Who cares about a game, when it's all due to fame?
Each level feels the same, it really goes all the way
I don't know about you, but you gotta get out of it
I don't know how to say it, but at least we die
I wanna bring a home to you
It's another world that I gotta get a grip of and hold it on to
It's another world that I gotta get a grip of and hold it on to
It's another world that I gotta get a grip of and hold it on to
It's another world that I gotta get a grip on
Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome, everyone, to MixMom's second space
Web3 Builder Talk, navigating community the right way. Shout out to our co-host, ex-co-host,
for joining us. We got Jorge, our other co-host, coming up here as well. It's a beautiful
day. Crypto's pumping. Co-host, how are you doing? Mikel, Hivens, Compass, Jason, James,
everybody. Jorge, Ryan, Jordan, welcome so much to the space. Jorge, how are we feeling
Yo, what a fucking lineup. Holy shit. Like, we got Mikel, we got Jason, we got Jordan.
Oh, my God. What are we doing? This is about to break Twitter, guys, or ex whatever you
want to call it. I know it's Valentine's Day and you guys are here because, you know what?
I got asked today, they were like, hey, what are you doing for Valentine's Day? I said,
well, I'm going to do its leg day at the gym. Then I got to work. Yeah, that is Valentine's
Day. So guess what? I'm here hanging out with my best friends, all you guys here. MXM is
fucking pumping. Bitcoin is pumping. It's at 52K. What else can you guys ask for on a Wednesday?
Let's talk gaming. Let's introduce everybody on the panel. Let's find out a little bit
more about everyone. Absolutely. It looks like the stage is actually full already. Wow,
that's amazing. Thank you so much for all the support. Jorge, I went ahead and invited
you as co-host. We can get one more up here. Perfect, perfect, perfect. What I'd like to
do, and we do have a full panel, so to be time sensitive, I would love to start off
with a quick intro of who you are, and I would love to do a quick icebreaker question. Jorge,
what's our icebreaker question today? Tell them when Bitcoin hits 100,000, what are you
telling your family and friends when they're texting you and being like, okay, do I have
to buy crypto again? You know what's absolutely crazy is I'm in a group chat with a lot of
my buddies from college, and it's absolutely blowing up right now. Everybody is trying
to get into crypto and into gaming coins. We're still early. We got normies asking how
to get into crypto. It's a beautiful thing. We're going to go ahead and go from my right
to left, and we're going to go ahead and pass it over to Mikel. How are you doing today?
Oh my God, I'm doing so good. I love this intro question. Can we all just savor for a moment
that we were right once again? Every cycle, this happens, and everyone's like, oh my God,
why didn't you tell me? They're going to say it again, and we can just sit here and know that we
have just known the whole time and told them the whole time and that they didn't listen.
It feels good, man, right? It just feels good. Mikel from Sedona. We are a Web3 game launcher,
platform as a service. We are currently exploring some acquisition options, so that's exciting.
I also advise for the crypto creators on the side and lots of other stuff in Web3 gaming,
so I'm super happy to be here, guys. Thanks for having me, and I'm excited for a great
chat about community. Mikel, it's absolutely amazing to have you on here. Thank you so much
for everything that you do for the Web3 industry. It seems like you are all over the place. I see
in all these spaces. You're heavily involved, so thank you so much. Haven's Clumpus, who do
we have behind the account? How are you doing today? Very good, very good. One thing that was
mentioned, Leg Day. I had Leg Day today as well, Jorge, and it was amazing. It's the best thing to
do. We're very good, very thankful to be on the spaces. I'm sure we're going to enjoy it. It
already started off with great energy. The first question asked, well, definitely. It's always the
same thing. Every cycle, every time. The same questions over and over again. If it reaches or
when it reaches 100k, I'm not going to be saying anything anymore. I'll just keep it to myself,
and then I'm good to go. That's about it for us. As for Haven's Clumpus, short intro,
we're a first-person shooter game. It's a free-to-play game, and we're launching NQ4 this year.
I love it, and who do we have behind the account today? It's Abood. Abood, thank you so much for
joining us, man. I'm excited to get you involved with this conversation. Jason, over to you. It's
a pleasure. I'm Nick, the partnership manager over at Mixbob. I don't think I've had the pleasure of
meeting you. Please give us an introduction. How are you doing today, man?
You have not. We have not had an opportunity to speak yet. It's fantastic to be here today.
I'm very happy to come here and hang out with everybody. I'm Jason. A lot of people know me as
Bitbender, president of Blockchain over at Gala. We also have our CTO, Adam Price, on the call
as well, who's joining in. We are a platform and L1 Blockchain with a focus on entertainment. We've
got games. We've got music. We've got film. We've got a lot of really cool stuff that's hitting
right now really, really hard. For us, it's all about community and building. We're here to talk
about that and to hang out with all you guys and to answer the question. Crypto is like my
whole ass freaking job. I don't think my family is going to be messaging me about it. I don't
think all of my friends are already here. It'll probably be one of those things where Adam sends
me a Slack message. It's going to be like, hey, BTC 100K, smiley face. That will probably be the
end of it. Then we'll get back to building because that's how we do. Jason, Bitbender,
throws one of the greatest parties. I got to know, GDC is around the corner. I got to know,
are you going to throw another party? Let me know. I need the details I need it all so I make sure
I get there on time and I don't show up late like I did last time.
Which party did you come to last time? The GDC when we did the arcade
dinner. That was good times. That was very good times. Adam, are we allowed to talk about the
thing that we're doing? I don't think we're allowed to talk about the thing that we're doing yet.
I think you definitely are. I don't know if we're 100% cleared from a PR and legal perspective to
talk about this, but we are doing a big ass Gala chain hackathon at GDC with a...
