DISCLAIMER: THIS CONTENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. IT IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION TO PURCHASE TOKENS OR ANY OTHER ASSETS. ANY INVESTMENTS MADE IN THE PROJECTS OR ASSETS MENTIONED BELOW ARE DONE SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.

Project Highlights

• Shrapnel is building an innovative, extraction-based FPS in which players use NFT guns and gears to fight and hunt for exclusive drops in a hyper-aggressive arena called The Zone (inspired by successful titles Escape from Tarkov and the “Dark Zone” mode **from The Division).
• Vanity items, cosmetics, and maps can be minted and modified through Shrapnel's UGC tool built on Unreal 5. Shrapnel offers a diverse range of NFTs targeting various stakeholders- players, creators, curators and investors.
• Shrapnel will be deployed on Avalanche subnet which offers zero latency, EVM compatibility, AAA graphics quality, and in-game assets trading for premium gaming experience.
• Shrapnel features a single token economy. As only popular player-created maps or vanity items provide extra rewards for $SHRAP stakers, the $SHRAP token will face less selling pressure. If the content generation mechanism is implemented well with a large user base, the game could achieve a balance in supply and demand for $SHRAP.
• In terms of Community, Shrapnel has 21.8K Twitter followers, 25.0K Discord members and 508 Telegram members.
• Neon has raised a total of $17.5M from prominent leaders in gaming and blockchain including Griffin Gaming Partners, Polychain Capital, Forte, Razor, Dragonfly Capital, DeFiance Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Avalanche, Sfermion, Mechanism Capital, Merit Circle, Spartan, Overwolf, etc.
• Shrapnel has a BAFTA and Emmy award-winning team of gaming veterans who formerly contributed to the success of top-tier franchises including HALO, Call of Duty, Star Wars, Hawken, Skylenders, etc. Shrapnel CEO is Mark Long, former head of Xcloud at Microsoft and publishing at HBO.
• Ali "Myth" Kabbani, one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, serves as an advisor. Myth has leveraged his success as a Fortnite pro, boasting over 21 million followers across social platforms.

According to Steam, AAA FPS games CSGO and PUBG are among the most played games on the platform with a peak of roughly 975,000 and 523,000 players a day, ranking 1st and 4th most played games on Steam respectively. Despite their immense popularity in traditional games, the First-person shooter genre remains largely untouched in GameFi, with only a few shooting games of medium graphics quality and average gameplay.

Table 1: Prominent AAA FPS blockchain-based game comparison

As one of the first FPSs on the blockchain, Shrapnel is building an extraction-based game on Avalanche, in which players equip themselves with NFT gear to fight on the battlefield, dominating NPC monsters and other players to extract loot or lose their own gear. Users will be able to modify their in-game items, targeting a shooting metaverse format governed by the users.

Gameplay

Extraction-based gameplay

Players enter Shrapnel's battlefield as “Operators” to fight against other players and extract resources in The Zone. However, they must compete with other Operators and bots, creating an ultra-aggressive battleground within The Zone.

Figure 1: Shrapnel Map concept art

Gears (in form of NFTs) can be equipped by the Operators to support various play styles, offering various strengths and weaknesses. However, these items can be dropped and looted by others upon death, which requires players to stay on their guard and execute flawless tactics to improve their success rate. Additionally, mysterious “Compound Sigma” can also be collected during the game. Only the greatest warriors who survive long enough get to keep their plundered gears and resources, which are safely stored in the players' inventory.

???? The high-stakes nature of Shrapnel creates an intense and dramatic experience as players attempt to protect or steal loot through high-octane shootouts. Extraction-based FPS gameplay has made for successful traditional titles with Escape from Tarkov and the Dark Zone mode from The Division. Shrapnel draws from and innovates on the best features of this genre, which will more than make up for the lack of exciting gameplay in blockchain games thus far. As the Shrapnel user base grows, the game’s ferocity, competitiveness, and entertainment value increase accordingly.

Shrapnel's initial target fanbase is PC gamers with plans to expand to mobile systems in the near future. However, high-quality graphics requires high configuration hardware, which may exclude a considerable number of users.

