iteratively, in public, for many months,” Mills said. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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.Ĭastaways 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. 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.Ĭastaways 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. “At least, that’s the promise, and I don’t think anyone’s actually executed on it well yet.” “ 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. From there, he joined a crypto startup in San Diego, then built a now-defunct app called Beekn. 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. I always knew, even since that age, that I wanted to run a game studio.” “Everything I did in the Minecraft world was just things I learned through the internet. “I taught myself how to code at 12, 13, by watching YouTube videos, and that was kind of my thing,” Mills told GeekWire. 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. 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. Despite the “crypto winter” that struck in late 2022, Castaways enjoyed meteoric growth in the last quarter of the year.
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