How do I even say this? Because if I say it wrong, I just give it away. If I say it right,
then you probably aren't going to know what I'm talking about. With a major player in the tech
space there. I'll just say that. That leaves a lot of ambiguity out there. But yeah,
we're doing a really big hackathon at GDC and we will probably be doing some interesting
community related stuff around that. Given that we now have an office and I'm in the Bay Area,
we're probably going to be doing some other cool stuff up here as well.
Yeah, my DMs are open. Adam, Bitbender, my DMs are open. I accept any type of invitation. It could
just be a simple address. It doesn't have to be something fancy on Canva or an invite or anything
like that. Just let me know the details. I'll be there.
No, I'm flying in a couple days earlier.
Okay. Well, we'll do something. We'll at least get together for some drinks and hanging out.
This is what I love about Web 3, guys. It's all about building communities, all about building
with other partners. It doesn't matter what type of game it is. No one's a competitor. We're all
friends. We're all community together. Web 3 is small. This is what I'm talking about, guys.
100%. We're all fighting the bigger battle, right? Bringing Web 3 to the masses. I absolutely love
it. I've made amazing connections. I've met amazing people through Web 3, such as Jorge.
So thank you so much. Ryan, over to you, man. How are you doing today?
I'm doing good. Excited to be here. What's up, everybody? On Twitter, my name is Ryan Ever,
but in real life, I am Evan Ryer, the CEO and co-founder at BR1 Infinite. We make the world's
first risk-based shooter. It's a shooting game where you pay real money to spawn. And for every
player you eliminate, you earn real money, all in U.S. dollars. We have a free mode,
10-cent mode, 25-cent dollar private matches. And using the $1 game mode as the example,
you pay $1 U.S. to spawn into a large open world map. There is no timer or there's no
start or finish in our game. Again, open world shooter. For every player that you eliminate,
you earn $1 U.S. and we take a percentage of player earnings. There's a very large
collector-driven economy of weapons and skins that all offer their own additional earnings
bonus in the game. But that and more. Excited to be here with all these amazing speakers.
Let's go. We're absolutely excited to have you, Ryan. Thank you so much for joining us and giving
us some insight on BR1. Game of Silks, how are you doing? Who's behind the account? It's a pleasure
to meet you. What's up? How are you guys doing? You got Matthew Pursuto here behind the account
today. You know, definitely have a few friends who are yet to get on to the crypto, crypto wagon
and keep getting messages. And I had a couple of them message me this week. Once we hit 50K,
just like we hit 40K, they messaged me too. So a little bit about Game of Silks. We are
basically digitalizing the sport of thorough red horse racing, offering people the opportunity
to purchase digital representations of actual resources in the real world as NFTs on the
blockchain. And they earn rewards from their resources that compete in the real world,
total of 1% of the real world earnings. So that's what we did.
I love it. And thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to connect. It's a
pleasure to have you up here. James, we're going to pass it over to you from Satoshi Lab. How are
you doing? I'm doing great. This is James from Find Satoshi Lab. We're the development team
behind Steppen, Moore, and Gashero. We launched our latest game, Gashero, a little bit over about
a month and a half ago now. We're just getting ready to launch our fourth PvP tournament. It's
called our Gas War. This is going to be our solo Gas War. Everybody competes individually.
We also a week ago launched our second PvP mode called Hero Mountain. Between the two of them,
we're giving out about a million dollars a week. And just PvP alone, trading volumes for Gashero
has been phenomenal. Anybody can go to gashero.com, click on that play button. You get four free
heroes to try the game out for free. It's a progressive web app, so it plays on any phone,
tablet, laptop, anything you want to play on. And excited to be here. When we hit 100K on Bitcoin,
I'm calling my friends and telling them we're all retiring. Let's go. Everybody's going to be on
yachts and PJs. We don't want Lambos because we don't like traffic. We're going to pass it over
to Creatorhood. How are you doing, my man? I'm doing really well. I'm loving the vibe so far here.
You guys are awesome. Thank you so much, man. How are you doing? Who's behind the account? And
what's Creatorhood? Yeah, so my name is Jared. I do social media and creator onboarding here,
some content creation. Creatorhood is a creator-focused NFT marketplace. Think of like Blur
Meets Friend Tech. We've got some Socialify components as well and a really cool payment
gateway system where you can use Polygon, ETH, and over 200 currencies. So we're sort of trying to
bridge some of those Web 2 artists and make an easy onboarding system for them to come over and
join us here in Web 3. I'm actually really stoked on what we've built, and we're in Season 1 right
now where you can earn points. I can't say what the points will be used for, but there'll be an
announcement very soon, and you guys can probably assume what you think the points will be used for.
But so by buying NFTs, listing NFTs, selling NFTs, and creating NFTs, you will earn points,
and they're going to be pretty useful. I think you guys will dig it. So happy to be here. Love
the vibe so far, and happy to get to know you guys. Come on, Jared. You got to let us know what
happened. There's some massive announcements. We're announcing some big advisors soon and some
partners, and then we're also announcing what these points will be used for. But I can't legally say
right now. I'm sorry. It's okay, Jared. It's okay. Thank you so much for sharing what you already
have. Jordan, over to you. It's so great to see you again, my friend. You had some amazing points
last week. How are you doing? Yo, what's up? I'm glad you think so. I'm doing great. I'm Jordan
Feinstein, and we've got Jordan Feinstein behind the account here. I am building Eureka, which is
a game that's taken us all back to 1850 to a brand new continent, full-scale continent, full of
nothing but empty space and resources, so we can all try to enjoy some of that opportunity that
everybody in the past had before everything was taken and so full. And we're building a game with
a kind of crazy AI. You control the characters just by telling them what to do, like walk to the top
of the hill, our viewports are AI-generated, and it's a super slow, buy-the-game. I also just wanted
to add real quick, Ryan, I did a deep dive into what you guys are doing literally yesterday. The
whole pay-to-spawn system, so good. This shit's brilliant. Definitely watching what you guys are
doing. Just a little shout out. And when Bitcoin's 100k, I'm probably not going to say shit to my
family because I told them all at 16 to buy, and then I told them at 20 to buy, and they were tired
of it, and so I shut up. But they know I had it, so there you go. Let's go. I absolutely love it,
Jordan. Thank you so much for being here. Last but not least, Adam Price. How are you doing?
