# Web3 Gaming - User Acquisition

By [Nylz](https://paragraph.com/@nylz) · 2023-11-30

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[**_Revolutionizing Player Engagement: Unpacking User Acquisition in Gaming_**](https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vAxRvPzOakxl?s=20)

Delve into the heart of gaming's evolution with a focus on user acquisition strategies.

This discussion peels back layers of gaming industry tactics, offering insights into how games attract and retain players in an increasingly competitive digital world.

Discover how user acquisition is being redefined in the gaming sector, setting new standards for player engagement and community growth.

**_TRANSCRIPT_**

Legendary 00:02:34 Gm gm, everyone. And welcome back to our weekly show. We had a fantastic conversation last week And this week, we really want to dive into what I think is actually one of the most interesting topics when it comes to web 3 gaming.

Legendary 00:03:12 Diving into user acquisition might sound boring at first, but I really think, if we're looking at the current sentiment in the market, And if we're looking at how we've been discussing back and forth, is this a bull run, but the number of active trading wallets still super low.

Legendary 00:03:29 It's still like only almost 9 k people who are trading where new users coming from, how we will get new users will web 3 gaming be the vertical that finally drives new interest into the space, and that all ultimately kind of leads back to talking about user acquisition, And for that reason, I'm also super happy that we actually have, quite some diverse projects that we can talk about user acquisition strategies today.

Legendary 00:03:54 From, obviously, ZTX with my lovely Coast Karma when it comes to a company that has such a solid, such a massive foundation in an already existing, community with Zapeto to pirate nation where we've seen a constant development over the last year with new updates being shipped almost every week and really onboarding the arbitrage community but also getting the perspective in from, content creators on the gaming side themselves because ultimately a lot of community building, a lot of user acquisition comes down to, working with content creators, but also partnering up with other, companies, or even sometimes competitors in the space So getting that all together and talking about what makes the user acquisition strategy in web 3 successful is a topic I'm super excited for with my monologue out of the way, Karma, how are you doing?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:04:55 Absolutely beautiful. Very, very happy for this panel. You know, overjoyed to see Pirate Nation, to see this here join us. I can't see other speakers yet because I'm getting slightly rugged, but, you know, all the everybody joining us today is just always a joy to have on stage, and I'm looking forward to this convo. I am actually in Dubai. I'm traveling a little bit. And, today, I saw Birch Khalifa.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:05:23 So just half an hour ago, I was in the highest building in the world and, you know, just like very, very pumped, to jump from that place to now, you know, sitting here and chatting to you guys.

Legendary 00:05:37 Love to hear that. Eliza, welcome to the stage as well. You are traveling or you will be traveling soon. I didn't remember from the last time we spoke.

Elisa 00:05:46 Hey, everybody. Thank you, legendary. Great to see you all of you guys here. Yeah. I'm traveling this Sunday. To go to YGG Summit, and I will actually be seeing Carmel there. And then, following that going to Japan, so it's it's definitely gonna be interesting for me because we won't be able to create content at my usual PT setup. But luckily, I'm going to Japan, so you know, they're very high-tech. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find like a streaming cafe or something. So, yeah, glad to be here and very excited for this conversation.

Legendary 00:06:19 Absolutely. Don't worry about having streaming cafes and tech access in Japan. Sanjay, welcome to the stage What about you? Are you traveling? Are you stationary at the moment? How do you think about content creation when you're on the move?

Sanjay 00:06:32 First of all, thank you for having me. And, yeah, I do a lot of traveling every travel from my room to the kitchen and then back to the office, which is also in my house. So, yeah, I do a lot of traveling around in the apartment. Probably like 300 for the hundred steps per day altogether. So, yeah, probably about, hopefully, I'll hit 600 steps today. So, yeah, but excited to talk about user acquisition and web through gaming any day. You know?

Legendary 00:06:58 Love it. And, look, that you're joking about that, but for me, that was a massive change in my life when I took my daily news show, the modern market, from audio only to live streaming that on YouTube, because I was used to walk around during the spaces and, like, get stuff done in my flat or just walk around for inspiration. And now I'm, like, all stationary and have to look somewhat into the direction of the camera. So that's definitely been a big change. So love the love the movement within your own home. This from Pirate Nation, and the, the head of business at the company behind it, a proof of play. Welcome to the stage. How are you doing, traveling stationary at the moment?

Dith 00:07:39 Yo, Jim, everyone. Caught me at a sort of slightly odd time. So one of the funny problems they haven't solved completely in ecommerce is that some companies like to give you a really wide delivery window. And so long story short, I've just had some furniture arrive unexpectedly. So if you bear with me 5 minutes, I'm just gonna get it up into my flat, and then I'll be able to actually, contribute to the spaces, properly. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to share a few thoughts about, user acquisition and, what we're working on at Fire Nation.

Legendary 00:08:18 Love it. So we will transition from a furniture acquisition to user acquisition in just a couple minutes, but actually getting getting into the main topic first, quite would like to start with you Karma for an opening question. Basically, I'm really interesting to start the conversation with you because Zepeto has this massive web 2 community ZTX is building a web 3 community first.

Legendary 00:08:47 You spoke about many times how you're going for the web 3 community first, take the learnings there, and then go for basically acquiring the web two users to and and diving and leveraging the leveraging the community that you already had. And across that journey, my question is, what has been the biggest difference so far that you've seen when it comes to acquiring acquiring users in web 2 versus acquiring the user's game, whereas in WIP 3.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:09:20 Yeah. That's, you know, the hits the nail on the head. The question behind today's spaces. The very, very quick answer to that is we haven't actually seen the extent to which we can onboard the web to user base yet because ZTX as a product is not yet ready. So let me maybe zoom out and see, you know, just how we approach this problem. Well, the wet free space is still so small. That for a larger project, especially something social like a metaverse, user acquisition very quickly turns into user onboarding.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:09:56 Because there's only so many existing digits that you can actually, you know, engage. Now, the way we see that ZT X can be simplified into 2 phases, phase 1 is feedbacking and improving the initial early beta game with web free native community. And our phase 2 is onboarding the web to users from the I don't know if it's just me, but comma, you are rocking for me. Oh, that is really, really bad.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:10:29 In that case, I am going to force you to go to someone else first, and I'm going to try and reconnect, with maybe, you know, another, another line.

Legendary 00:10:40 Yeah. Absolutely. Then let's let's quickly, switch gears on that. And maybe you've mentioned the point of how user acquisition turns into user onboarding. And since we have both Eliza and Sanjay with us as content creators, and, partnerships with content creators with KOLs influences, however you wanna call them, play a big, big role And I know Eliza, it's something you've been talking about for a very long time.

Legendary 00:11:08 How, basically, when it comes to onboarding people, it's not only about educating them what web 3 is, but also like forgetting about web 3 for a moment and actually talking about the game at heart and talking about why this is something, to be excited about. So I would quite like to know from you when you partner up with web 3 games. How do you approach that challenge that on the one hand, you obviously have a massive reach within the web 3 community.

Legendary 00:11:36 And there's maybe not the question of user onboarding because those people might be very familiar with how Web 3 works, but then you also extend your audience beyond that and you have users, gamers who are maybe not that familiar. And you kinda serve a bit 2 different target audiences at the same time when you create content in partnership with a game that you're interested in?

Elisa 00:12:00 Yeah. Really good question. I'd say, like, the the instances in which I've, like, witnessed web 2 players that school them, you know, experiencing playing a web 3 game has been, like, in my discord, so it hasn't necessarily been through my Twitter content. And I'd say the main the main thing is really just, yeah, the onboarding process. Like, I used to think, Oh, making a wallet a is not that complicated and, you know, to any to any gamer really, it shouldn't be, too much of a hurdle because we are pretty techie.

Elisa 00:12:39 But there's also something else, which is, you know, the younger generation has a really short attention span and unless you're telling them, oh okay, play this game and you can make a $1000 today, like there's no real incentive to creating a wallet because to them it's just playing, yet another game. And sometimes the financial incentives, you know, don't remotivate a younger player. Like, I'm talking about people who like 18 to 20. So in in the playtest that I've ho hosted, the most recent successful one was Golden Tides, and, they basically just needed to sign up with Gmail.

