NFL Rivals looks to reignite growth with major changes for Season 3 coming 20th August
Approaching its third year, and with that Season 3, Mythical Games’ mobile American football game NFL Rivals is gearing up for big changes.
Kicking off August 20th with a week-long training camp before all features go live on August 27th, the headline news is that NFL Rivals has become too difficult for new players to compete in, especially in terms of the overall power of the teams. This increasingly pay-to-win environment has meant Mythical couldn’t generate high enough retention of new players and hence stopped marketing the game, which plateaued at around 7 million downloads.
“Let’s call it like it is, we hit a wall in Year 2“, Mythical Games says.
Season 3 will provide an opportunity to reset that situation. One significant decision is to remove all existing base cards i.e. all non-NFT cards. In return, players will get Training Points, which can be used to boost other cards.
Another big change is that the cards earned from in-game packs will be locked by default, which means players can’t immediately trade or sell them, but hopefully make use of them. In order to be turned into NFTs that can be sold or traded, they need to first be levelled up and then minted using Mint Tokens.
Mythical says this will enable it to lower the price of packs, while also increasing the quality of cards in packs so players get more, better cards. That also encourages players to turn their cards into NFTs, which is where they are most valuable, both to players and also to Mythical in terms of the available monetization options.
In terms of Blueprints – cards that have previously required pairing with base cards to be turned into NFTs – they will still play a role in the new upgrade system.
As for how the upgrade path works, players will now have to burn cards, including NFTs, to get the required Card XP for upgrading. Ranking cards higher will require burning “same name” cards or Rank Up tokens.
Want to rank up Pat Mahomes? “You’ll need Pat Mahomes cards or Rank Up tokens or a combination of the two,” Mythical says.
Notably, this sort of model is already happening in FIFA Rivals. Each NFT card has a tech tree system, which means they can only be levelled up by burning other NFTs to collect their specialism points.
More generally it looks like Mythical Games is becoming more focused on getting players to turn their cards into NFTs, while also making low priced NFTs valuable for the purposes of making rarer, more powerful NFTs even more powerful and valuable. As previously mentioned, Mythical already makes the majority of its revenue in NFL Rivals when players trade their NFTs; something it’s looking to deepen.
Some other changes coming with Season 3 is Stadiums Mode, which introduces a higher level of competitiveness. Matchmaking will be skill-based, and matches wagered and real-time PVP. It contains ten stadiums of varying difficulty, which can be unlocked using Trophies. Stadium admission will be paid using in-game coins.
The way players are ranked and promoted is also changing, from being Leagues based to being determined by how many coins players earn in Stadiums Mode and Events. Higher ranking means better league standing, which in turn boosts player rewards.
Mythical is also releasing over 800 new cards across all 32 teams. In addition, there will be special legendary players, one per team, with 145–150 power.