I'm great. Thanks for having you guys. Adam here from Gala as well with Jason.
I'm the CTO of our platform teams, chain team, note team, so anything nerdy you guys want to
get into how this stuff actually works. Happy to talk about it. What am I going to do when
hit 100k? I don't think there's going to be much conversation at all. Everyone's already in,
but I know. I don't know. It's just going to be celebration. It's going to be party time.
Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I love it. We're going to be partying on the yacht.
Alrighty. We did an intro to everyone. Thank you so much. I am Nick, your host. I am the
partnership manager over at MixMob. I am joined by Jorge, marketing director over at MixMob.
Thank you so much, Jorge, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be here with me.
So let's dive into the topic, diving into the topic, which is going to be navigating community
the right way. A lot of you guys here on the panel have been building games, platforms.
I'm sure for the past couple of years, therefore you've been building a community, right? And
building a community with either a product not ready or going through alpha and beta stages.
While you're building this product, you're also incorporating your community.
And so this is going to lead me to my first question. And this is going to be when you're
building a community for a game that is still in development or a product that is still in
development, how do you keep your community interested and engaged? What are some tactics
that you have used previously in these past couple of years to keep your community engaged
and to also onboard new community members? We can go ahead and have an open mic or raise
your guy's hand, whatever works best for you guys. Someone, someone, tell us what you guys
are doing. Tell us the secret sauce. Let's share it and find out how we can help each other.
So I think that the biggest thing about community, and I didn't raise my hand because,
that's an extra button on my phone and Twitter breaks half the time I try to use it.
But the biggest thing for us is maintaining an extremely active communicative environment for
people. So if you show up in our Discord, which you can join at galagames.chat, there is always
going to be somebody in there who is there to answer questions, to engage with people.
And oftentimes it's me or Eric or some of the other executives that are in there having super
candid open frank discussions about things. What we're doing is a little bit different than what
everybody else does because typically you have like a game or a couple games or something like
that. We've got, I don't know, probably close to 14 different pretty heavy titles that are on the
platform. We've got film, we've got music, we've got the entire tech pipeline and things like that.
So there's a lot of stuff going on. And so it's just this constant process of engagement,
of answering questions, of listening to the community, which in the bull market,
super fun, best thing ever. Bear market, it sucks because you have projects that are collapsing
all over the place and discords and telegrams that are completely dead and that devs have
rugged and sort of left everybody hanging out to dry. And those people have a tendency to
gravitate to the discord where they will feel heard. And since there's always people in ours
occasionally, we get people who are generally pissed off and we're the only ones that will
listen to them so they show up and yell at us for a little bit. It gets fun sometimes. But yeah,
that's the thing is listen and engage and continuously keep the conversation going and
give as much information as you can about stuff as you build. I absolutely love that.
Communication is massive, especially in Web3. If you don't reply within a day,
some community members will absolutely go bananas, right? A day? We're supposed to get a whole day?
Shit, man. People like 20 minutes ago, I asked Bitbender this thing in Discord. He didn't respond
yet. Probably is rugged and left. It's fun. I love it. Web3 in a nutshell, right? We're going to
pass it over to James. I think pregame is the hardest part, right? You certainly want to use
all the platforms of your availability. Having a very active community in Discord and being
available and doing AMAs and doing game nights and talking. But you've got to be on Telegram and
you've got to have your Zeele quest board set up and you've got to be bouncing around to WeChat
and Kakao Talk and the Var Cafe and Lion and all these platforms to engage with communities around
the world. But I think the important thing to remember is there's a cadence to it. I think the
mistake a lot of projects make is they almost push too hard to quit and then there's a lull
before the next things are coming out. You almost want that slow, steady, organic growth that's
peaking right as the game's launching, not two to six months before the game launches. It's really
hard to sustain that high intensity once you've hit it. I love it. So it's a balance, right? Of
hype, but actually having a product to back it. And that's such a hard balance to find. But yeah,
no, thank you so much for that, James. Ryan, over to you. Building off of what my colleagues have
shared here, a big part of it is recognizing what the core community member that you're trying to
convert to your ecosystem to your cult is looking for. And many people say they're looking for a
good game, but that's not it. They're looking for entertainment. They're looking for camaraderie.
They're looking for friendship. And it's not just about having the game ready. And many people are
in a pre-alpha format. How do you build a community when you don't even have the product ready yet?
It's by giving people a sense of belonging. Being a reply guy, no one's time is worth more than
anyone else's time. I may work 27 hours a day. I answer every single DM, every single community
member. And when you make people feel hurt and like they're truly involved, whether it's the
decisions or their feedback is being translated into something meaningful, that's exciting and
they'll stick with you forever. And that's one thing that we concentrated on aggressively and
enabled us to build our community to just over 120,000 users strong. I absolutely love that take.
We love to be a part of communities. We love to be a part of a tribe. This has always been a thing.
Ryan, thank you so much for that. Havin's Compass, over to you.
I very much agree with everything that's being said. I'll just add on top of being transparent,
like great transparency and honesty with the community. If something is going wrong,
because that's where the whole thing, you know, where everything can go wrong is. If something is
not going the way that it should, be honest with the community. Tell them what is happening.
That's like on the negative side of things. Now on the positive side of things, obviously you're
going to have to keep them up to date with everything that's happening. You know, keep
that knowledge flowing. And most important, I think each one of us can be part of a community
of a specific project. So look at yourself and think what keeps me looking at the specific
project, what keeps me engaged in a specific chat. And that's exactly how they're going to
feel about your project. So put yourself in their shoes in a way or another.