Elisa 00:13:19 So there was no wallet creation necessary and I continue to host play tests for games that have this kind of onboarding just because I don't want to lose people and I also don't want them to have like a negative perception, of the games that I'm, you know, encouraging them to playtest but I would, to be honest, like, my main thesis about this is, is to do with IP and If there's an IP that's good enough and familiar enough, people will be willing to to play the games like I I am very bullish on, you know, NFT projects now moving towards actually thinking about, okay, how can we expand our IP?

Elisa 00:14:02 How can we make our IP familiar and, just like a bigger brand, obviously Pudgy Penguins is a massive example. But there are other brands that are starting to follow their footsteps like cool cats, imaginary ones, sappy seals, and imaginary ones is actually, now working on mobile games. Grates is also a very good example. And yeah, I think people, you know, when they recognize and I and they're like, oh wait, I've seen this before, they're more willing to actually play it and yeah, that that's my main thing really.

Elisa 00:14:38 I think if players like an IP and like the look of a game and and think it's something familiar, they're more likely to go and play it.

Legendary 00:14:47 Yep. Yeah. I think that's a very good take, and I think that, thinking just beyond the game and thinking how you can build an IP around it that might create multiple touch points with the brand than just having that single activation the game is such a such a valuable strategy. Sanjay would love to get you into the conversation before I'll check back in with Carmen to see if her connection is working again.

Legendary 00:15:12 How do you think about games basically extending beyond the game itself, trying to build a broader ecosystem as a part of also the user acquisition strategy because ultimately if we take the example by Elisa, thinking about Padji penguins, by having the toy lines in Walmart, they just create so many more touch points with the brand than before.

Sanjay 00:15:35 Yeah. You know, I used to work in, in sales in the past. I was not that of good a salesman, but, you know, I I went to a lot of classes and sales classes. And and, you know, they taught there that to to to buy something, a customer or a person has to see the object or has to see the brand at least nine times before they decide or even think about buying it. This is like some statistics like the sales company came up with. They have to see it at least nine times. So, like, if you show a game like one time to a player or a gamer.

Sanjay 00:16:07 Most of the chances are no matter how good the game is, the chances are they are not going to play it, or maybe they might just take a look at it, but they're not, like, inclined to play it. And that's what that's something like we mentioned, you know, like me, Eliza, wipe you down there. You know? A rating as well. We mentioned with some games we work with is that, if you want a one off partnership or one of something like that, it's much chancellor is not going to work because people are going to look at it one time, and they're gonna forget about it the next week or the next month. So you have to at least show them multiple times again and again. And not just one one platform, but on different platforms. So, you know, you wanna use the acquisition. You gotta get out of Twitter.

Sanjay 00:16:43 You know, like, most of the people in this space are not really full time gamers and not spending 8 to 10 hours a day gaming. So you gotta go to TikTok. You gotta go to, you know, YouTube and Twitch and all that. And, and, you know, like, putting these IPs in the stores where, like, when you go, you walk up to a store and you see Fortnite, you know, toys everywhere. And now that just reminds these kids that, oh, I gotta go back home and play Fortnite. And then you go to, you go to, like, McDonald's or something. I don't know if McDonald's have a collab with Fortnite, but they probably will eventually. And, you know, like, you buy a Fortnite happy meal or something like that.

Sanjay 00:17:18 So the more you can come in front of the customer or like just just organically be present in front of them, the higher chances that they are going to indulge in your ecosystem. So Pajee Pangoon is doing great job that they have these pajees around, but I still think right now they don't have, like, an end product? Like, where does the person go after they buy the pudgy? Right? Like, oh, they got they look at this pudgy, click is buying it. A couple of YouTubers have it in their, in their house and whatnot. But what can a normal person, you know, like a normal kid can do apart from buying the toy alone. Like, yeah, they can buy the toy from Walmart, but where does that go after?

Sanjay 00:17:58 Right? So I think they're probably creating some mini games and stuff. I think they have one game. I don't know if it's public yet or not, but, you know, maybe make it more public so people can be like, oh, that's that game I can play, and I can go back home, and I can, you know, have this toy and also play this game. So, yeah, there's a lot of work needed, but, again, user acquisition is not the easiest job. Probably most toughest job and the most important as well. So this conversation can just keep going then going and going.

Legendary 00:18:24 Yeah. Absolutely absolutely agree with you. And I think those are some very, very good examples. Carmel, welcome back to the stage. Just wanna catch up quickly. On what we've been extending the conversation on.

Legendary 00:18:38 The the question that I had for Eliza was basically how she thinks about the two points that you mentioned very early on in your statement, which was the user acquisition that then also blends in with user onboarding because we have to educate people about web 3, and both Eli and Sanjay made the point that, it is so important to not only think about the game, in itself, but think beyond that, think about the ecosystem, are creating, like, the Pudgy penguins are doing with the toy brand that just ultimately creates so many more touch points with the brand.

Legendary 00:19:09 And I would love to get you in on that knowing how many collaborations with brands Zepeta has also had and also knowing how collaborations can be a fantastic tool to acquire more users and basically leverage other communities.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:19:24 Yeah. And I hope I'm back I'm just going to apologize for, you know, dropping off. I am consistently being rocked guys. Can you hear me alright? Just to quickly, you know, confirm. Works perfectly right now. Okay. Let's dive straight into it. So I completely agree with everything that had been said. I was, you know, it was possible for me to follow the majority of the conversation. But if I were to simplify the entire conversation and bring it back to the with basics. I think before a user can even discover whether or not they like your app, whether they like your game, what before they can even discover if your game is fun.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:20:05 Currently what I personally as a user find the biggest hurdle is usually just a simple logging into the games. Even thinking back about the first DTX playtest, which, you know, was a very, very early version, but nevertheless, we wanted community feedback. It was clear from the start that only Savvy web for users would ever actually participate and play and feedback because the only logging login, flow that was available to us was actually utilizing MetaMask and utilizing MetaMask mobile. So that instantly cuts you off from any onboarding attempts early on.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:20:45 But this is, you know, changing. And here, I wanted to say that the onboarding itself just is so closely correlated with how the technology is advancing. We all depend on blockchain tech. We all depend on these 3rd party solutions that help us abstract accounts and help us actually make logins and utilization of blockchain so much easier for for, you know, just basically newbies. And these solutions have really advanced over the past months. So what games are now able to do is create something called smart accounts, abstracted accounts.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:21:22 Which means that while your game has elements on the blockchain and while your users have ownership of their assets, You do not need to undergo the entire loop of educating them about the security and self custody of assets. You do not need to teach them about how they, you know, need to stir store their seed phrase and retrieve it if something goes wrong. Instead, what you can do is create social logins and create the, in a way, a Metamask wallet or login enables you to then create an account in game, which is a one stop shop for all interactions.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:21:59 I am criminally oversimplifying, and I'm sure this is going to, you know, add to this a bit later on as as is incredibly savvy in that regard. But if I were to simplify, the technological progress and integrations, which are now possible, are really allowing us to invite users who have never interacted with MetaMask, to access games via social logins and obstructed accounts. You know, in a very, very easy manner or at least easier than it used to be just a few months ago. And that really opens the doors.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:22:34 So last example, and I'm going to, you know, to pass the mic back to you, you know, after the beta launch, CTX will work to add support for Zepeta account. As an option for creating and managing ZT X game accounts. Now this means that any existing Zapato user and Zapato being, you know, a web to app that backs us and has over 430,000,000 lifetime users by now, these users will be able to join ZTX with virtually no additional setup required. And the same will be possible with social logins, be the Gmail and other accounts.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:23:08 And you can then go even further and combine that with on ramp integrations where instead of, you know, having to leave the app and onboard your funds, you also have frictionless buying in game. And I think this all is going to genuinely help us have a quick start for completely new users that has never even touched a MetaMask before. And I think that's going to be genuinely huge.

