1/ Have been thinking more about @Jihoz_Axie’s chart that shows @AxieInfinity D30 and D90 retention basically the same. D90 of 50%+ is dope. But the insight is this is the retention curve of someone holding a job, not just playing a game.
2/ In future blockchain games, there will be P2E earners, players who spend, and players somewhere in the middle. Balancing the 3 is key. P2E earners will seek consistency of earning and job satisfaction, delivered by their guild / game community.
3/ P2E earners will also leave for other jobs in the P2E world if all else being equal they’re offered significantly higher pay with another game or guild. In a world with many P2E games, they will compete for earners like companies do for employees today.
4/ Like companies today, I think future P2E games can leverage earners to build UGC content and enrich the social environment, rather than a more single-player experience grinding for assets to sell. Earners can have different jobs based on skillsets and interests.
5/ Anyone building a blockchain game should study @EveOnline and it’s system of corporations (and overlords), still imho the closest thing to the metaverse we have today:
6/ We’re still on the ground floor of blockchain gaming. There are 150+ teams today building blockchain games. Always interested in seeing the next wave of in-game innovation. DMs open!
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1/ .@jeremysliew and I are thrilled to lead the $100M Series A of @Splitgate, the competitive AAA arena shooter that’s taken the gaming world by storm. In 1 month post console launch they’ve had over 13M downloads.
2/ CEO Ian Proulx first built @Splitgate, a “Halo meets Portal” game, as his senior undergrad project at Stanford. In the first ever playtest, friends played for 5 hrs straight during finals and Ian knew he found the fun.
3/ The next 5 years, Ian and co-founder Nicholas Bagamian grinded on a ramen budget. They launched on PC in 2019, absorbing player feedback before launching last month on console, and reaching 200k concurrents within 3 wks
1/ As a gaming and a crypto investor, I get asked sometimes what’s the bigger opportunity. Well today, there are ~10M active DeFi users, 100-200M cryptocurrency holders. There are 2B gamers in the world today.
2/ Annual sales in gaming was $175B last yr and larger than music + video combined. The top 50 game franchises have all done $2B+ in sales. Crypto projects are *worth* more but games generate more revenues and have more users today.
3/ And comparing still to social networks, the biggest game platforms have 100-200M MAUs (Roblox, Steam, PlayStation). FB has 2.8B MAUs. I believe gaming and social network use cases are the best ones to bring the next 1B users to web3.
1/ Play-to-earn in blockchain gaming. Some thoughts on what I think it is, what it is not, and the future
2/ What it is: Enabled millions of people around the world a way to earn more money than they had before. The @AxieInfinity, @YieldGuild and other Axie guild teams have truly changed lives, in the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela and beyond
3/ What it is: Brought legitimacy to what has been a decade of grey and black market where players have grinded for in-game items, gold, and services for other players who were willing to pay
1/ After speaking with several large game publishers the past wks it’s clear that @AxieInfinity has lit a fire around the adoption of blockchain in gaming ($10M+ rev / day will do it). Some takeaways 👇
2/ Every major gaming publisher is exploring blockchain, overcoming suspicions that it’s a solution in search of a problem, and also navigating the challenges of who/how to partner in a crowded landscape and what questions to ask. Many compliance-related ones have come up.
3/ Some practical questions: Will the partner provide compliant fiat-crypto on/off-ramp? In how many countries? Will they support payments in-app? Tax reporting for creators? Can they act as a merchant of record? What products are they whitelabeling? What’s actually live?
1/ @EveOnline is the most OG of open world games, a leap towards the metaverse 20 years in the making. I had a chance to discuss the magic of EVE with founder / CEO @HilmarVeigar 👇
2/ EVE is a “capitalistic space trading game”, with a hard and soft currency, where players mine, trade, build, and battle in a single shard and join guilds (“corporations”) of 1000s of players. Battles have been so epic, books have been published about them:
3/ There’s an estimated 10M players, ~500k DAUs. 2020 was the biggest year ever for new player adds. Over 15% of players today have played the game since launch 18 years ago. No other game has accomplished that at this scale. 4 principles drive the game:
1/ After spending more time in the @AxieInfinity ecosystem, I feel that the heart of the play-to-earn (P2E) model lies in the new guild system, like @YieldGuild
2/ Guilds have been at the heart of MMO/open world games for decades. Players grind and chop trees not because it’s fun, but because they value their identity and reputation within their guild
3/ P2E has created the 2.0 Guild, revenue-generating organizations that buy, breed, lease assets, and provide employment, in addition to community. They can solve the cold start challenge for new NFT games, and also become dominant net new asset buyers (Eg Axies)