I love that take. Putting ourselves in the user's shoes, right? Not only thinking about what makes
sense to us, but what makes sense to them. And I think that's the beautiful thing about Web3 is
that they're actually able to engage with us consistently. I actually had a call with our
good friends over at ev.io and the one thing that he said he came from Web2 and the one thing that
he loved so much about Web3 is being able to communicate with his community on a daily basis,
actually having a community be able to talk to the founders and the devs. It's such a beautiful
thing in Web3. Jordan, over to you. Yeah, so I've basically just been using the only strategy that
works for me. Like I'm not a huge loud marketer guy. I'm not. I don't have someone with a million
followers on Twitter. I'm not even really into the zeely quests. And I just I never participate
in this shit myself, so I can't be arsed to ask my community to what I can do is put myself out in
front that, you know, I docked myself on this. I am building the game. I am dying to play that I
can't play. And I'm putting everything of myself that I can into it. And I am in my discord
constantly. We've got a small community, but anyone, you know, they roll in, they ask a question,
and then it's 45 minutes later. And I've been like talking to them in detail about why we made this
decision and how it should work. Like literally yesterday, this guy came in and was asking a
question. And I was like, man, you just helped me make up my mind on what we're actually going to
do for the game here. He like actually did have a part in a fundamental decision on how NPCs are
going to work in Eureka. And so I'm just trying to kind of be someone that people can, you know,
that they know, and they know how I think. And that that can hopefully, if you give some confidence
in the thing that I'm building. 100%. It's all about being personable, right? Especially when
we're behind screens, we have to put that extra effort into it since we're only a PFP or anything
along those lines. I absolutely love that. And you know, I think that this is great, right? We've
talked about how you keep your community interested and engaged, you know, before a product
is out. And so now, you know, like I've mentioned before, I know that a lot of you guys are building
products. I'm sure a lot of you guys have gone through alpha and beta stages. And I would love
to know what you guys have done in terms of events or challenges when these alpha and beta stages
have came out. How have you guys distributed this to your community? And what things did you do to
keep them not only engaged, but excited to actually play it when it's live? Yo, just play the
airdrop row, right? You know, I love that play the airdrop, right? And you know, maybe I maybe
I'll segue this a bit. We've been seeing a lot of play the airdrop. And I would love to hear the
panel's thoughts on on is, is it a good tactic? Is it a bad tactic? Are we onboarding the wrong
users to correct users? What is this good for awareness, actual users? Ryan, over to you.
I think it's an incredibly dangerous strategy to implement. If you go and you if you think that
delivering a game with a play the airdrop function is going to drive users, you're correct. But
acquiring users is only half of the battle. User retention is everything. I think user attention
may be more important than user acquisition. The reason at the end of the day here is if you do a
play the airdrop and the users show up in numbers, and then your d1s, your d7s, d15s, d30 start to
drop, you're going to know why. It's because the players that showed up were incentivized for
financial gain, and not the core game loop, which is what you need to be delivering to drive you are
you need to have strong reward mechanisms, leveling mechanisms, missions, whatever it is
for your core game loop that aligns with the gamers expectation and gets them excited to come
back tomorrow, not just for money. Absolutely love that. That's an interesting take to say that
retention is more important than acquisition. I would love to deep dive into that. After Jordan,
over to you. I just thought I'd share my opinion on it since I brought it up. I think it's fine.
It's like a pretty funny full circle moment for our industry because we started with play to earn
where it's like, yeah, every headshot or every, you know, everything you do in the game, we're
going to give you some tokens. It's like you can't just admit tokens to people. It's not sustainable.
And now we're like all the way back to it where like play to airdrop is just play to earn tokens.
The only differentiator is that it's like a finite period of time. So that does solve that
sustainability question. But I think 99% of these games that have used play to airdrop and then
they're complaining, you know, oh, we just got these slippers and farmers and like it didn't
work because your game wasn't ready yet. Like you need the rest of that funnel there for every user
like Ryan was just saying, like anyone who comes into your game, is there enough game to keep them
playing? What's making them play once the airdrop is done? You don't have that. You just wasted all
your tokens, you know, and you're not going to get a second chance with those same people.
I love that take Jordan. Thank you so much. Over to you, Mikel.
Yeah, I like what everyone's saying on this. And I think it's really like it is a very important
thing to talk about. Like there's a pretty basic economic principle that says that you want to
incentivize the behavior that you want to recreate. And I think that most people are just
thinking about getting people initially to the platform and like hopes and prayers and dreams
that everybody's just going to stay. But that's not the way that it works. There does probably
need to be like some extrinsic motivating factors factors to get people there. But there
also has to be like intrinsic motivation for people to come and keep playing. So like tying
those rewards models to time in the ecosystem or hours played or something like there's so many
different things that we can do. But like just be creative, right? This is web three, we have all of
these tools and different things at our disposal. And it just seems like everybody is just doing
this like played airdrop. And it's just like rinse and repeat NFT cycle from 2021. Like we're
incentivizing people to come in, there's nothing to make them stay. So until we kind of nail this
lesson, I feel like we're doomed to repeat the same failures. Absolutely love that. So that's
very interesting, right? We have to we have to almost complete the cycle. This is one step on
onboarding these users. But now we have to figure out how to keep on the stay have a game that's
actually fun to play. Jorge over to you. I love the juicy topic. I got to play devil's advocate
here, right? Because somebody has to do it. Someone's got to play the villain. Well, again,
you know, the way that web three gaming is set up, the way that we have to fundraise, the way we have
to sell NFTs, the way we have to do everything in this space is all about speculation and getting
the DJ and gamblers and getting the the what do you want to call it, you know, the way that they
will give us their money for a quick financial gain. So if the airdrop is what's the meta,
that is the meta. That's the way to get your game funded. That's the way to get your game
to the next level of another 12 months of runway. Because let's face it, to do some of these private
seed round series a there's only a limited amount of time. And for and the next thing is that a lot
of these VCs are finally getting smarter on how to invest into web three gaming. It's not no more
pretty pitch deck anymore. It's actually who are you? Let me see your resume. And finally, real
questions are being asked. And so with that said, the there is ways that speculation is going to be
able to get you funded. So the airdrop meta is what's in and that's what's getting you funded.