Legendary 00:23:35 Yeah. I think, social logins, the ERC standards action are so, so important for the space to still acknowledge that the technology exists in the background, but not for the user from, like, day 1 to learn everything anew, as to just be able to onboard them. Because I also think taking the other extreme and just saying that the technology in the background doesn't matter. People won't care about if it's web 3 or not.

Legendary 00:24:02 Might be true in the future in the long run, but it certainly not true in the short midterm, in my opinion, also because I think that when we speak about web 3 gaming, we speak a lot of times about in game economies. We do have the connection to, economies that are ultimately fostered and leveraged by real money. And for those reasons, I do think that, it will play an important role to at least acknowledge the the tech that is in the background, even though most of the users don't really need or want to know how it works in the background because you also don't care about that in a similar vein.

Legendary 00:24:38 When you go shopping, on Amazon for whatever things you want to buy. This, I wanna check with you. Are you back with us on stage?

Dith 00:24:48 I am. Yes. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for the patience. Just really awkward timing, on a delivery there, but I'm back at my desk now, hydrated, moisturized, all that good stuff.

Legendary 00:25:01 So Wonderful. And ready ready for my question. Yeah. So the the the way how I onboarded to parrot nation was via 1 of the parleys, the, collaborations with other communities I think for me it was I missed out on the on the yoga pads where I'm a whole guy then. So the infinity gods, was it the other way around? I don't fully remember. But, I definitely remember seeing them over and over and over on the timeline. And I quite would like to know from you how you think about those community collaborations? Do you see them as a very, very strategic element to get exposure to multiple communities?

Legendary 00:25:39 Do you see them as as as user acquisition tools in the sense of it is easier to acquire users from web 3 native communities who already know how to maybe even navigate a layer solution because for some, it might be a challenge to even get on arbitrum. And then you basically save yourself the time to do the user onboarding and educate them about arbitrary? Like, how do you position, those parlays and community collaborations within your overall user acquisition strategy?

Dith 00:26:10 Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the great question. So Well, maybe to share the context. Power Nation as a game has been live for, a year, about a year now. We're coming up to the 1 year anniversary in, like, 2 weeks. When it launches in a very, very early and rural states, There wasn't a whole lot to do in the game. It's pretty basic, but we've come a long way since then. We've been launching, a game update almost every week. Since launch. So it's improved a lot. The game is more fun. But we've also invested in that onboarding experience. So Right now, there's the custodial wallet option.

Dith 00:26:49 If you arrive to the game and you have an existing wallet, you've already been onboarded to F Three. Great. You can connect with an existing wallet. And if you don't, you're completely new to the blockchain. You've never owned any crypto. You can have a wallet created for you. Use the social login you get into the game. One of the things that we've done, because we are a fully on chain game, meaning all game logic runs, on chain. Now you can't really have that happen on Ethereum L1 because it's just too slow and too expensive. So one of the things that we've done is allowed some of our NFTs to live on Ethereum L1, which is where, you know, people like to trade is where all the liquidity is.

Dith 00:27:27 It's where most of the market participants sort of you know, enjoy, NFTs, but gameplay to address the fully on chain scalability question runs on arbitrary Nova But, of course, you know, again, thinking about the user, experience, people don't like to bridge. They don't like to switch networks and so on. So we've abstracted away all of that.

Dith 00:27:50 If you've never interacted with Arbitrum, I mean, many people have, obviously, it's a it's a fantastic ecosystem, but if you haven't, then, you know, we don't have any of the, I think typical issues where you need to understand what this ecosystem is, how it works, how you add it to your MetaMask and do an expensive and long bridge. You kind of arrive on Pirate Nation. There's a, a kind of a, like, a pop up where we explain what's happening, like, gameplay happens on l 2. So you check a box, you sign one transaction, and then then that we could kinda take care of everything for you.

Dith 00:28:24 So gameplay will run on arbitrary Nova, which is super fast, super scalable, and you never need to, bridge. You never need switch networks and so on. This kinda, like, feeds into, I think partly answering your question, but also what what Karma was saying is that you really have to think about how you make it easy for users to get in. And we're, at this point, fairly sophisticated in that onboarding funnel. Like, we look at every step, every screen, every click that the user has to make even once they get into the game. Right? How do we make sure that we don't lose a new player within the first five minutes of the game. One of the things that we had seen, a few months ago was, like, players are getting into the game.

Dith 00:29:01 But then they're getting stuck, not knowing how to craft their first ship. And you kinda need a ship as pirate nation. A lot of you you need a ship to do combat, which is, like, probably the most fun thing in the game. So we're like, okay, how do we make it, like, really easy for people to get to their ship? Like, let's make that the first quest. So that helped a bit with, like, conversion through this, like, user onboarding funnel and then say, okay, it's not enough to make it the first quest. Let's actually, like, make it a pop up that hand holds the player through that first quests. So, like, we make sure every player coming into the game within their first minute has a skip, which is like a basic ship. And then okay, like, what's the, you know, where's the next drop off?

Dith 00:29:40 And, you know, we're looking at that funnel, you know, stage by stage and optimizing all along the way so that you basically, what you wanna have happen is, like, if ten people arrive on your gaming website dotcom, how can you get, like, as many of them? Ideally, 10 out of 10, but, you know, no site converts perfectly. So how can we get 9 or 8 of those ten people into the game past the first hurdle and experiencing the first sort of like fun loop that gives them that sort of like crunchy satisfying bit of dopamine that as good games do make you wanna play more. Right?

Dith 00:30:13 Like, that's you kinda have to get them to the fun as quickly as possible, without losing them at any point in that funnel now, finally, I have this terrible tendency when someone asked me a question to add a ton of context. So thanks for bearing with me. But, finally, to answer your question about the parleys, I think yes. There there's intentionality to who we're partnering with and why. And I think the the obvious headline there is that these are many of the high quality communities that have, either gone to market with a very clear value proposition, clearly speaking to gamers.

Dith 00:30:52 So, yeah, they're a newer project, but it's very clear who they're trying to attract and kind of community they've already curated or it's an older project at which point a lot of that community curation has already happened through the natural ebb and flow of trading and people who weren't interested in that project for the long term have probably left and people who are really enjoying it I've stayed on. I think like a good example of that is, is Wolf game. Right? Like, it it's a mature community. People at this point know what that's about and why enjoy it and why they're there.

Dith 00:31:25 So, you know, that's kind of a, you know, a game and an ecosystem that has some similarities to what we're building in terms of, you know, how the core product functions and and and and and other things. So we've been intentional in selecting communities to parlay with. We still have, many exciting ones in the pipeline.

Dith 00:31:46 And I think the one sort of maybe unique or different challenge we have from other games being fully on chain is that I mean, today, if we wanted to scale to 10, 20, 50, 100,000 players, very confident we could do that without really, you know, investing heavily in a marketing budget. We've essentially sort of spent nothing on user acquisition to date. But our challenge actually becomes in, the cost of that scale. Right? We run fully on chain and as scalable and as economical as arbitrary Nova is, it still costs something. Right? We're paying for gas for our players.

Dith 00:32:26 So the reason that we're not today scaling to hundreds of thousands of players is largely because we're building the underlying infrastructure and answering some of these hard questions that haven't really been answered before. Right? There's no fully on chain game today that has hundreds of thousands of players or millions of players. And hopefully, you know, we're we're part of the pack leading the way and then figuring that out. But, you know, that that's kind of a, a technological piece to that we have counterbalance against the question of user acquisition as well.

