🦍Bored Ape Yacht Club to Launch Play-to-Earn NFT Game

👍BAYC and Animoca Brands will co-develop the upcoming game

In less than eight months, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has become one of the most valuable and best-known NFT projects around, with celebrities “aping in” to the club, Adidas signing the brand, and virtual bands springing up left and right. Now the Apes are getting their own game.

Recently Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs announced that it will develop a play-to-earn game in partnership with Animoca Brands. Animoca is the publisher of the upcoming metaverse game, The Sandbox, and also an investor in a wide array of play-to-earn games and crypto industry projects, ranging from Axie Infinity to NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club game is planned to launch in Q2 2022, but no other specific details were announced, aside from the play-to-earn focus and the fact that it will utilize Bored Ape NFTs. The teaser image shows a robotic hand clutching an electrified banana with the Bored Ape Yacht Club logo on it.

Animoca Brands and Yuga Labs have yet to announce which blockchain platform the game will run on, although the Bored Ape NFTs are minted on Ethereum. Many Ethereum-based games—most notably Axie Infinity—use a layer-2 scaling solution such as a sidechain to minimize fees and offer speedier transactions than Ethereum’s own mainnet can handle.

Also unclear at this point is whether the Bored Ape Yacht Club game will be exclusive to NFT holders, or if it will be available for everyone to play, perhaps with benefits for NFT owners.

Play-to-earn games typically require the ownership of certain NFT assets to play and then reward players with crypto tokens that can be swapped at in exchange for cryptocurrencies. Monster-battling game Axie Infinity is the biggest example to date, with some 2.8 million daily players and more than $3.6 billion worth of trading volume to date.