So I think like, yes, while the sticky game is something that we all are looking for,
I don't know how many years away we are from that sticky game really being something that
the game, the web three d gen or the gambler will want. And so until we're able to find another
UA way of bringing in more people that are actual real gamers, man, do we have a tough battle ahead
of us? 100%. And so this makes me wonder, is played airdrop a bad tactic? Or is it just
incomplete and not being used correctly? If I may, so I can't raise my hand. I'm on a desktop
right now. So sorry about that. And I think it's really circumstantial, right? Like if you make your
user base, farm and farm and farm and play your game for a long time, and they don't get the type
of reward that they were expecting, and you alienate your user base can be a dangerous tactic.
And secondly, if your platform sucks, or your game sucks, it doesn't matter how much you
incentivize them, they're not going to stay. So the most important part of building the community
is a for us is having the best marketplace we possibly can for y'all is creating a really
engaging game that's actually genuinely fun. I feel like a lot of web three games get so focused
on making sure their users profit. And that's necessary to get it. But some people get lost in
creating a great game. There's been a lot of web three games that when I played it, I was really
disappointed in. And because you know, when you look at like Overwatch or Call of Duty or these
massive games, people don't need to be monetarily incentivized to play their games because their
games are amazing. And I feel like if any time when you're building a community, if you focus
on building an incredible product before anything, it'll be really easy to naturally allow that
community to grow just because people want to be a part of your community because what you built is
amazing. But the airdrop can be really, really useful. You just have to be careful. You don't
want to alienate your user base. And you're spending a bunch of money. It's like you're
marketing money. And I forget who mentioned retention. retention is absolutely the most
important part. So it doesn't matter how great the airdrop is, if people are just coming to farm,
then once they've farmed, they're just going to leave and you spend all this time and all this
money and now you have no user base. So the airdrop can be incredibly useful. You just have to
navigate those waters very carefully. I love that take. So it almost seems like it is a good tactic
if you actually think about it full circle, especially with retention having that product
ready to go. James, I'm going to pass it over to you. I think we're going to find there's a lot
of different versions and variations of play to airdrop and how you can make it work. My concern
with the normal model I'm seeing where there's some fixed amount that can be earned over some
long period of time. Let's say you've got, you know, 100,000 of x things can be earned over three
months. Potentially, I see the benefit and the draw on that for the developer, because a player
that might come in for a play to earn model might get burned out in the first couple weeks. They
don't feel like they're earning enough. And maybe they think that makes the player have to stay
along around longer, similar to what we're seeing with some of the marketplaces, because they're
not going to be able to get that reward until the end of the third month since they play longer.
Where that falls apart for me, though, is that if it's a fixed amount of reward at the end,
then that player is incentivized to recruit their friends and play with their friends,
because the more people that come in and play, the less each one of them gets. And I think the
most successful games are those that you want to play with your friend group. You're having so much
fun playing it. You want to tell your friends about it. You want them to all come play with you.
And that's how it grows and compounds. One of the things we did a little bit different with gas
heroes launch was that we didn't go out and sell a collection. We actually airdropped all the NFTs
that are in gas hero to our current step in player base. We started with these gas hero badges, and
then the badge holders got these coupons for weapons and pets and heroes across the time.
I think that's kind of a play to airdrop as well. It's not a token. It's NFTs. I think there's
different ways that you can use it and be successful with certainly this airdrop meta
that we're seeing be used everywhere. But I think you have to be really mindful of what's your end
goal. Like if it's retaining players, if it's getting them to stay for three months instead
of two weeks, if it's whatever. But I think all that has to resolve around the game being fun to
play and people wanting to recruit their friends to come play with them. Without that, I think any
of these models fall on my face. I absolutely love that take, James. Thank you so much for that.
I'm going to pass it over to Game of Silks. Yeah. So when it comes to the play to airdropped model,
I really, when I think about it, I kind of, I think it's something that's here to stay. I think
it's going to get refined and a lot of games are going to be able to work into a way that makes
people engage more with their community or may engage more with their game as well, you know,
get people to come back season after season or month after month to engage in this. And I really
see it kind of taking the place of the web to battle passes that you see in all those games,
where they have certain milestones you have to hit. And once you hit those, you unlock
the next tier rewards. And that's really what we're seeing here. And I think it's with
some, you know, work and it being applied uniquely with each game,
it could encourage people that are playing that game to engage more with it. And
it's a way to reward your users to incentivize them to keep going back and keep playing.
Absolutely. I love that. I think that this is something that will definitely continue to build
on top of until we, I wouldn't say necessarily master it, but figure out how it works best for
each of our games, right? Ryan, over to you. Well, I have two questions and a statement.