Legendary 00:32:57 I think that's that's a fantastic, perspective that you share and also really appreciate all the context that you embedded in it. I do have 2 follow-up questions, but I wanna go to Karma first, because I know you also wanted to share something on that perspective.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:33:13 Yeah. Actually, I had a I had a fun question in mind just to throw to the audience, but this really, like, jolted my memory. So I wanted to first maybe share something that we really sympathize with on ZT X side. You just mentioned that, you know, anything you do on chain, especially when you, take over the costs that users incur, can really quickly add up. And it's something that you know, just as a member of the audience, maybe you might not be thinking about, we all always scream.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:33:42 We want on chain elements and games and we want, you know, as much ownership of our assets as possible, but then very quickly adds up, especially as in game smart contracts tend to be quite complex. And as such, also utilize more gas. But the example I wanted to actually bring up was the, like, soft onboarding campaign we've done on Zt X side a few weeks ago. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to test the interest from web to audience Now that web or 2 audience is not yet ready to be onboarded. ZT X is not nearly as far along the way as we just heard pirate nation is.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:34:22 We are, you know, like, we are approaching our beta launch in a few weeks. So it will be a while until we have the smart accounts and social social abstraction in place. But what we wanted to do is see how high is the percentage and how high are the numbers of existing web 2 users which would be interested in a web free product. How many of these users would be interested in claiming as free digital collectible for the first time in their lives? So what we did was we displayed a link to existing Zapato users, the majority of which never utilized blockchain before, And what they were able to do is they were able to claim a digital collectible.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:35:02 It was a hoodie, which down the line, they can use both in the petal as an interoperable asset as well as in ZT X. So it's just a wearable for your avatar. And on the end of the user, on the user end, they truly never left as a petal app. At some point, you know, it took them to to, like, a screen where where, you know, the claim was successful. But on their end, they just claimed that they're just horrible. On orbit rooms. And, however, we've onboarded 200,000 new wallets to orbit room in under 24 hours.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:35:38 We actually had to stop this, this entire campaign early because the gas costs were completely ruining us. Now this is a bit of an exaggeration, but we did cut off the campaign early because 200,000 users claiming a digital wearable for free is something that, you know, very quickly approaches multiple figures, and we know for us, it was just a soft test. So in the future, these users can reactivate their accounts and, you know, enter straight into ZTX from Zepetto utilize their asset But I wanted to say that, you know, these things are incredibly costly.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:36:17 And until we have, you know, even faster, even cheaper solutions, it's going to be very difficult for gains for brands, for projects to actually take over the costs necessary for onboarding. Yeah, so, like, really excited to see where this goes and really excited to see the strides that are being done. But it's certainly something we should on the community site consider you know, as we as we think about onboarding, someone has to pay for the onboarding part.

Legendary 00:36:47 Yeah. Absolutely. And, it it is important to keep that in mind, right? You're using a scalability solution. You're using Avidroom Nova, whatever the two solution that might be. And, yes, it is by many, many, multitudes cheaper to interact with the blockchain there, but, however, once you go at scale, there is still significant cost to that. And I love the point that you made on onboarding, the 100 k wallets and having digital collectibles.

Legendary 00:37:16 And I also love the point, that you made this when you talked about how on chain parrotationist is a game, and you also brought up Wolf game, which I found quite interesting. Wolf game now obviously being part of being acquired by by Pixel Volt and being integrated in reboot. And I get to play both the game by reboot battle plan and, parrot nation.

Legendary 00:37:43 And I wanna get to a very, very specific point because I noticed when playing parrot nation, I have beautiful log that shows me everything that is done on chain, on behalf of me that I don't have to obviously pay the transaction costs for, but I can see the on chain interactions Whereas, battle plan, like, choose the specific strategy to also do the transactions for you and Albert Manova on the back end. But don't share that info with you. So you don't you I mean, obviously, you can look it up on the blockchain, but you don't have it as accessible within the game. To see which elements are transactions on the blockchain.

Legendary 00:38:18 And if my question to you would be, that lock that you have that shows all the, on chain interactions that happen on behalf of the players, what is the strategic thinking behind that. I quite like it, but I would love to hear your perspective on it first.

Dith 00:38:36 That's a, yeah, interesting question. I mean, The strict strategic value. I I don't know if there's strategic value. I think, you know, that was a feature that we had in the game since launch. And when we launched the game, no one was really talking about fully on chain games. And then 6 months later, over the course of the summer, suddenly it was pretty clear.

Dith 00:39:04 This, like, bubble emerged where, like, fully on chain games are becoming really trendy and if you'll start talking about autonomous worlds, then we went to, like, ECC, and it was almost a bit of a meme how many, like, VCs were, like, sniffing up this fully on chain gaming tree of, like, yeah, we need to, like, fund on chain games and it's the future and the rest. And, like, you know, we'd kind of been trying to get that message out there for the 6 months proceeding. So, I mean, the real answer is that feature was in the game before I even joined the team, but I suspect the original product thinking was was it worth me or did anything?

Dith 00:39:40 Like, being a being like an early fully on chain game, we we had a role to play in the ecosystem to let people know what that meant and to show them how it actually looks in the game. But if you think about it through the lens of like, okay, what's the value to the player? It's a harder question to answer, right, because it comes back to this point of like, and, you know, a few of us have made this point. Gamers don't really care about the underlying technology. They do to an extent if they are web 3 natives because they're asking the question of Yeah. How can this technology or this underlying ecosystem enrich me? But if you ask your average web 2 game or it's a, like, I don't care.

Dith 00:40:18 I don't care if this game is in unreal or unity or it runs on AWS or GCP or it's fully on chain or not. It's like, I just wanna have fun. So I think it's interesting. I would flip the question back to everyone to see who thinks we should still have that feature in 12 months when we have hundreds of thousands of players. And most of them, when they've joined pyronation, It'll be the first time that they're doing anything on chain. They they may not know that they're doing anything on chain. Right? So, you know, is that something we we would wanna keep at that point in the game sort of life cycle, possibly not. Like, does it add any value to those players? Does it confuse them?

Dith 00:40:58 Does it need to be hidden? Maybe, like, you know, it's kind of like upfront center right now when you complete a quest to, boom, the sort of transaction proof pops up so it's a really interesting question, but, you know, I think, hazarding a guess, it was part of our, like, early educational sort of effort in, raising the profile of fully on chain games.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:41:20 Yeah. And I'm happy to jump in first and, you know, share my thoughts. In the meantime, anybody who would also like to, you know, pitch in, feel free to just you know, throw your head hand up. This is actually something, you know, when we, when we met in Paris, something we discussed I still remember something you said that there was a time, where no amount of on chain nest in a game was enough for the maximalist. There was there is a particular group of, you know, really, like, web free, affectionate is out there where no matter how much a game puts on chain, it will never ever be enough.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:42:00 And I remember, you know, talking about it, with with you with Pirate Nation team and it because it is impressive to, you know, to what extent Pirate Nation is on chain. And we were talking whether or not it will make sense as we onboard a larger and larger audience because for these upcoming audiences, it will likely matter much less. They will majorly just, you know, care about the quality of their gameplay and whether or not it's fun, whether or not they have, you know, their assets. So I personally believe that it will become increasingly less important to feature, you know, these options front and center.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:42:39 I know that for asset GTX, you know, while we are trying to give as much visibility, especially at in the better stage over asset ownership and give players their own accounts where, you know, they can have an overview of their history. We are actually cutting down on scoping these features because we believe the UI should be, you know, as clean and as simple as possible. And this is very likely because, you know, the majority of the audience we will onboard is fully what too, but I still believe that it will just become less and less important how much is on chain. To the majority of audience.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:43:17 It will always remain important to it, to a smaller, smaller group of of absolute, you know, like, aficionados, I hope you will agree with me here, Keith, but I also think it's perfectly fine to disagree.

Dith 00:43:30 You know, I think the the thesis for why games should be fully on chain is, hasn't been answered in a practical setting yet, right? Like, it's still early in this arc. But, the second someone builds space nation on top of pyre nation. And you could start doing that today, by the way, because if you're building something fully on chain means the game is like, natively open source, right? Natively compostable and remixable, and any dev right now can start using our use all of our smart contracts that comprise the game. Right?

Dith 00:44:09 So you can mod, you know, extend the game. And I think on people are only gonna really get it I think, you know, beyond the sort of, like, very, early part of the curve, which is this, like, niche early adopter part that we're in now, only gonna move to the next part of the curve, and people will only get it once they see it and feel it. Right? And it will happen, but you we we are early. The way games over time have, I mean, if you look at some of, the world's most popular games, they started as mods, right? Like everyone knows the Counter Strike example, the the DOTA example, and there are others.