Operator classes

Figure 2: Shrapnel Operator classes

Shrapnel enhances the strategic component of the game by offering 3 Operator classes of Assault, Survivalist and Infosec, with different strengths and weaknesses for players to choose from and develop their playstyle.

Creation

Figure 3: Shrapnel Player-created Content creation flow

This project offers professional-grade creator tools built on Unreal technology for users to create their own content that can be minted and listed on the Marketplace and earn them rewards based on the performance of the content. From the traditional juggernauts of Minecraft and Roblox to the metaverse game worlds of The Sandbox and Decentraland, user-generated content games (UGC) are some of the most popular games in the world; Shrapnel aims to achieve such success with its own UGC features.

Shrapnel also hopes to boost demand for its $SHRAP token with this feature by allowing users to stake their tokens to any NFT vanity items to boost their discoverability on the marketplace and receive rewards based on the popularity of these items.

Additional features

• DAO: empowering the community with governance power to make decisions on the game design, roadmap and aesthetics.
• MEF Headquarters: pre-game/post-game lobbies for users to join, in which they can explore diverse gears and items in an armory and enjoy the socializing in between battles. The owner of each MEF Headquarters is able to customize their MEF space and benefit from the promotion of user-generated items showcased there. This feature together with the multi-player gameplay enhances the social value of the game, mitigating the impact of rewards selling on the game ecosystem.
• Reputation system: The reputation system tracks players' contributions to the community, gameplay, and creations, granting them increased discoverability in maps and the marketplace as well as access to additional incentives.
• Marketplace: Shrapnel Marketplace functions with order-books through which buyers and sellers trade assets. $SHRAP will be the currency of the marketplace, however, bids and offers are represented in USD equivalent.

In-game Economy

The Shrapnel economy recognizes and rewards the contributions of its many stakeholders, such as gamers, creators, curators, and land owners. Rather than just clicking and earning, this project successfully incentivizes sustained input and engagement from a varied set of users, which supports the robustness of the game and adds value to the game economy.

Shrapnel uses the single token model for its economy with its governance token $SHRAP, which will be initially issued as an ERC-20 token and migrated to the Avalanche network in the near future.

Staking and Rewards

Figure 4: Staking and Rewards system

Users are able to stake their $SHRAP token on any map or vanity item to earn staking rewards based on their performance using the mechanism below.

Map Rewards

The mapping architecture of Shrapnel features two types of land: The Arena (curation/promotion land) and The Podium (competition land). The Shrapnel stakeholders' (including players, land owners, creators and curators) major objective is to get their own maps/favorite maps to the middle of The Podium.

Figure 5: The mapping architecture of Shrapnel

The popularity and quantity of $SHRAP staked on the maps influence the map's promotion to the Podium. In other words, the more players and $SHRAP staked to a map, the higher the chances that map will be reach the Podium.

The top 6 performing Arena maps are promoted to the Podium while the bottom 6 performing Podium maps are relegated back to the Arena. Within the Podium, land owners, curators, map owners and stakers partake in performance-based $SHRAP incentives.

Figure 6: The mapping promotion/relegation mechanism to the Podium

???? Shrapnel Map Rewards are designed to obscure the negative narratives that exist in the current GameFi landscape as a consequence of click-to-earn projects. As a result, this function requires not only dedication and skill to create high-quality and appealing maps, but also the faith and practical effort of players and curators to actually contribute to the game's growth rather than just clicking and extracting money. This feature enables Shrapnel to leverage the external resources of gaming companies to maximize gameplay creativity and diversity. However, an initial stable of successful content developers should be employed to support the expanding user base, longevity, and profitability of the concept to attract new developers / studios.

$SHRAP token

Token: $SHRAP
Total Supply: 3 Billion $SHRAP

Inflationary factors:

• Payment to validators
• Rewards for player-created content creators
• Content discovery for users to play
• Rewards for content staking
• Mission rewards

Deflationary factors:

• Payment to validators
• Rewards for player-created content creators
• Content discovery for users to play
• Rewards for content staking
• Mission rewards

???? Shrapnel taps into the entertainment value of GameFi to attract users. Furthermore, only high traffic content provides token stakers with a significant amount of token rewards. As a result, the $SHRAP token will face less selling pressure and will have more room to be used as the value generator for the in-game economy, eliminating the need for an additional in-game utility token. If the content generation mechanism is implemented well with a large user base, users should enjoy a balance in supply and demand for $SHRAP. In other words, selling pressure from reward tokens allows content creators enjoy lower minting prices which encourages the onboarding of new gaming studios, increasing the likelihood of providing users with a better gaming experience.