What is the difference between play to earn and play to airdrop? Who, what type of gamer does play
to airdrop target, a web three gamer or a gamer? And then the statement, we are making games for
gamers. The point here is if you want to be successful in this space, we have to build core
game loops that attract the native gaming audience. When you play BR1, you register email, password,
download, play. There's no mention of NFTs. There's no mention of crypto. It aligns with
the core expectation of gamers. We've been successful in onboarding real gamers. We like
to say we acquire users like a web two gaming company and we monetize like a web three gambling
company. And that's important to note. The largest audience is that audience of core gamers that we're
all trying to attract, not the web three gamer. I love all of you guys' take so far. And it,
you know, this conversation started almost as play to airdrop being a user acquisition
tool. But the more that we think about it, is this possible that this is just a tool that we'll use
inside of the game, not to incentivize our gamers, but almost another ladder, right? Another game
loop in itself. I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to BSCM Gaming. Welcome to the stage, by the
way. Go ahead. Hello. Thank you. Great space. I want to try and take a slightly more, even more
of a contrarian take to this and add a little more feel to the fire here. Something I've witnessed
often is founders and game builders being pushed to go down the airdrop route, whether they liked
it or not. And this is often something that's pushed on them by either some early stage backers
who have been in the project from the beginning or a number of advisors in the space who
will come together often and constantly push this narrative until a founder or a team essentially
finds themselves cornered to have to go down this airdrop route, whether they like it or not. And
often it comes at the consequence of any long-term preservation of the project. Like there is this
angle too. Sometimes teams don't want to do it, but even their community is calling for it. Perhaps
someone from the initial team is also calling for it. Perhaps also a number of advisors are calling
for it. So you kind of have to go down it by the end of the route. Absolutely. And thank you for
joining the stage. I see that we do also have Mal. Welcome, Mal. I believe that you're over from
Gala Gaming. How are you doing? Hi, how's it going? Yeah, I'm over from Gala. We're actually
on an off-site currently. We're just seeing Jason and Adam. So I'm with both of those at the moment.
How are you doing? I'm doing great, man. We're talking about community and specifically play
the airdrop. I would love to hear your take on play the airdrop if you think it's beneficial,
not beneficial, good, bad, anything along those lines. Yeah, I wouldn't touch it personally. I
feel like it's airdrops today. I mean, the amount of scams around them, they've got a terrible name
as it is. I feel like you're pretty risky if you'd even get involved with a lot of them. We're the
ones that just land on your wallet. I guess they're a bit different. But I don't think you're getting
the right kind of crowd. You're not getting high quality users from that. They're just people who
go. I feel like if you've just got a decent product or you're making a decent product,
people will notice that. People will speak. You want it to be more organic is basically the summary.
I personally wouldn't touch airdrop stuff. I don't go looking for it. Some people do, but
I haven't really seen ecosystems grow based off just that. So I wouldn't say there's much data to
support it. Maybe there is, and I'm just not looking. But no, I wouldn't personally touch it.
And I know other people have different opinions on it, though.
Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for that taking. So it seems like we have a majority of negative
towards play to airdrop, but there has been some positives. Is there anything that the panel thinks
that we can build off of the play to airdrop? Or is this something that we should just absolutely
eliminate? Ryan, over to you. Look, you're doing a go to market and your phase one is bringing in
an initial pool of users, the critical threshold of users required for people to meet up,
have a good time and use your product, fuel the ecosystem. And hell yeah, brother.
If this is the thing that gives you the momentum to get started, to build that snowball of momentum
that is your user pool, but you have larger goals of targeting a standard web to game audience,
then fantastic. Why not let it rip? I absolutely love that. So it just seems like we need it's all
a case by case scenario. You know, I think that we've had a great topic around this. And so with
play to airdrop, you know, I think that we talked about that being UA, but then we talked about
retention, right? And retention being a massive thing when it comes to gaming. I would love to
hear your guys's takes on how you guys are retaining your players, especially it's so early
on, right? A lot of our products aren't completely finished. You know, we're developing our products,
what are some retention tools that you guys are using inside of your community and inside of your
game? I would love to hear examples, right? You guys are all builders. I'll go ahead and actually
pass it over to you, Ryan, as you did bring up the retention tool first.
I apologize. I rubbed on you, brother. I'm the need to repeat the question.
No worries. No worries. So we started talking about retention. What are some good ways that
you're retaining your community, you know, with your product and not only your product,
but within your community? It's a multi-pronged approach. And earlier we brushed on communication
and communication is everything. You don't need to reward people things. You don't need to give
them something special if you communicate with them daily and you make them feel heard. That's
step one is building a community. That is the driver of retention. Second to that within our
core game loop, it goes without saying we build functionality that incentivize users to show up
to fuel our D1, our D7, our D15 and our D30 metrics. For those of you in the audience,
these are measures of your users returning to the game. A user plays one day. What's the
number that he actually shows up tomorrow and plays again? What are the chances you see that
user show up again within 30 days? And there are certain benchmarks that you want to follow,
depending on the type of game that you make. In our end, we do have daily activity rewards,
that incentivize users to show up every day and log in and play. We include missions in the game.
You have a progression system. Not only can you complete these missions to earn rewards,
but you can level up your user profile. And by leveling up your account, you could claim
additional rewards. There's an element of seasonality. So we give users that reinforcement
around a time constraint. You need to claim these rewards before the timer runs out. And then last
but not least, I'll touch on our kill races. So in addition to our core game loop, where you could
play for free, you could play for 10 cents, play for a dollar, private, whatever. In the background,
we run a handful of tournaments. We call them our daily kill races, our weekly kill races,
and our monthly kill races. The way these tournaments work is we track user kills
throughout a period of time. So in the weekly kill race, we track all the kills you get in
game over a week. And the players who make it to the leaderboard by the end of the timer by the end
of the week, get a cash prize. And this incentivizes them to all show up to maintain their positions
within these leaderboards. That's driving those retention metrics that I was talking about just
before. I love that mix mob is actually doing something similar where we have our our we have
MXM attached to the leaderboards, our paid leaderboards. And every week we actually cash them out
and then go into a new cycle. So it's a great way to keep them going, keep them going on their own
time as well. I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to James and then Havin's compass.