Dith 00:44:48 So there's this value in, building open source games and games that are fully on chain for that reason because, yeah, maybe your game makes it and, is massive and people really enjoy it, or maybe it's the mods that it. And I think the other thing, which, again, most gamers have kind of taken for granted, but it will eventually happen is that many of these kind of web 2.5 games that are not fully on chime on chain will rise theme eventually and will stop development and the teams will give up and move on because that's just what happens. That happens in every product category around around the world, right?

Dith 00:45:26 Starts ups are hard, games are particularly hard products to build. And when people start seeing their favorite, like, web 2.5 game cease development, and that's it. The game is the game. And it's never gonna progress or develop from there, or maybe worse that the developers are really, out of cash and can't even support server fees, and the game has taken offline, you know, it's those kind of catalysts that I think are gonna shift the the spotlight a little bit more back towards, okay. Well, you're telling me if this game was, like, fully on chain, then it would actually run forever, and we wouldn't have this problem and the community could own it and take over development of it.

Dith 00:46:04 You know, that may maybe, you know, if some of these points will reach that, I think give I think the narrative for fully owned chain games more of a practical setting than a theoretical one. Because right now, it's kind of all, like, thesis sounds really good, but as I say, it's still too early for, for, you know, I think the mass audience to to care. And I think ultimately the way that it manifests itself is not from, a technological narrative, but actually from, a gameplay narrative, right?

Dith 00:46:38 Like, I answered this from more of a an on chain perspective of why this this matters, but, again, putting it through the lens of, like, fun first and what players give a shit about, then, it's about someone making space nation and that game being, like, really, really awesome. And then people discovering like, oh, okay. The only reason people were able to make that was because the game was based on Pirate Nation. Was, like, built on this, like, globally open source protocol in the blockchain. So I know we've deviated from user acquisition, but those are my thoughts on on chain gaming.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:47:26 Alright. Well, I'm gonna jump back in because I think either I am getting ragged again or legendary is. Yeah. Definitely legendary. Alright. I'm actually gonna, you know, I would love to loop back into the convo, Charles, you know, co founder of Misty Island. Thank you so much for joining us. And I'm not sure, you know, at which, at which moment you were precisely able to to jump in today, but we had just been unpacking the topic of to what degree does it matter for the entire game to be on chain?

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 00:48:05 And whether or not as we expand user acquisition, the the answer to that question might change and might actually, you know, the weighting of that might become different. I'm wondering if you would like to share a few thoughts, you know, from your perspective.

Charl3s 00:48:19 Thank you, Karma. Appreciate you having me here. So when we look at what features of a game should be on chain or off chain, We're pretty pragmatic, like, I think a lot of the people on this panel are that in the end, it's all about a use case, and it's about who's the target market, and what sort of user benefit can you provide them and how are those unit user benefits made much greater by putting something on chain and in some cases, it may be advantageous to keep it off chain. So I think even with, like, you know, there there is a within the kind of crypto enthusiasts, crowd. There's definitely people who get quite philosophical about this, and that's fair.

Charl3s 00:48:56 But I think when you look at what people do with their feet, they tend to favor applications that make pragmatic choices. So if you look at like Uniswap, it's not all on chain the front end is off chain. And and that makes sense. Right? That enables a good user experience or, OpenC or blur are also kind of hybridized solutions. Maybe quite a lot of it lives on chain, but there's plenty in many cases order books that exist off chain. And so I think every application's making pragmatic choices. Some just have the luxury to put more on chain given what they're building.

Charl3s 00:49:30 When it comes to games, we see it as being fundamentally, it's about, you know, a game has to acquire users, retain them, and find some way to monetize. And so we look at saying, what can we put on chain? That kind of gives us some new superpowers in those three dimensions. And when it comes to user acquisition, we're really excited about prize based play. The ability not just for a game to issue prizes to its users, but for users to issue prizes to other users, which we think is uniquely facilitated by leveraging the blockchain.

Charl3s 00:50:03 So having a sort of open prize system where a user can come and lock up a cool NFT they've made or a soul bound token or some ETH. And challenge other people to compete for it. That sort of open prize system helps solve an activation problem for people, for for games. And and I think is an experience that especially crypto natives really love. So that's 1. And then also on the activation end, cross IP stuff is made far easier by using open ledgers.

Charl3s 00:50:31 So if you look at a lot of the work we do is taking groups like, say, sappy seals or board apes or me bits or even we've been messing around with some Pirate Nation avatars, which are the avatars are in the metadata, which is a great move. And the way we look at it is saying people care about these things that exist on chain. And if our game experience can speak directly to that user, by featuring their IP, by featuring avatars and characters they identify with. That's a way of pulling people in. So you've kind of got prizes. You've got cross IP stuff. And then the last side of it for us would be around the creator economy.

Charl3s 00:51:09 So We think that NFTs are an amazing way to monetize user created assets, games like Roblox rely on microtransactions, people buying a cool hat or a backpack or a sword for their character. And by giving these things provable rarity, users are likely to be willing to spend more on them. And what's exciting about that isn't just that the game can monetize through that, but that a creator economy can be stimulated around it because if you're a game artist, right now, you have no relationship with the end user. You can actually sell goods directly to the user that they can use in games and in other games.

Charl3s 00:51:47 So I'd say prizes, cross IP stuff, superior creator economy. These are the things we're focused on. And then game logic and game state, We're not quite as advanced as a pirate nation on this front. For us, a lot of the the nature of the game involves a lot of, like, real time combat where it's like, you know, you're playing a team death match or capture the flag. And there's some of that you could communicate to the chain or, you know, put on chain. But a lot of it is very difficult to. It would just be tons of small unique actions that would be hard to put on chain, at least right now. And so, yeah, we're pretty pragmatic about it.

Charl3s 00:52:23 And the way this relates to user acquisition for me is that, I think I look at it as if a user, there's sort of 2 paths you can walk along here. Once a user deeply identifies with something that exists on chain, like they have an avatar they love, or they have a board a profile picture, right? That user is is is is much easier to activate suddenly because you can see who they are on chain. You can kind of get a sense of what matters to them. And you can provide compelling incentives to pull them in. You can leverage the IP that they're passionate about and use it for user acquisition.

Charl3s 00:53:00 The I think the tougher path that will have to be cracked, but as more challenging is getting a user to care about something on chain in the first place. So it's almost like the internet's a great activation tool, but if someone doesn't even have an internet connection yet, you're, you know, you're in a game of persuading them to get that. And so it's it's harder. It's not to say it can't be done, and consumer apps will do it. They have a reason to do it. We're very focused on users who already love things on chain.

Charl3s 00:53:29 We think that groups like, say, sappy seals have done a lot of the hard work of getting a user to be excited about on chain, on chain goods And so once a user already cares about that, there's a ton you can do. They already have a wallet. They know what a token could be worth. They are excited about on chain prizes, and you're suddenly playing in a very kind of ideal circumstance for leveraging crypto to get them to engage with a platform. So I think for us, like, we're catering to the niche of people who are already excited about NFTs, about tokens, and then kind of leveraging cross IP stuff and prizes to get them to play.

Legendary 00:54:10 I really love how you got in, at this point of the conversation and and have this comprehensive picture on how you think about user acquisition but why also to you the thought of what is on chain, what is off chain matters, matters from a user acquisition perspective, because you take this collaboration perspective standpoint, partnering up with, Kent Pappanas, with the boomers, etcetera, and obviously tapping into communities who already on chain assets. So then the question really becomes relevant for you. How, what what the assets that are already on chain. How can we use them in the game?

Legendary 00:54:47 And it becomes more than something that is just personal preference were nuanced because it becomes part of the user acquisition strategy. And I also love the point that this made before flipping the question and saying, will it matter in 12 months? Because right now, I am one of the users who really likes to see the log in in the game, not because like I'm on Chain maximalist, but just because I'm so curious to see what's happening behind the scenes, and now it is still the very web 3 native people, that we are onboarding. And this is why I think that thinking about what is on chain versus what is off chain is so so important also in the light of the user acquisition strategy.

