DEADROP
It’s been over a year since Dr Disrespect’s studio, Midnight Society, announced DEADROP, an extraction shooter that attracted a lot of initial attention due to its sale of NFTs as profile pictures for the game, granting early access to it.
Now, a year later, the focus appears to have shifted away from NFTs, given that the entire industry has shifted away from the concept, not that it ever caught on in the first place. Midnight Society has repeatedly said that they want DEADROP development to be transparent and open with fans over time. But as time has gone on, they increasingly want to try to sell things to players ahead of the release of the game, a series of passes, keys and crates, an array of microtransactions despite the final product being far away.
To Midnight Society’s credit, they have indeed delivered in a somewhat timely fashion a series of “Snapshots,” different bits and pieces of the game that these early access fans can play, including debuting some of them at in-person events with Doc and others. The “Snapshot” idea, delivering non-stop vertical slices of the game every few weeks or months didn’t seem like it would work out well, but so far, they’re still going, and things have continued at a relatively decent clip.
But it feels like the game is moving continually in a Star Citizen-like direction, selling more and more things as it goes.
At this point, the game has sold Tower Keys, which allowed for Snapshot access, exclusive cosmetics, exclusive streaming rights, gameplay event invites and a season 0 battle pass, with no date attached. Those were limited, but codes can be bought and sold.
This is not to be confused with the original Founders Pass, which was the one with NFT profile pictures, “voting rights” on game features and access to the earlier builds.
There is also a Game Access Pass which does not include legendary items, as those legendary items are only included in the next Key category.
DEADROP
Now, as of this week, DEADROP is also selling Drivers Keys, another limited time key which gets you legendary vehicles and license plates, and also 5 “exotic crates.” You will get 10 bonus exotic creates by purchasing at least one of the four different Drivers Key packages. The prices are not shown unless you log in, but they go for $30 apiece, except Doc’s is $40, so $130 in total for that promotion.
Exotic Crates include a number of items in ten total categories, different types of guns, character gear and license plates. There are 100 total and if you get them all, you’ll only get weapons after that (I’m not clear on if these are actual, usable weapons or in-game skins). You cannot buy Exotic Crates individually, only as a part of these pricey bundles. Exotic items cannot be traded, only legendary items can be traded.
So, got all that? You can see where this is going, that while open and transparent development may be one thing, this is taking something as simple as closed early alphas and monetizing it to a pretty extreme degree in the name of “community,” selling loads of items for a game with no official release date. At this point I can’t tell what is or is not taking place on the blockchain here, but no, you’re not seeing the term “NFT” here any longer, that’s for sure. But what this feels like is an attempt to set up an early stage Counter-Strike type chest opening system.
I was reminded to check up on DEADROP now after Doc’s recent comments criticizing Call of Duty for selling so many skins, saying that it’s “not what he grew up with.” Overlooking the fact he was 21 when the first Call of Duty came out, it sure seems like the structure of DEADROP and its hyper-early monetization is not what anyone of any age playing games grew up with, certainly. We’ll see where this all goes from here.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