One of the things we did a little different with gas hero was building a social structure into the
game. That's key to the very core of the gameplay loop. As you progress in our game, and your heroes
get stronger, and they add these pets and weapons and grow in rarity, from common to uncommon to
rare. One of the one of the most important parts of the game is who can earn these leadership
positions. So we have clans that then feed up into a guild, up into districts, up into city,
and then the entire world. And a massive part of our tokenomics is that everything that buys and
sells inside the marketplace that's built right into the app, a percentage of that goes right
back to the leaders that are in the game. So you want to progress and make your lineup of heroes
stronger so you can earn these leadership positions because that's a significant way to
earn. Somewhere we've got these auction houses built into the game at all of these different
social levels. It's 90% of the stuff that's sold in the auction house goes right into our PVP to
fund it. And then we split the game into both PVE activities where you're doing things solo,
and then PVE activities where you're operating as a group. So building the social structure,
recruiting people to join your clan and your guild, becoming a leader of the clan and guild,
getting your entire, not only individual lineup stronger, but the whole clan and guild in this
whole structure, we feel like is a massive retention tool because it's not just hanging
out in a discord server and building community and talking about the game. It's moving that
social structure into the game itself where you feel like you're a part of something. You're
building towards something greater than yourself. I love that. And you know, that's hopefully what
we'll start seeing now that we have games that are actually being ready to be launched.
Havens Compass, over to you. Thank you. This is actually a very good question. And it's more of
something that games that are live need to focus on. And I think we're not fully live yet. We have
an alpha version that's out. Users are testing it and so on. So to us, this is not the case right
now. But what I do think is very important is to have the strategy for the time when you're going
to launch the game because like otherwise we spoke about it before, the whole thing with keeping your
community engaged and all that. That's all part of it. That's for the beginning. And that needs
to keep on going. But then as soon as your game is out and it's entertaining, that's already the
first step into keeping the users entertained, keeping them playing this game. And when we speak
of reward systems, rewards don't necessarily mean they need to be, you know, NFTs or airdrops or
whatnot. A lot of things can be rewarding. Even if it's just a shout out like, yeah, this guy won
this tournament or this user has that and that much kills. And you know, these are also rewards,
but they're different types of rewards. They're more of a, you know, not a monetary. I'm not sure
if it's the correct word, but it's not, it's nothing, you know, it's not money. It's not
nothing. None of that. It's just some sort of a rewarding feeling that you give to the users as
well. And I think that's also an important thing to have. 100% Havens, thank you so much for your
answer. I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Game of Silks. Hey, yeah. So for retention,
one part of one part of our, I guess that we're working on to kind of tackle that with our game,
when you buy the horses in our game, it's a real life horse. So this horse will race or, you know,
can earn rewards for you for up to 20 years, its entire racing career. But a real world horse
might only race seven or eight times a year. So if you're a person coming and getting involved
in our game and just buying one horse, there's not that many times throughout the year where
you actually need to engage their game. So ways that we're, and that might not be, you know,
interesting enough for somebody to long-term go, Hey, I only, you know, touch this game seven or
eight times a year. Do I want to get involved with it? And do I want to keep coming back year
after year and acquire more horses? So a couple of the tools that we've implemented in that,
and these are really just based off the real world and how horse racing evolves there. But
we're introducing ways that people can stable their horses. So they can, if you have one horse
now, you can put it on a stable and think of that like staking your horse with a pool of other
horses. So you're one horse, like I said, might raise seven or eight times. But now if you were
to stable it with other horses, you might have 10 or a hundred other horses. And now in a year,
instead of just getting seven or eight races, you're looking at hundreds or however many.
So that's one way that we're working on getting people who are, you know, just purchasing one
or two and not, not your whales in the game who are super involved, but getting it so that they
can have more engagement and more action in the game through just one or two assets.
I love that. It's so interesting to see so many different games. And you know,
the way you guys use your own retention tools that is more geared towards your own game and
the features, right? We are heading into the hour, but BSCN, I love your takes. You always have so
many. I would love to know if you have anything else to add to retention, anything that you have
seen across all of the games you've came across, any retention tools that you have seen that you
really like, things that you thought really worked out. I would love to end it with you
before we head into the outros. I appreciate it. Sometimes I feel quite bad. I have really,
really bad outros. I'll say this. I think there's an awful lot in this industry specifically that
perhaps we're trying to reinvent that doesn't need reinventing. This is still the gaming space.
There's an awful lot of things from the box standard traditional gaming space that work
really, really well. I think sometimes we're perhaps overthinking it. Just copy those models,
look at some of the best games you may have played in a previous career or a previous life,
just replicate them in here and add a layer of Web3. That will probably do exceedingly better
than most things that are built natively Web3 up and trying to reinvent too much of this stuff.
I love it. It just made me think of the acronym KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.
Don't overthink it. Absolutely. Thank you so much. We are heading very close to the hour.
I want to make sure that everyone has a quick minute to give their outros so we can end this
on a great note. Jorge, anything you would like to add before we start the outros?
Yeah, I think a lot of this has been about user attention, about user acquisition,
about the meta in this space. I think it's cool to hear all the takes.
As a marketing guy, this is the shit that I study almost every single day
to understand how I'm going to be able to best help my clients. I think it's great to hear all
the different takes. I think one thing that I'll take or say is we are coming into a having event.
We are going to be coming into opportunities where new faces will be coming in. Make sure that
you're positioning your game or your project so that new faces understand from being able to just
either click on your Twitter profile or from your pinned tweet. Too many times do I see projects
assume that people know what they are or what they're doing or what their token is or what
the utility is and lose a customer. Make sure you keep it simple. The final message was keep it
simple, stupid. Again, Twitter profile, pinned tweet, your team, across your team, making sure
they're keeping it simple. A lot of new faces are going to be coming into the market in the coming
months. Make sure you take advantage of it. Yes, sir. Thank you so much for the knowledge.
The user journey is so important, especially in something as complex as Web3. It's very
difficult to understand. We need to make sure that we help navigate these new users as well
as these existing users. Jorge, thank you once again. We're going to go ahead and do a quick
outro. Any last words? If you guys could keep it short as we do have six minutes and I would love
to get an outro out to everyone, but BSCN Gaming, we're going to pass it over to you real quick.