Legendary 00:55:27 And with that being said, Yellow Panther, welcome to the stage. I would love to pass it to you. And hear from you as a content creator, if you are looking at new games, either because you wanna partner up with them, you wanna play them, you're building your tier list, Is that something you're looking at? What of the game elements are on chain, off chain does that matter from your perspective as a game or content creator? Or is it something that's not as important and not the top priority for you?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:55:54 What is up everyone in Yellow Panther here? Life from Thailand. We just have, 2, events, over 2 days. And interesting question.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:56:07 Like, if you talk about user acquisition, I was actually just with Jackal, with Sing Jin and a few other wolves, And we were talking about user acquisition and, regarding how I view and tier, certain games, I actually the whole user experience, from a to z is very important, because I not only go from my perspective, but I also go from my audience, either, web tree native or not, web tree native perspective as well. So it is like a full full on, rating, right, not just like a, like, just based on gameplay or based on hype and those kind of things.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:56:47 But, basically, we were saying, and I was observing, right, let's just say Asia, right, not all countries are crypto, the crypto adoption is very high. So I I do believe that, you know, games that, do not have onboarding, barriers are actually have more advantage, right, in comparison to, you know, what Eliza and Sanjay already mentioned if you need a wallet and stuff like that, it does have a higher barrier of entry for newer, gamers and and non crypto native people.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:57:24 And which I think is very important, right, it's just too early for some of it. And we all have this picture painted that, you know, either web tool or web tree, it doesn't matter because in down the line, we all know that it's gonna just be come gaming. And the tech is gonna be behind it and so on. And it does have to be, you know, it does still need to take a lot of work because even in Thailand, right, not everyone is interested in gaming, web tree gaming, because of wallets because of a lot of ongoing issues and also, like, even regulation. Right?

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:58:02 But then in my opinion, it at the end of the day, it does matter. Right? And, you know, with now all the attention span that you know, these gen z's have or, like, gen alpha. It's just very short, and we have to keep it short and simple. Within a few clicks, you can play the game, and that's just my perspective. But if you talk to me in terms of, like, on Chain Gaming, I personally have a lot a lot of, conviction in it and also belief in it because it is very cool and it is very suitable for us web tree native people, I will say it's it is on the advanced level.

yellowpanther.moca 💎 00:58:41 And for games like pyronation and other games that, you know, other people are looking at, I believe that, you know, in the future, it will have a very strong audience and it will be people who truly understand the web tree gaming and not, web 2.5 gaming and so on.

Legendary 00:58:57 Yep. Yeah. I think that is a great perspective because you are, you know, mentioning how all of the on chain, profile is super important and on chain activities are super important. But ultimately attention span, that's a very important one. It's super, super short. And you wanna onboard people and you wanna get them to play the game, and it's perfectly in line with what, Tiff said before. You start part of nation. You will need to get to the point where you do crafting. You craft your ships, but if you don't know how to get there, you will have forgotten about that. And we will not even notice it. You won't get to the point. So then just start it by having a pop up and showing people how to craft the ship first.

Legendary 00:59:35 And I think this is one of the aspects that makes you so complex to build in in web 3 gaming because you have those different target audiences, and you have so many people in audience groups want different things. And on some you can compromise, on some you probably can't compromise. You have to have some kind of adaptability or flexibility. And then you also have the additional challenge that you want to do things in the right order and the right order might look very, very different for different games.

Legendary 01:00:01 And that constitutes such a complex strategy in my opinion that you need when you build web 3 games and a massive, massive part of that is also something that we touched on, which is working with, content creators with gamers, like yourself, like Eliza, like Sanjay.

Legendary 01:00:17 And I kinda wanna flip the switch a bit on this and go to Ulyssa and ask you because you've seen we have so many creators, in the stage as well, if if someone is a creator and wants to get, you know, is highly passionate about gaming, web 3 gaming and wants to get in your position, where you are able to work with games, you're able to advise games to do the play tests, and ultimately to partnerships with games what would you advise to creators who want to get in the position that you are in right now?

Elisa 01:00:48 Wow. I love this question. I would say, so I actually answered this question kind of recently, because someone asked me, and I've been seeing a lot more creators pop up. And honestly, I I really love to see it because we need more creators. We need more, people that are good at communicating. There's many such cases where there are very, very, very talented game teams, but their devs Like, devs don't tend to be, you know, public facing. They tend to not really like, marketing and putting themselves out there. They'd rather just build the game.

Elisa 01:01:24 So as creators, we actually have a pretty important mission where, you know, sometimes we even have to go, like, kind of chasing these teams and asking them, hey. Like, can you give me, you know, some key information? Can I please playtest and, you know, putting these these games on the map? Yellow Panther is actually really, really good at doing this. And, yeah, I think as a content creator, there's a lot she sees out here. There's a lot of web 3 games that don't have any coverage, because they may be, for example, less hype or just don't have like a a very experienced marketing team.

Elisa 01:02:00 So I would say, you know, look out for those smaller gems because personally, I've We tested a lot of games recently that I think deserve a lot more followers, than some accounts that have a lot of followers already. And yeah, all they need really is is someone to help them, be the messenger kind of, right? And yeah, I'd say in terms of, like, growth as a creator, it's tough because you do need time, like, you need time to build relationships anytime to write up your content, you know, do video. But I would say consistency is the number one.

Elisa 01:02:39 Like, people need to see you on their feed every single day. So even if you have, you know, another job or yeah, your your time is, you know, occupied somewhere else. Just make sure you you're tweeting at least once or twice a day. And that doesn't mean, you know, a thread once a day, but maybe try, like, you know, 2 threads or 2 videos a week, something like that. Like, You don't have to release quality content every single day, but, you need to kind of be at the forefront of people's minds. And the only way you can achieve that is by churning out high volume, like literally just being there all the time.

Elisa 01:03:16 If you look at any of the biggest content creators, that is literally what they do. Like, if you look at, I don't know, Wales, Wales, Twitter or even YP's Twitter, Sanjay's Twitter, like, they're just very active, right? They always remind you that they're there. And, so in a way, like, you need to understand the attention economy. And number 2 is network. Like, who you know and the connections you make is everything.

Elisa 01:03:43 I was a content creator last year and I definitely wasn't, like, as successful as today, and I still have a long way to go, but I would say that the people I met along the way, like the friends, the builders, you know, they've definitely helped me also achieve what I've achieved. So, network is is really huge And you should never see relationships as transactional. Like, at the end of the day, relationships are relationships. Like, every single builder and created that I know I genuinely have, like, a connection with them and a bond and I try to help them.

Elisa 01:04:17 And I think that's only something you can do when when you're passionate because you actually genuinely from your heart, want to do that, right? If you're not doing it for money, you're you're doing it out of pure passion, so don't rush don't rush making these relationships. Like, you know, most of the relationships I have today, like, they actually took a while but you also have to be willing to put yourself out there. Like, I think the first relationship I I made was with Loop from Treverse, and I literally just DM ed him over a year ago now and was like, hey, can I please interview you for my newsletter?

Elisa 01:04:54 And I interviewed him over Discord it wasn't a call. It was literally just text and I posted it and he posted it. He reposted it from the Treeverse account and my newsletter got some traction like that. And, yeah, just keep experimenting. Keep creating content. Keep networking. Like, you will get there. The space is still so smooth. Like, there's so much space for us to grow. And Twitter as a platform is also gonna keep evolving, so I would definitely make the most of that. Like, if you look at live streaming, for example, it's just beginning on x. Like, if you wanna be an x live streamer, the opportunity is there right now. I have that, answered your question.

Legendary 01:05:34 It more than answered my question. You covered so, so many fantastic points that resonate with me as a content creator myself. Only one thing that I would like to add, to that before I pass to you Sanjay to also get your perspective in is building what you said, right, post at least once or twice a day, don't be afraid to post more often. Don't be afraid to even repeat yourself because it's never going to be the case that you do a post. Now you do a post saying 4 hours and you're going to reach the same audience. You never reach the entirety of your audience with a single post.

Legendary 01:06:07 So even if you repeat yourself with some of the things that you say, that ultimately doesn't matter because, as also Yellow Panther said, attention span is so short. You need to keep that momentum in your favor. You need to keep that energy going. And part of that is repeating yourself on purpose. I will finish my tangent in a moment, but it's like such an important point that you made. Gary V also said that, right, he's been saying the same things for 8, 9, 10 years, more than a decade even, and he's been asked why he does that.

