Two recent announcements from web3 games highlight that not all is rosy in the gaming world. Both City States: Medieval and Axes Metaverse have shutdown their game servers, with varying messages about the future.

City States: Medieval

City States brought their Discord down to a bare minimum, with just the closing announcement and a general chat. In fact, you can’t even invite anyone new to join! They also shutdown their game server with a rather confusing statement.

Today we have decided to shut down the CityStates game server. While we could keep it running at low cost, there is not really a point when we are not able to fix bugs and exploits or add stuff that is needed to generate income.

Working around the double-negative, it seems that though keeping the server up doesn’t cost much, they don’t have the funds to add new features or even bugfix! The City States team also suggests that anyone with HEX tokens left on their exchange, to set a sell order for $0.00225 and they will buy it back to help players cash out their tokens.

Without even a message of potential hope for the future, it seems that City States is dead for good.

Axes Metaverse

On the other hand, Axes at least leaves us with a mention of a future for the game. The game has remained basically the same since it first launched, and the team was unable to attract the market they had hoped for. And so, the team will shutdown the game servers on May 25th, 4pm UTC. They say that they will wait for a “better market for Web3 games” and make some updates, focusing the product more towards web3 gamers rather than trying to bridge the gap to traditional gamers.

Axes plans to keep their marketplace open, though without a game, I can’t see there being much interest in these NFTs.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that I have much hope for Axes. Their game was entertaining and had potential. But with little variety between the matches, and a stagnant ecosystem, it’s not really a surprise that they didn’t bring in a large playerbase. And though they try and point blame at the current markets, there are hundreds of other web3 games still growing and building. I guess we’ll see what happens!

Closing Thoughts

These aren’t the only games to close up shop recently. Chainmonsters also announced a server shutdown recently after a disappointing land sale.

And I do appreciate that both City States and Axes took the time and social effort to post announcements about the closing. So many other game teams just fade quietly into the night, leaving their playerbase wondering.

Though this news isn’t so great for the dev teams or the engaged players, it is a sign of an increasingly competitive web3 gaming market!

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Planned for both mobile and PC, City States: Medieval (CSM) is currently in development, with beta expected to start soon. The City States: Medieval team is part of the growing movement among the blockchain gaming community that seeks to lower the barrier of entry for new blockchain gamers. So along those lines, CSM will be free to play and require no initial wallet or blockchain setup. It will just be a standard game that players download and enjoy. Then, those who want to move into the blockchain and NFT side of the game can do so.

The team releases regular development logs on their Medium page. Usually these are just development changelogs, but they also release articles and video previews as well. This week brought us one of those more informative updates.

City States: Medieval Latest Development

Development of the game continues onward. Two additional, major components of the core functionality, have their first iterations in-game. This includes the world map and the in-game market. CSM also implemented the first stages of Armory storage. Players cannot just stack up piles of gear forever. They require storage space in their Armory. And that space is limited.

In addition, we have a new visual display of the happiness mechanic Keep your villagers happy and they will work harder and more efficiently!

The CSM team is also continually updating the user interface and trying to improve the quality of life for their players. The most recent example would be the process involved in equipping your troops. Previous iterations required numerous clicks and jumping between several in-game windows. Now the inventory has been compressed into one space with ready to click filters at the top to help players sort through their loot. For more info about the game and it’s updates, check out the City States YouTube channel.

What is City States: Medieval?

City States: Medieval is a medieval city building simulation. Players begin with a bit of land and a castle. Harvest basic resources like wood and food to grow the city and build new structures. Players can upgrade buildings and the castle itself, though some are gated behind other upgrades.

Players must balance their growth, as every building needs workers, and every population needs a job. City owners choose where their population works, and can move their villagers around at will. But villagers need the proper tools in order to work their jobs. With all of these moving parts and requirements, it will be difficult for one city to excel at everything. And so, it might be wise to focus on a few resources, using the market to sell your excess and buy whatever goods your city lacks.

At the beginning, villagers only require Food. But as the game progresses, they develop more refined tastes, such as beer or gold! In addition to the standard workers, players also recruit military units. Military units can be equipped with various equipment, allowing the players to specialize their troops.

Initially, players use military units to clear out bandit camps and increase the area of workable land for the castle. Though later stages of the game offer PvP and Clan wars.

Battles aren’t automatic in City States. Each battle occurs on a randomly generated map with various terrain. Players position their troops and attempt to defeat their foes in this turn based combat mode. Combat in CSM offers an interesting addition. Whenever a unit defeats another on the battle map, the losing unit has a chance to drop some of its equipment as loot. The victorious unit receives half of the dropped equipment immediately. Another 25% goes to the player who wins the overall battle. It’s unclear what happens to the remaining 25%. The game will feature both PvE and PvP.

City States will also feature Clans, in-game diplomacy, AI Raider settlements, vassalage, and heroes!

Heroes will be NFTs, with a sale sometime near release. There doesn’t seem to be much plan for other NFT sales, though players can extract resources from the game as NFTs. City States: Medieval does have it’s own governance token, CSM, which is already live. The team had a seed sale in 2021, and also reserve the right to sell their share of the token reserve for future fundraising efforts.

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