Cheers. Really appreciate it. This next 12 months is going to be the most exciting space to be in.
Just make sure you're in it for the ride. Think of what you've got ahead. Think of how crazy it's
going to be and just capture that opportunity while it's here. Let's go. Get ready to buckle
in, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. Mikel, over to you.
Oh, my God. I was hopping. It's been an amazing space. I am clearly not very good at using my
Twitter. Excellent topics. I think leading into this next bull run, focusing on community and
how we can really help build cohesive communities around these brands that we're building is super
important. Yeah, I'm excited for the next six to 12 months of building with you guys. It's been
a pleasure these last couple of years and hopefully the fruits of our labor are finally here.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Mikel. Over to you, Havens Compass.
Thank you guys very much for having us here. This was a great space. I enjoyed it very much,
and I'm hoping that we'll do more spaces together. Last but not least, of course,
follow us, join us on Discord, download the game, play the game, give us feedback,
let us know what you think. Yeah, definitely exciting year to come.
We're looking forward to it with all of you, and thank you again.
Thank you for joining us. If you are here listening, make sure that you follow everybody
on the panel as they are all building something amazing. They've all been here for such a long
time. They have great expertise, great takes, and great products. Ryan, over to you for your outro.
Oh my God, are you really giving me this opportunity?
Well, folks, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking side by side with all of you.
I've never been more jealous of the younger generation growing into the age of games that
we are creating for them. The future of gaming is truly now. Over and out, folks. Till next time.
Thank you, Ryan. Game of Silks, over to you.
What an outro. Tough one to follow, but thank you, guys. Thanks, McSmob. Put on a great space today,
and great panelists here. So just a lot go you, McSmob. Give everybody a follow on stage.
They're all great speakers, so thank you. Thank you so much, and thank you for the praise.
James, over to you. Yeah, thanks, everybody, for listening, and thanks for the invite.
Everyone make sure you like the space, repost it, follow everybody that's up here, as everybody else
said. For Gas Hero, you can always check out our game at gashero.com. Click on that play
button. You can play for free. We also have a shout cast tournament happening tomorrow
on both our X account at Gas Hero Official and our YouTube channel, where you can actually see
the final rounds of our Gas War happening live. Thanks again. Thank you, James. Creativehood,
over to you. Thank you so much. I had a blast. I'm really excited to check out all these games.
You guys seem like you're building some cool things, and I loved how rational and thoughtful
everyone's input was and how non-toxic this environment was. I really enjoyed being a part
of this. Last outro, I just made a tweet announcing who our advisors are. It's really big news. I'm
really excited about it, and if any of you all are planning on launching an NFT for your platform
or need a platform to do it, shoot me a DM. We have some really cool tools that we've built,
and other than that, I wish you guys the best of luck. I love your vibes, and I can't wait to
check out what you've built. Creativehood, thank you so much. We love your vibes as well. Jordan,
over to you. Yo, so happy to be here. I'd say for personal outro, if you think my game sounds
cool or if you just like listening to me talk on my profile, my game's profile, I've got a video
now talking all about Eureka, but then just, you know, leave the space. We're talking about,
we're going to the bull market here. Gaming is the thing that will save crypto after the bull market.
You know what people play during bear markets? Video games. When the economy is bad, they stay
home, they play video games. We are the reason why the next bear market will not be a crypto winter.
It's because people will still be playing the games we're building now, and that's a pretty
big opportunity. I'm here for it. Let's go, Jordan. Thank you so much. I love that take.
Andy, over to you. Hey, guys. I'm not rugged anymore, so I've never got an intro,
but I'll do my intro as my outro, I guess. My name is Matt with Corner Copious. I'm the marketing
director over there. We're building a very large open world MMO, currently on Cardano and ETH,
and soon to scale out to other blockchains. But yeah, I would just love to invite you guys to
come check out what we're doing. It's going to be an epic, epic journey over the next few years
as we continue to build out our game alongside our community. So we're currently in pre-alpha
testing, and we will be unrolling quite a few core game systems like inventory, our crafting
system, our avatar creator, all sorts of really great things coming online in the next few months.
So come check us out, and I hope to be on one of the next spaces. Absolutely, indeed. I'm sorry
that we weren't able to get you in on the intro. We'll make sure that you're the first intro next
time you're on our panel. Mal, last but not least, over to you. Yeah, I also didn't get to give an
intro, but I can kind of say it now as well, just like the last speaker. So I be working quite
closely with the Gala chain engineers, the people in the community who are building,
which is very important to us. We love our community. We love this space, and we look
forward to actually helping people build on Gala chain. So I just want to say thanks for inviting
me onto the panel to speak, and hopefully you can see a lot of you because you're all builders.
If you need a chain to build on that is customized for gaming, Gala chain is definitely the place to
be building. So I'd hopefully love to see you there, and you can just shoot me a message.
Hit me up on Twitter in the Gala discord, and I'll be happy to help you
stop building on Gala chain. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Mal. We appreciate it. Ryan,
I see you have your hand up. Any last words? I would say it would be a robbed opportunity
to the incredible audience that we have out here. If any of you out there like the games,
like the speakers here slide into their DMs, collaboration is everything. And I know every
single person here up here is eager to work with you. And it goes without saying, but it felt really
important to share. Ryan, I absolutely love that so much. Absolutely. Web3 is beautiful,
especially with partnerships. So make sure you slide in DMs, connect with people. Your network
is your net worth. So thank you so much, Ryan, for that. We are going to go ahead and close out
with the outro song. Once again, thank you so much to everybody that joined. Thank you so much to
everybody that took the time to listen to these beautiful, amazing people. I'm going to go ahead
and end it with the Fisher song. Thank you so much to everyone that tuned in. We will see you
guys next week, Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST. Thank you, everybody.