Figure 7: $SHRAP token allocation and vesting schedule

???? Although Shrapnel aims at building a long-term AAA game, the current token vesting schedule does not reflect a long-term dedication from early investors with only 12 to 18 months from TGE until it is fully unlocked. This could result in tremendous selling pressure on the token. Moreover, the proportion of tokens allocated to the team and early investors is quite high compared to other projects.

Fundraising and Backers

Figure 8: Shrapnel Board of Partners and Investors

In October 2021, Neon raised $10.5M to build Shrapnel; the round was led by Griffin Gaming Partners, Polychain Capital and Forte.

Recently, the studio has announced another $7M in private token sale with the participation of Dragonfly, DeFiance, Three Arrows Capital, Mechanism, Sfermion, Spartan, and Overwolf as well as angel investors of Dennis Fong, Stephen Lim (co-founder of Valorant and Raid Base), Brian Lee (co-founder of The Honest), Keith Nunziata (at Citadel Global Equities) and Jason Zhao (partner at Kleiner Perkins).

Sharpnel has received funding and strategic backing from industry heavyweights ranging from traditional gaming corporations to web3 gaming VCs, gaming guilds, and tier-1 crypto-native VCs. This offers Shrapnel exceptional resources and strategies that are potentially adequate to accomplish Shrapnel's vision of becoming a premier AAA game changer of the present GameFi status.

Team

Shrapnel Company Linkedin profile

Mark Long (CEO)

• Former head of Xcloud at Microsoft and publishing at HBO
• 26-year game industry veteran

Don Norbury (Head of Studio)

• Worked at Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Bioshock, Sunset Overdrive, and Crackdown, to the sports superstars Madden NFL and NASCAR
• 16-year game industry veteran

Colin Foran (Head of Game)

• Worked at Ryse: Son of Rome, Sunset Overdrive, and the Emmy-winning Westworld VR: A Delos Experience

Aaron Nonis (Head of Platform)

• Worked at Microsoft XNA, HBO NOW and Westworld VR

Mark Yeend (Head of Marketing and Community)

• Worked at Xbox, HBO, Star Wars, Halo, The Sims and Harry Potter

Naomi Lackaff (Head of Partnerships)

• Worked at HBO

Calvin Zhou (Head of BD)

• A tech entrepreneur with a background in hedge funds and investment banks

Joshua M. Davis (Head of Experience)

• UX leader for Electronic Arts, Irrational Games, 343 Industries, Microsoft, High Fidelity, and Amazon, stewarding franchises such as Madden NFL, Tiger Woods PGA Golf, EA Sports MMA, Superman, Bioshock, Halo, Harry Potter, and more
• Holding a design patent for Microsoft and Thea Award from Themed Entertainment Association for contributions to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

Community

Table 3: Social media statistics of Shrapnel and prominent AAA FPS games (source: SparkToro)

The team brought on Ali "Myth" Kabbani, one of the most well-known Twitch streamer personalities to serve as an advisor. Myth has leveraged his success as a Fortnite pro to build a huge following of over 21 million across social platforms.

Furthermore, Shrapnel concentrates on interacting with and gathering feedback from the community with an array of initiatives including:

• Sustainable community-first approach with weekly Podcasts and updates
• In-game items and graphic sneak peek
• Interviews and AMA on prominent media channels including Cointelegraph, Exchange Wire, Hackernoon, Venturebeat etc.
• Interacting with the Avalanche community
• Friendly daily activities of team members
• Most prominently, almost no airdrop or giveaway campaign was executed to enlarge the community
• Active and dedicated community members that help to deliver thorough answers to questions

Figure 9: Friendly daily activities of Shrapnel team members and talent acquisition