NFTs Finally Found a Use-Case: A Sewer Game With Bad Poop Jokes
Talk about flushing your money down the toilet
Whenever I write about NFTs, I end with the same logical argument. Until real use cases for the technology appear that are useful to the wider population, it will fail to find mass adoption, and continue to exist as a get-rich-quick scheme from which very few will get rich.
Well, ask, and you shall receive.
Early this year, Bored Apes Yacht Club launched Dookey Dash. The announcement video was filled with hilarious toilet humor, like using innuendos to describe buttholes. Classic. It’s like it was designed for 8-year-olds if they had thousands of dollars to burn in crypto wallets. The game is an endless runner-style skill-based “minting experience” that sees players fly through a sewer tunnel, avoiding obstacles to compete for the highest score. Think Earthworm Jim, or for younger readers, Temple Run. Then, after several weeks, the player with the highest score would find “the key in the shit.” I kid not.
To gain access, players had to mint a Sewer Pass NFT, which was free — gas fees aside — if you had a Bored Ape or Mutant Ape NFT in your wallet. This means it’s far from free, given the astronomical cost this collection has sold for. The current floor price for a Bored Ape is still over $100,000. Those who didn’t have the entry fee could buy a Sewer Pass on the secondary market, which had a floor price of around 2.7ETH on OpenSea. This pass gave a player three weeks of Dookey Dash access. Some of the higher tier passes — I’m as lost as you are — sold for over $12,000.
$12,000 for three weeks of access. Wowzer.
With willing participants (read: mindless apes) like that, it’s no surprise the project cashed in millions. The announcement of the game also drove up the price of the Bored Ape collections, which had been enduring a tough time of late. According to data from CryptoSlam, Mutant Ape NFTs jumped nearly 125% in sales volume, while Bored Ape NFT sales jumped over 150%. Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs, which also have some role in Dookey Dash, have seen a sales spike of over 125%.
After the three-week window, in which the game was at one point pulled for rampant cheating, Dookey Dash closed its sewers. The highest score belonged to Esports player Kyle Jackson, referred to as Mongraal. His reward? The exclusive Dookey Dash Key NFT. It was such a prized possession that Jackson immediately put it up for auction. It sold for 1000 ETH ($1.6 million).
What will the new owner do with that key? Don’t know.
What did the players gain from dedicating hundreds of hours in pursuit of an unknown prize? Don’t know. Holders of Sewer Passes have been promised that it will grant them access to “The Summoning.” What’s that? Don’t know. The explainer video describes it as the following,
“Gary, the Great Dog Prophet thinks conditions are right to perform a summoning ritual that will bring incredible power sources from another dimension into our world. Eligible sewer passes can participate in the summoning. Your best score will determine what it reveals. Your power source will be able to evolve through a sequence of various Ape Coin powered games as the continues. These power sources are your key to what comes next.”
If I’ve managed to wrap my head around it, Sewer Passes are going to unlock further content, based on the attached score, which will be used in upcoming content/games.
Trying to understand makes you go apeshit crazy.
The bigger question is whether the Dookey Dash project does anything to move NFTs forward as an applicable technology. The simple answer to that is no; it doesn't.
While it might just qualify as a use-case for the tokens, it’s nothing beyond using them as a currency to play a mobile-standard game. It isn’t revolutionary. You don’t get to play as your ape. The only blockchain thing about the game is owning the NFTs in your wallet to play. The game wasn't even built on Web3 or hosted on a blockchain of sorts - it was built on the standard (supposedly obsolete) world wide web.
On reflection, I’d hedge that the project was created to serve a couple of other motives:
Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Apes Yacht Club, raised $450 million in VC funding at a $4 billion valuation led by A16z. The game and its surrounding ecosystem are just an elaborate way to try and show it can deliver value on that investment.
If the entire argument for why people should buy your expensive NFT is to become part of the community —and not just the money you can make from reselling them — then you need to help find reasons for the community to come together. This game is an attempt to prove Yuga Labs is building one.
What's also guaranteed is that other NFT projects will try to replicate this system over the coming months. But, unfortunately, each will do so to lower and lower levels of success until, like always, it falls apart, leaving a lot of bruised egos and empty wallets.
Ultimately, Dookey Dash doesn't represent an actual use case for NFT technology. Instead, it's representative of the NFT landscape since its takeoff — the momentum it depends on to keep people buying in is driven solely by hype.
But the more who buy in, the more the risk increases that the early adopters have already made the money, meaning those who get in late have thrown their money down the drain — and into the sewer.