Legendary 01:06:38 His answer is, look, it I have to say that often because, a, it just takes time before people act, on what I'm saying, and they need to hear it five times, six times. It's especially true if we pivot back to web 3 gaming when we talk about onboarding people, new technology, so many things that need explaining, it's just not enough to say it, a single time with that being said, Sanjay would love to throw it to you to get your perspective as a creator in on that question as well.

Sanjay 01:07:06 Yeah. I think Elisa covered, all the topics very well. And, you know, same thing. I guess it just goes back to the same first point I made that the more people see you on their timeline, the more people see your name popping around spaces and, you know, collaboration with other creators. For ex, for example, legendary X Sanjay, thread or something, you know, Eliza X Yellow Panther video or something like that. Or like a live stream, the more people see it or the more projects see it, the chances are that they wanna work with you even more. I did, I did like an hour master plastic seed world the other day, and this is what we basically covered. You know, like, we wanna be in front of people every day, a day in and day out.

Sanjay 01:07:45 And I understand, you know, there's a lot of people who are who are not very comfortable in tweeting every day or multiple times a day. I'm not comfortable tweeting multiple times a day. I'll I tweet, like, maximum 1 or 2 times a day. Because I want my profile to look clean for whatever reason. Right? Like, I mean, I'm still in my Instagram zone, I guess. And, but at least I'm always replying to people. I mean, I do at least, like, a 100 replies a day. So I'm always, like, you know, under people's comments. People are always seeing my face. They're always seeing reading my comments. They're always reading my opinions. So there is a less barrier of, like, perfection when when you're replying to somebody's post versus when you're doing it on your own channel.

Sanjay 01:08:23 I understand that people want it to be really good or really perfect when they're on their own channel, which is not good, but I understand. But if you can't do that, then just go and start commenting on the people's accounts. You're applying to people's accounts, throw in your opinions, throw in your thoughts there. People will read that. You know, like, nowadays, people spend more time under a post comment section versus on their timeline. Like, they will scroll the timeline so fast, but as soon as they catch one post, they're gonna open that post, and they're gonna start reading the post. They're gonna start reading the comments because you know, they wanna know what other people think about that topic before they think about their topic for themselves.

Sanjay 01:08:58 This is all like psychological, but, you know, I think there's a big part of that involved in X and in every other platform, TikTok, huge in comments section. Common section gets more like sometimes in the video itself. So Yeah. I don't know where I was going with that, but, basically, you know, again, you know, networking is great. DM people, you know, Yellow Panther was the first creator I deemed or the first person really I deemed in the whole of web 3 space, and we've been so close ever since. And I never deemed him to get something out of it. I literally just went on my timeline and I see Yellow Panther everywhere under comments sections, under tweets, you know, posting videos, this and that. And I was like, yo, this guy's working like 16 hours a day.

Sanjay 01:09:38 I have to DM him. I was like, yo, bro, you're killing it. I see you all over my timeline. Shout out to you. And then, you know, and the rest is history. So don't force it. Just let it come organically and, just just build general relationships. You know, it'll go a long way for sure.

Legendary 01:09:54 Yeah. That's a fantastic point. And and you you said it perfectly. The comment section is so so important. It is the case on on TikTok on Reddit on x. And X is a good example because this is ultimately how monetizing as a creator on X works. Right? You're getting paid for the amount of, replies views in your comments section by blue verified profiles because x as a company knows that this is the real estate to place ads in because people will scroll those comment sections and attention that is directed there is hugely, hugely beneficial. And if you reply to replies, obviously the algorithm gives you a boost on that because it wants to foster that, organic conversation.

Legendary 01:10:34 Look, I don't wanna pivot this into a completely interface talking about about content creation and algorithms, but I did think it is a very, very important point because we had so many creators with us to get that perspective in as well. What I want to do is go to you death with a question we spoke a lot about of collaboration.

Legendary 01:10:53 We spoke a lot about how to, collaborate not only with creators, but with other games where that's from, the perspective of the parleys, where that's the perspective that Charles put in from from Nifty Island, partnering up with top tier projects in the space, where do where do you draw the line between, you know, collaboration and competition? Because you are also obviously collaborating with other games who are targeting the same audience to some extent. They're targeting the same base players, and players have, say, a certain amount of time that they are willing to play whatever game a day it is.

Legendary 01:11:30 So we are very, very collaborative in the web 3 space. Which is something that I love. But is there a point where you say, here I have to draw the line to, to competition, is there like this, what we learned in business school that I hate I hate the word. It sounds absolutely terrible coopetition, blending together competition, and collaboration. So how do you think about the line between collaborating with other games, projects in the web 3 space, and and drawing the line to competition?

Dith 01:12:00 And I know it's a tricky question. Oh, man. It's so funny that you have also, been through that very cringy, business school session on, competition. I have to use the word one thing. That brings First time they use it after business school. Some business school memories. Yeah, it is a cringy term.

Dith 01:12:22 No, look, I think while while games are only serving web 3 natives, then it's not really about having competition with other games and really just having competition with whatever the most attention gathering thing is at any given point at any given moment. Right? Like, someone had mentioned earlier on this space that there's, you know, this fun sort of NFT pump going on for the last couple of weeks. But if you look at the number of, like, unique active wallets, okay. It's crept up a little bit.

Dith 01:12:57 Some people are kinda coming back, or it's the same people activating their second and third and 4th wallets because, you know, God knows we, at this stage, each have 10, 20, 30, 50 each. But it's still a very small audience. Right? So really the competition, I think, for games. I'm not just referring to us, but for games that only serve a web 3 audience right now is, is we're still participants in the attention economy. Right? And it's still a fact of, like, hey.

Dith 01:13:28 There's a finite number of hours, in the day for people to spend online looking at web 3 things and how they wanna spend their time. A lot of these people are not just doing one thing. Right? Like, I think at least in my personal sort of circle of friends, people play games, they trade shit coins, They flip NFTs. They form protocols. Like, they're doing a lot of stuff.

Dith 01:13:52 And so really the answer, I think, becomes one of, like, well, you know, and and also how do you eventually get to 100,000 players or a 1,000,000 players that every game should be looking to answer is just like, what what's your route to get there that you're no longer, like, playing this very insular 0 sum game of fighting for a finite number of attention and actually you build a game or an app, with onboarding smooth enough and abstracted away, has that abstracted away friction enough. And it's actually fun and good enough to stand on its own own own two legs outside of a, financially sort of inclined, audience.

Dith 01:14:32 Right, and that, like, a normal gamer would wanna play, not caring about the underlying tech. So, you know, a little bit of a politician's answer, but that that's really how we answer it ourselves. Like, we are collaborating with a ton of different games, a ton of different, I mean, even other web 3 projects where we just like what they stand for, how they've operated, how they've crafted their brand. Like, our first parlay ever was with the Pudgy penguins, for obvious reasons. Right? It's just an awesome turnaround story. We love what Luca is doing. We know that that's a very thoughtful, mindful, active community, and so on and so forth.

Dith 01:15:09 So, you know, we're we're very collaboratively oriented. We we don't think about competition much today because it's just simply way too early. And I think when we do think about competition, it will be months down the line where our game is on mobile. It's in the app store. And what we're trying to do is, is really grind play the effect, like, going back to user acquisition. Right? You need to play a pretty competitive game in, and it's a it's a game of mathematics. Right?

Dith 01:15:44 It's like, how do you bring on board good users without spending too too much and add dollars and have a game that's good enough for those people to wanna spend time in and for those free to play players to wanna spend their money in. And that's where it all comes back full circle. Right? Because once we achieve that, then this whole ecosystem makes sense to our early supporters, the web 3 native, who've been in the game early, understanding it, contributing to the economy. Some of them are, harvesting and, you know, preparing for this eventual future by gathering resources.

