Introduction: What are Valhalla and FLOKI?

Recently, the crypto community has been buzzing about a new NFT metaverse game called Valhalla. But is it worth the hype? In this article, we'll take a closer look at the game and the FLOKI token that powers it, to help you decide if it's a valuable investment or just another flash in the pan.

Valhalla is an NFT Metaverse game developed by the FLOKI team, which aims to capture a share of the $1 trillion Metaverse market. The game will utilize FLOKI tokens as its main utility token.

The FLOKI token is a meme coin alongside Doge and Shiba, named after Elon Musk’s dog, however, it’s meant to become a utility token of a community-powered ecosystem, along with a crypto education platform, a defi project, and an NFT marketplace.

Value Proposition: How does Valhalla aim to capture a share of the Metaverse market?

Valhalla aims to take advantage of the growing metaverse market by offering players a play-to-earn experience using blockchain technology. The game will feature advanced mechanics such as on-chain gaming interactions, upgradeable NFTs, and robust play-to-earn mechanics like a gardening system, in-game characters called Veras, a battle system, an in-game ship system, and an items system. Players will be able to earn and collect FLOKI tokens by playing the game.

That being said, the Metaverse narrative is not that strong anymore, as dappradar.com shows us. Decentraland and Sandbox, once the two biggest metaverse projects cannot surpass 7k in UAW (unique active wallets) over the past 30 days. To put things in perspective, Axie Infinity has 100k UAW. Shows you cannot just slap metaverse onto something and hope people will come back if there is no real value for the user.

It is also worth mentioning that the whitepaper for the promising Valhalla NFT Metaverse Game is only 1 page long, part of the 8-page whitepaper of the whole FLOKI ecosystem.

Development Progress: How far along is the development of Valhalla?

Valhalla's first major release with Open World went live in Q4 2022 and is currently playable on the Optimism Goerli testnet. The game was first announced on Sep 2, 2021. And this was their roadmap for the game, taken from a news post:

Almost one year and a half later, on the https://floki.com/timeline, the only mentions of actual progress on the game are the release of battle arena, open world in Q4 2022, and a few days ago the PVP system has been added (not listed on their timeline yet).

You can find past news and updates on their website’s ‘timeline’ section, however, the concerning thing is the lack of a roadmap for the future.

Team and Expertise: Who is behind the development of Valhalla and do they have the necessary experience?

When it comes to the team developing the game, the whitepaper says Valhalla is being developed by 11 people. The only people mentioned are 2 members of the core FLOKI team, who are leading the team: MrBrownWhale and Jackie Xu. Both are crypto veterans, one being a blockchain programmer, no mentioned game development experience.

Even though they plan to expand to 20 people, that is very likely still too little for the kind of project they are trying to build. We are not told who the other 9 people are (not even pseudonyms like the other two), but they are praised for their extensive skills and experience. More red flags when it comes to the team and development.

Game Mechanics and Play-to-Earn: What features does Valhalla offer and how do players earn FLOKI tokens?

The game is currently available to try out and is free to play. It seems the idea is built around a Viking world, combined with capturing magical beings (Veras) and an in-game battle system. It will also involve a gardening system, an in-game ship system, and an items system. Other than that, the 1-page whitepaper doesn’t give us further details of how the game will work.

We only know that Valhalla will be powered by FLOKI tokens, as in ‘the only way to buy in-game items in Valhalla will be with in-game tokens (which will be FLOKI or can only be bought with FLOKI).’ This would be a big issue when acquiring a player base, as it requires paying money to play the game. There is no description of how players will earn FLOKI playing the game.

On that note, the main idea of Valhalla sounds an awful lot like Illuvium, another crypto gaming project, the only difference being that Illuvium actually has a 200+ team of real people building an AAA game, of which they already delivered the key components, with stunning graphics and quality. Good luck with this kind of competition.

The game visuals and graphics look pretty basic at this point, nothing special about the sounds either. You explore an open world and try to find these magic creatures called Veras. You then fight them in a turn-based arena, where you move around and use abilities. These Veras will be upgradeable NFTs.

In the gameplay video, the level 1 bear could easily beat a level 5 magic hat, which does not make a lot of sense. At the end of the battle, when the opponent Vera is low hp you can try to capture it. We don’t know much more about the gameplay loop than this, so it’s hard to know how engaging it will be.

Tokenomics Analysis: Examining the Economic Model of FLOKI in Valhalla

Valhalla will be part of the FLOKI ecosystem and it will use the same token, so when discussing tokenomics we have to look at the project whitepaper, where we don’t find too many details.

The FLOKI token is available on both the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain networks with a total supply of 20 trillion. There was no steady release schedule for the token, and a high total supply of tokens can be a red flag for token appreciation potential.

Additionally, the 3% transaction tax may deter some users from participating in the ecosystem, as it could be seen as a high fee for buying and selling FLOKI. It is also not clear how the revenue generated from the transaction tax and utility products will be used to sustain and grow the Floki ecosystem in the long term. It also lacks a clear plan on how to generate revenue and make the project self-sustainable, which is already a common theme.

Adoption and User Engagement

There is one area where this project is good: marketing and engagement. They have 383k followers on Twitter at the time of writing, and they seem to be good at creating a lot of hype.

They also ran ads on American TV, have banners in multiple big cities worldwide, partnered with F1 teams and other sports teams.

Conclusion: Is Valhalla worth investing in or is it just hype?

After looking more in-depth at Valhalla, we can see it has very little chance to succeed and plenty of red flags. The main concept of an open world where you capture other creatures is the same as another game in the crypto gaming space, Illuvium, which has a massive competitive advantage.

The game development team is led by 2 people with no experience in building games and the other members of the team are not mentioned.

The 1-page whitepaper makes a lot of nice-sounding promises for the game but provides no additional details of how it will accomplish said goals.

With all this said, they are impressively good at marketing, promoting themselves, and creating hype. Even though Valhalla has zero chance to succeed as a game, I wouldn’t be surprised if the FLOKI price keeps pumping in the future.

I can see how plenty of uninformed people would buy into their narrative, this is one of the big reasons I am putting this article together, so subscribe to our blog if you want to see more crypto gaming projects debunked.

Stay safe, friends!

Show Of Force