The Sorare of Music: P2E Game Nafstars Is Creating a Lot of Buzz

With the presale of its homegrown NSTAR token currently underway, play-to-earn card collecting game Nafstars is drawing a lot of attention not only from fans of NFT games but also from the wider gaming community. 

Just in case you’re hearing about it for the first time, Nafstars aspires to establish itself as the Sorare equivalent of music and entertainment. (Sorare, as you probably know, is a popular fantasy football game where players buy, sell, trade, and manage virtual teams with digital player cards.)

So, without any further ado, let’s go on with this quick review where we will be sharing BeInCrypto’s early impression of Nafstars.

Nafstars: Overview

Nafstars (Nafstars Manager) is a play-to-earn NFT game that will enable users to create their own music labels using artist cards and accessory cards, the latter featuring cards representing speakers, microphones, outfits, turntables, stadiums, and so on.

As of January 2022, the Nafstars team comprises 15 experienced professionals from diverse backgrounds. The team is led by CEO & Co-founder Cyril Braun, who is a multi-platinum and diamond music label owner. Romain Delnaud, the other co-founder, also packs some serious experience as a former label managing director and international operations director at UMG. 

Jean David Pautet, a major shareholder at Nafstars also happens to be one of the leading investors in Sorare, besides being a blockchain and play-to-earn specialist. So, overall, it’s fair to say that Nafstars seems to be backed by a team that’s rich in experience and collectively has a solid grip over both the music and P2E gaming industries.

The fact that the project has also managed to strike key partnerships with renowned brands including Universal Music, NRJ Music Awards, Aldam production, UMG,  TRACE TV should further inspire confidence among investors and other stakeholders.

Meanwhile, key French musicians and partners to have already joined Nafstars include the likes of Eva Queen, Keen V, Vegedream, and Jacky Brown, among others. The platform aims to sign a further 50+ new talents from all over the world in the coming weeks.

As of Feb 1, 2022, the talents signed by Nafstars collectively account for 4.5 billion views on YouTube, 10+ million Spotify streams per month, 10+ million followers on Instagram, and 10+ million TikTok followers.

Nafstars also claims to have already surpassed the 10,000 user-accounts milestone.

The gameplay

Nafstars players can have their managers/labels compete against one another in battles. The winner of these battles goes up in the in-game rankings, rakes-in valuable experience points, and obtains other rewards. You will have the option to further boost your gains by selling, trading your cards, and/or competing against other players.

The scores of each artist card are calculated every day via different Oracles and based on other metrics such as the number of streams, career longevity, titles, rewards, fanbases on social networks, etc.

How scores are calculated

Each card in Nafstars Manager comes with a rarity level. The rarity levels for both artist and support cards are in the following order::

• Common – 1000 cards per series.
• Rare- 100 cards per series. 
• Super rare – 10 cards per series 
• Unique  – 1 card per series

As a player, you have to collect cards in different rarity levels — ideally by choosing the most powerful talents available to you. You can also place bets on who’s going to be the following day’s leading artists.

Built on the Polygon blockchain, the game has an automated system in place that tracks your assets in real-time. That means, the more the talent pool you have picked perform in real life, the more the corresponding cards’ power increases. So, the stronger the talent pool you have raised, the higher the likelihood of you winning a battle.

The score associated with each artist card is dynamic and calculated using the following formula:

•  Score per artist-card = Rarity (static value) x Career (depends on longevity, number of releases, and number of awards) x Social hype (number of social media followers, views, and streams) x Card level (data evolves according to game scores)

Similarly, the score associated with a support card is calculated using the following formula: 

• Score per support-card = Rarity (static value) x Base value (dynamic value) x Affinity with the artist (if the artist and genre are compatible, the card’s score is 2x)

You can also collect booster cards to improve your leaderboard performance. The rarity degree of booster cards is as follows:

• Common (85% of airdrops) 
• Rare (10% of airdrops) 
• Super rare (5% of airdrops)

Scores per booster card = Rarity x Base value

Leaderboard mechanics

Nafstars hosts weekly leaderboards. You can subscribe to your artists, given that they are eligible for that particular leaderboard (min 1, max 5). The total score is calculated based on the sum of your card scores, although you can also use a booster card to improve your score. Player rankings are determined based on the score of individual players at the end of the period.

Note that some leaderboards may restrict subscriptions to only a limited pool of artists and accessories.

Subscribers contribute to the pool by paying from their $NSTARS stash. A pre-specified percentage of the pool is spent to reward winners. Usually, the top-10 players earn their rewards in the $NSTARS token and cards. Other players, meanwhile, are rewarded with booster cards.

The NSTARS token

The NSTARS token is the homegrown token in the Nafstars ecosystem that glues together its individual components. It is an ERC20 token on Polygon with a maximum supply of 600,000,000 tokens. 

The private sale of $NSTARS took place in December and it added $500,000 to the project’s kitty. The presale launched on Jan. 31 with a total supply of 20 million tokens.

Nafstars expects to launch the public sale of $NSTARS in the coming weeks, presumably by the end of February.

Conclusion

In our observation, Nafstars has so far checked most of the boxes that you would expect an ambitious project of this magnitude to do. For example, the project is backed by what appears to be a pretty competent team, it has done a decent job sticking to the roadmap so far, and most importantly, it has struck partnerships with some key brands and talents from the music and entertainment industry.

Of course, these are still the early days for the Nafstars ecosystem and as they say, proof of the pudding is in the eating. So, we’ll try to keep a close eye on the project to fetch you the latest updates. 

Meanwhile, if you are intrigued and want to dig more into the project and its long-term potential, the Nafstars lightpaper is a good place to start.

You can also join Nafstars on Discord for more info and regular updates.