| Hi everyone, this is Zheping in Hong Kong, filling in for Jason and Cecilia. The first rule of making a blockchain game is: you do not talk about blockchain. But first… This week's top gaming news: Ever since the decline of Axie Infinity, investors and developers making crypto games are trying to figure out how to build one that doesn't look like a vessel for sketchy financial speculation. The prospect of riches was enough to sustain these games for a time, until the trillion-dollar meltdown of crypto over the last year. Digital real estate, spaceships and pixelated avatars were selling at ridiculous prices. But now, on top of the faded promises of crypto wealth, players are discovering that many of these games aren't all that fun to play. At least one new game appears to be addressing that last issue. The title, MetaCene, has been in development in China for almost two years at a cost of $5 million. A weeklong test of the game, which concluded in August, brought on 3,000 players who were mostly hooked. Two-thirds of them continued playing throughout the whole week, spending an average of two and a half hours in the game each day, said Tan Qunzhao, who runs a team of 60 developers making the action role-playing game. Tan started work on MetaCene a decade after stepping down as chief executive officer of Shanda Games, a Shanghai studio that published Dungeons & Dragons Online and Final Fantasy XIV in China. He said poor game design is what doomed previous entries in a genre known as gamefi, for game-finance. "The notion was that gamefi players were in it just for the money but not for the fun," Tan said. "But that was just because developers opted to focus on the 'fi' but not the 'game'." MetaCene takes players to a post-apocalyptic world and gives them a blade, a pair of gauntlets or an electromagnetic gun to start their journey. You level up by slashing Gundam-like world bosses and grinding dungeons in teams of four. Currency is earned through crystal mining, which can be done even when away from the screen. I wasn't able to test the game, but Tan walked me through the gameplay on his laptop. MetaCene is reminiscent of many existing online games, for better or worse. The cartoonish art style is similar to that of Genshin Impact; the player-versus-player fighting system takes inspiration from the Legend of Mir 2, which Tan helped popularize in China while at Shanda; and there's some Parkour quests that remind me of ones I struggled through in Guild War 2. MetaCene won't be for everyone. It's free-to-play, and some elements will feel like cash grabs. Tan's company takes a cut of crypto transactions between players. He plans to raise $8 million in additional funding from venture capitalists to support development, after having already won the backing of the likes of Kai-Fu Lee's Sinovation Ventures. This title has a long way to go, but the early reception shows that a solid game with a crypto element is better than a crypto economy with a game attached to it.  A Guidebook of Babel. Source: Pixmain A Guidebook of Babel is a new story-driven adventure game from a Chinese indie studio. You see mysteries unfold on a ghost spaceship through the lens of four crew members and passengers and go back in time to try and alter things based on the butterfly effect. The game does a good job in parallel narratives — think Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction — and has a unique art style. Sony's stock gained the most since July after the company said it was hiking the price of the PlayStation Plus subscription plans. Gratuitous violence in games and the rise of female players have inspired some developers to go in less gory directions, according to the Economist. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which Nintendo gave an in-depth look at in a video this week, is what happens when developers have time to play, said Wired. September will be a stellar month for game releases, Kotaku reported. Besides Starfield, there's the PlayStation 5 release of Baldur's Gate 3 and the arrival of Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis on phones. | 
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