1/ It’s an eye-opening time for venture-backed gaming studios. A wave are set to launch open beta in the next 12 mos. But with 10,000 games launched on Steam per yr or Android per week, the odds are stacked against success for game 1. Studios should think strategically 👇 2/ Have a large enough private beta

Regular playtests are not enough to test if your game is a “1,000 hour game”. Recruit at least 10,000 players for your private beta to get a proxy for player retention, interest, and monetization. Know and target your gamer segment (casual… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

I’ve played @duolingo for 80 days straight. It’s one of the best gamified consumer apps I’ve used. Others agree, Duo has:
- 61M MAUs / 16M DAUs (+62% yoy)
- $370M in 2022 rev (+47% yoy)
- Cashflow positive ($46M in 2022)

Below I breakdown the features that make it so good👇 2/ Early monetization disruption:
Back in 2011 when language learning apps like Rosetta Stone charged $500, @duolingo disrupted the model by charging $0. Instead, users translated internet content which Duo sold back to publishers. Duo monetizes mostly via a freemium model.

1/ So honored to join the @apecoin DAO board, launched today along with the $APE token!🧵

https://twitter.com/apecoin/status/1504201556165644298

2/ Love or hate NFTs, they have captured the consumer imagination and continue to be the onboarding ramp for the mainstream into web3. @BoredApeYC is leading the way as the #1 NFT brand, becoming a household name and building the next gen “Disney” of our generation.

1/ Sharing a life update! I’m thrilled to join @FTX_Official to lead FTX Ventures, gaming, and commercial initiatives reporting to @SBF_FTX, in the company’s next chapter as a leading global financial services and web3 company.
ventures.ftx.com 2/ We’re launching FTX Ventures today, a $2B fund for builders, by builders. We’re excited to support great teams across crypto, web3, and more. If you’re excited to work with @SBF_FTX, @ramnikarora, @armaniferrante, @ajm_alameda, J, Brian Lee+, hit us up!
wsj.com/amp/articles/c…

1/ Have been thinking about the future of web3 gaming after a recent trip to the Nordics (Slush), home to some of the world’s greatest gaming companies (Supercell, King, Minecraft..). Web3 was on everyone’s minds. Then the Ubisoft incident happened, a repeat of the Discord one. 2/ Ubisoft’s announcement of its NFT launch, the first of the AAA publishers, was met with strong player negativity. Ubisoft quickly took down the launch video. For every tweet in support it looked like 10 against. Why did this happen and can this be overcome?

https://twitter.com/sixkeysunlocked/status/1468277606629920776

1/ Have been thinking about the evolution of VC investing in crypto, if we believe it to be as big or bigger than the internet shift of the late 90s and mobile of the 00s. Today, there are no more “internet” or “mobile” tech investors. To not be is to be irrelevant. 2/ In the last 5 years, early in the cycle, crypto-focused VC funds, mostly early-stage, achieved 5-100x returns with both index and concentrated strategies, with significant gains from those early in DeFi. Mean returns 7-8x. Notable funds all 10x+.

1/ What will it take to onboard the next billion users to web3? Killer apps. Scalable and performant blockchains. And bridging the 2, web3 developer platforms. @alchemyplatform is the leader today, and @ravi_lsvp and I are thrilled to join this round.
guce.techcrunch.com/consent?brandT… 2/ What exactly does Alchemy do? Provide developers read-write access to multiple blockchains, provide developers 1st-party and eventually 3rd-party APIs, data, tools to build faster + easier on blockchains (huge challenge today), power other data/infra providers in DeFi.

1/ Buying gaming NFTs on today’s NFT platforms almost feels like buying blind. You don’t (have to) do that buying a stock. Nor should you with a gaming NFT. @hawku_com is addressing that need and @mercebent and I are thrilled to lead their seed round
venturebeat.com/2021/10/28/haw… 2/ @imcharliegraham from @hawku_com is building a marketplace where buyers can research, buy, and sell game and utility tokens based on relevant real-time game and metaverse-specific data. What’s the best ROI asset purchase I can make, across games?

1/ In a short period of time, *every* gaming pitch I now hear is at minimum crypto-curious. Gaming-native teams know how to design great games; crypto-native teams know how to build web3 communities. To build a great web3 game you need both + thoughtful tokenomics: 👇 2/ Building a native web3 community: Pick your blockchain partner, engage with their community, build culture on Discord and Twitter, engage fans with NFT drops. Today, the web3 vs hardcore gaming communities don’t perfectly overlap. Mix carefully

1/ Valve banned blockchain games from Steam yesterday. It’s not surprising. Web2 centralized platforms get a cut of all value generated from its ecosystem. Blockchain circumvents that and decentralizes value back to builders and users

https://twitter.com/spacepirate_io/status/1448713803680473089?s=21

2/ Let’s take Roblox: most people don’t realize Roblox developers only get 27% revenue share. The company did ~$500M in rev Q2 this yr alone. Yet they just announced only 1,000 devs of their 1.2M community make $30k or more. Does that feel fair?

1/ Musings on top genres for blockchain games, pros & cons👇 2/ MMORPG (@EveOnline, World of Warcraft, Warframe, @staratlas): metaverse-style immersive digital worlds and economies with items for trading, in-game currencies, and social guilds. CON: hardest genre to build and scale

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

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

1/ @axieinfinity. It took them 3+ yrs to make their first $10M in revenue and 5 days to make their latest $10M. Runrating $1B+/mo of GMV. 350k DAUs. What is going on here… 3/ People compare @axieinfinity to @PokemonGoApp but other than core meta (cute collectible characters with distinct properties) and battle mechanics, the game hook is entirely different.

1/ As a gaming + crypto investor, I’ve been thinking about the intersection of the 2 for months. We’ve yet to see a major game or publisher adopt blockchain tech. Yet it’s really intriguing. Why has this been so hard? 2/ First what could crypto in a game look like? In-game digital currency + ICOs, fiat-crypto payments, items exchange, NFT items/skins/land, gold farming marketplace, interoperable NFTs cross-game, decentralized transactions in the metaverse. Why isn’t there broad adoption?

1/ There’s a lot of chatter on the #grandattrition, where companies are seeing unprecedented rates of employee turnover right now. You are not alone. A lot of drivers for this and thoughts on mitigation... @lightspeedvp 2/ 15mos of covid (and counting) have made people rethink what they want - life, priorities, values, where to live etc. Many have experienced financial hardships but some have amassed unprecedented savings that’s given them real optionality.