Is It Worth Your Time? A First Look At Spider Tanks

Ah, Gala Games, it's been a while since I talked about anything related to that platform. I'll admit it right away, even though I've made several thousand dollars by simply referring people to their platform, I never really liked them. Town Star was an odd game when I tried it (and I guess it still is) and I really couldn't stand the way they were running their business. Say what you want about Aggy and Splinterlands, but even though I now he's the Chief FOMO Officer, it's still a guy I trust and can take serious. The guys at Gala Games, though? I remember that time they asked for crypto donations in their Discord to help get Gala listed... all while asking for absurd amount of money for their NFTs and obviously trying to build a million dollar business.

With that out of the way, I don't need to be friends with a company to value the opportunities they are providing me with. In the end, I'm a simple man. I love gaming and I like money, so good games that can help me create an income are still a perfect match for me. The other day, I was looking around my Youtube and found a video by Bulldog1205 talking about Spider Tanks, one of Gala Games already playable games. I didn't expect much but I'm watching every video he puts up (as should you, he's an awesome guy!) so I gave it a shot. To my surprise, I really liked what I was seeing. The game looked polished and pretty entertaining. So after some back and forth about whether I wanted to touch anything from Gala or not, I gave it a shot and played for some rounds. Admittedly, I really enjoyed myself!

Spider Tanks is a 3v3 MOBA that puts all kinds of different tanks up against each other to fight it out in fast paced, quickly finished matches with changing objectives. There's basically anything you'd expect from a game like that. Team Deathmatch, Zone Control, Capture The Flag, you name it, it's all there. A single round only takes a couple of minutes to complete and the game isn't to popular yet, it sometimes took me longer to find the game than to actually finish it.

Gameplay itself is pretty straight forward. Your tank is composed of a body and a weapon. While the former determines your speed, your health, and your energy production rate, the latter determines what kind of attack you have and how much damage you will do. There are a lot of different kinds of weapons, ranging from classical cannons and gatling guns to mortars, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and what not. You also pick to additional abilities that you can activate if you have enough energy stored in your tank and that's it. WASD will move your tank around, left click will shoot your weapon and 2&3 will activate your special abilities. There are a lot of nuances to the different weapons, though, and each combination of tank and weapon plays different enough to allow for a lot of nuance and tactical options.

The game has a matchmaking and a ranked league system just like League of Legends, but without enough players to really support it, you'll mostly just get matched with random people that will either be way superior to you or don't have the slightest idea what they are even supposed to do. I found the game to be quite toxic as well, just like you'd expect from a MOBA. Flaming and insults often start only seconds into the game but alas, I can ignore that. If you can too, the game is actually pretty fun, it's fast paced nature makes it a great option if you only want to play a few minutes for a short break. I found it especially good to get stuff done around the house. I'll just get into the queue and start doing minor chores until it finds a game. I'll then play for a couple of minutes and then rinse and repeat. So the game itself is entertaining, at least for a while. What about the earning side, though?

As with all Gala Games titles, earning stuff is strictly tied to the ownership of NFTs. Without NFTs, there's nothing to be earned. So if you want to earn in Spider Tanks, you need to either own a tank yourself or you need to play with somebody else's tank. Let's talk about the latter first. Spider Tanks has some kind of built in Scholar system called the "Pilot Program". As you obviously only can play with a single tank at a time, you can designate your other tanks to be played in the Pilot Program. Anybody can sign up for that without any requirements and just be assigned a random tank from the program. If you win the round, you will share your earnings 50:50 with the person that set the tank for rent. Now that's a pretty cool thing. Not only because you get the chance to earn something without putting anything in, but also because it allows you to play with a vast amount of different tanks, making each game feel fresh. Of course that has the downside that you won't be able to really master a single tank, but I don't think that's an issue, especially at the beginning.

Now the question remains, how does the earning mechanic actually work? Every time you win, you are awarded a specific amount of victory points. At the end of the day, these victory points are compared across all players active that day and you then get your share of Silk, Spider Tanks native token. This token can then be used to upgrade your tanks, buy skins, and other stuff in the game's shop. You can also transfer it to Gala, Gala Games main token. You cannot buy tanks with it, though, so you either need to earn A LOT of Silk, convert that to Gala (on Ethereum), and then buy a tank or you need to put in outside money. Either way, once you have your own tank, you can start to upgrade it and earn without using the pilot program. There's a pretty big problem with that, though. Your earnings potential is only affected by one single parameter - the rarity of the tank you are using. Here's a screenshot from a recent match I won:

As you can see, I did nearly as much damage as DANNZ here and also healed a bit on top. But while I only got 13.42 victory points, he got 172.17 victory points. And that's not because he contributed so much more to the match, but simply because he was assigned an Epic tank, while mine was half uncommon half rare. Rev0420 on the other hand only did half as much damage than me, but because his tank is rare, he's still getting twice as much victory points as me. Now all of us had been using the pilot program and thus DANNZ was just lucky to get the best tank out of the mix. That's okay as long as you use the Pilot Program because everybody will be lucky every now and then. It's something different if you want to buy your own tanks, though. Here's the current tank they have on sale with all available rarities:

The common one is sold at 877 Gala, which is about $50. The most expensive on down below is actually sold at 350,939 Gala, which is the lump sum of $20,000. Well, in my humble opinion, that's insane. I mean I got to give it to Gala Games, they sure understand how to extract money from their players and build a somewhat sustainable economy. But that's because your earning potential is a 100% dictated by the amount of money you put in upfront. The only differentiating factor than becomes how many games you can win with that tank, which obviously will be somewhat dictated by your skill, but even that is only true to some extent. Roughly the first 20 games you win every day will give you a good amount of victory points, after that, it falls off a cliff for the day. The thing is, it doesn't matter if you need to play 20 or 60 games to get there - you'll get the same rewards, it just took you longer.

So the Gala model essentially comes down to this: You give a lot of money to the company in order to get started and then it's off to the races to try and extract as much value as possible in order to eventually make up for the money you spent. Frankly, to me, that's not what I'm looking for in blockchain gaming. For Gala Games, this is just a way of asking for absurd payments upfront because "you own the NFT" afterwards. I know not everybody will agree with me here and it seems like they are having a lot of success with what they are doing but well, it's obviously not for me.

If you are asking yourself what I earned in the roughly 6 hours I've played Spider Tanks so far? Well, about 15 cents... So no, to me, it's not worth your time. Yet everybody will have to make that decision for himself and as I said, the game itself certainly is fun for a while so it can't hurt to give it a shot and see for yourself! And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!