Dith 01:16:19 And that's where, you know, I think we'll we'll probably be looking at things through a more competitive lens, games like, you know, the the games that are played by millions of people that are enjoyed on mobile devices, like the laid some monopoly game, for example, is absolutely killing it. And that's probably where we'll start to think a little bit more about who we're shoulder to shoulder against in terms of competition. I think, you know, the reason that your question is so interesting right now is because the market has suddenly become really exciting in the last 2, 3 weeks, and there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of noise happening. There's a lot of pumps happening.

Dith 01:17:00 But the big question is, like, whether we're even really out of the bar yet. Right? And and I, you know, personally NFA, I'm not entirely sure. Right? I think we're not out of the woods yet. We don't have a massive influx of new wallets coming in and it remains high time for games and projects and communities to be really as supportive as we can be of one another. Right? This is not the time for anyone to lose their minds just because the last 2, 3 weeks and start, you know, looking at everyone to their left and right as competition.

Legendary 01:17:35 Yeah. That's that's a very, very good take, and I love that you introduced that element of thinking about the market and thinking about the volatility of the market specifically when comes to user acquisition. And when it comes also to thinking about drawing the line between, collaboration and competition, And I would love to hear your perspective on that, Charles, how you at Nifty Island think about that line between collaboration and competition. And if that is something that's also influenced by the state of the market.

Charl3s 01:18:08 Sure thing. So for us, we look for kind of partners where there's a very clear win win. And for us, that means the sort of NFT communities I think they've, despite a lot of the FUD, were maybe coming out of that era, the ticket 6 months back, and I think it was kind of nothing but negative news about NFT communities. I think the accomplishments of those groups are underrated where they still crush it on the timeline. When you look at the accounts and the projects that generate the most engagement.

Charl3s 01:18:42 It's groups like Pudgy penguins just like Dith said and and others that generate a ton of attention. And they also, when you speak to people who are in those communities, you'll need many who say, Hey, I just actually got into crypto in 2021. I mentioned Apache Pangolin, and that was kind of my moment where I got excited about things that are on chain. So you kinda have this enduring triumph in terms of attention. And then, many of these projects are responsible for activating people and bringing them into crypto growing the pie.

Charl3s 01:19:12 So for us, These are groups where their bread and butter is creating an awesome community and winning on the timeline, getting lots of people excited about it, and trying to grow the number of people who are excited about, their community, but on chain stuff in general. For us, those projects by their DNA typically are not gaming companies. So they might maybe during the kind of peak of the bull run, everybody wanted to be a gaming company, or thought, you know, that we infinite money and infinite capacity to do anything. I think now the bull market has really helpedfully caused these groups to double down on their core competencies.

Charl3s 01:19:49 So for us, we come to them and say, you guys, you know, should have your IT and games, not just Nifty Island, but other games. We can help facilitate that And, you know, in a single day, usually, if they already have game assets, we can get them in, token gate them and and get them ready for, for, in ex having an experience in Nifty. So we've really looked at those NFT communities as one where it's just a clear win win We can come to them and say, hey, we don't need to wanna charge you anything. We see the community is awesome. We wanna give them more to do. More prizes to win. More things to build together a new canvas for you to grow your IP and grow your resonance and to have so much fun together that people can't ignore you.

Charl3s 01:20:29 So that that group for us, that that kind of cohort has been great. I think we've got about, like, 60 plus NFT communities that are ready to use the game at launch with avatars and other three d assets. So that's been our bread and butter. And then I think with other games, it's, you know, there are some cases where probably they're going for a very similar user, target user to us and, and maybe the use case is very similar. But in a lot of other case, and in those cases, you know, it just might be, Hey, maybe it's not a fit.

Charl3s 01:21:00 But in many other cases, they're making a game that may target web 3 enthusiasts, but it's just com a completely different sort of game, and we're not under any delusion that will be the only game people ever play, right? That'd be that'd be crazy. And so with those, it's like, you know, say you have a game that's like a, you know, it could be anything like a turn based strategy game or a role playing game. If they have game assets, those game assets represent a considerable investment that they might as well use elsewhere, especially if their underlying business model revolves around people being enthusiastic about the NFTs they own from that, their community owned from that project. So those are the kind of win wins we look for.

Charl3s 01:21:39 NFT communities where they're not gaming companies, but they're masters of community and attention. We can help them, and and kinda keep them out of the costly experiment of trying to build a game. And then for games, they have tons of game assets lying around might as well leverage them in another place so long as they don't feel that we're kind of chewing up attention that they're going for. So there's just so many win wins, I think, out there. And, And, yeah, so, so, on a whole, like, there's a little bit of concern around competition here and there, but really in the open game world genre, there's so little that's live. And it has product market fit, but it's not really like a major concern.

Legendary 01:22:21 I I love that perspective, and I also loved how you put the IP of the projects and partners that you're working with at the center of it. I think we've been we've been having a fantastic discussion so far. I also really wanna be respectful, of everyone's time, both in the audience and our speakers. We've been running for a bit more than 1 hour 20 so far.

Legendary 01:22:42 And what I would really love to do is because we've spoken about so many dimensions of user acquisition from collaboration with content creators, from thinking about collaboration and competition to on chain versus off chain elements is, to throw it to you, Karma, to help us summarize, the the different things we talked about user acquisition maybe from the light of, the CTX and how you approach user acquisition based on everything that we've been talking about to close us out on today's basis.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:23:15 Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much, and thank you again to all the speakers. These spaces of ours, you know, these these weekly meetings and panels have really been gaining steam. And there are many users who can't join us live always, but love listening to spaces. So we will get in the habit of doing just a quick recap at the end so we can repost it for the audience with, time captions. So everybody can jump into the discussion a bit easier. So bear with me as I can now summarize for everybody. This was an incredible spaces. We have heard a great outline from, you know, OX diff from Pirate Nation, again, pushing boundaries in terms of how completely untrin it is.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:23:55 And how the commitment to on chain maximization of your game can shift over time as the audience changes. And then on the other hand, also assures compatibility and that this on chain component can assure that other users can build on top of your product, expanding audience and IP that way. And then we spoke to Charles, the co founder of Misty Island known for amazing cross integrations, and he shared his thoughts on the role of cross collaboration and cross pollination of IPs within the Ansteaka system and how partnerships grow on to increase the reach of both partners is done correctly and in an organic way.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:24:33 And Webster gaming is heating up. I think we are all feeling it, that we are back vibes And we see an influx of new creators to the space who want to concentrate on what we're gaming. Growing and onboarding a user base is as much a goal creators as it is for projects. And we have some OGs here today, Eliza Sanjay and Yellow Partner, who has been creating for a long time throughout the bare and dry periods of gaming content, and they shared pointers for others on how to really grow and, you know, ensure a stable, influx of new audiences to your content creation endeavor.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:25:12 And towards the end, we have summarized how competition is not top of agenda for early projects right now, at least not for the participants here today. How this web free space is so small that in these early stages, we all concentrate on early web free native cohorts of users And that user acquisition very quickly turns into user onboarding, which is only ramping up truly right now. I think we are all waiting for, you know, 2024 to truly take off.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:25:40 Similar how for us at ZT X, phase 1 is feedbacking and improving the early beta with web free native community, And after the beta launch, ZTX will work to add support for Zapeto accounts as an option for creating and managing ZTX accounts. This means that any existing Zepeta user can start playing ZTX with virtually no additional setup required, and the same will, of course, be would be possible for social logins Gmail and others.

Karma | In Manila for W3GS! 01:26:07 When combined with on ramp integration, ZTX will create, you know, an accessible and frictionless entry into the world of web3 And I think these are goals that are shared by everybody here on the panel and many other web games that are coming up. So, you know, it was a true joy speaking to everybody today, and I'm hoping that this summary going forward is going to help many others get even more value out of these spaces, even afterwards. We're shared, you know, stamps.You know, I would love for everybody to, if there aren't final thoughts and final mentions, to say good byes now. Again, as always thank you to every listener who has given us over an hour of their time today and to everybody who is listening , you know, a bit later because they couldn't join in their timezone. Thank you guys !

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*Originally published on [Nylz](https://paragraph.com/@nylz/web3-gaming-user-acquisition)*