Scaling Blockchain Games: The Fundamentals

[Music] [Music] so i'd like to welcome to the stage our next speaker talking about uh scaling blockchain games the fundamentals of that it's uh ivan transic from superscale uh welcome everyone to the growth track and to my talk i was talking too much last couple days first time for a long time uh on the actual conference so bear with me um before we start i'd like to ask uh like or like to find out who in the audience actually has launched an nft or a blockchain app or game two three four okay so like three four ish i guess

uh how many of you guys intend to or looking into this space uh in the next year okay another five and how how many of you you guys have a let's say mobile game or any kind of free to play game right now okay cool so i hope this will be interesting to all of you and definitely looking forward some questions answers on this new market which is upon us so i will talk about uh scaling blockchain games the fundamentals and how does it differ from for example what is similar and what is different compared to a mobile or free-to-play gaming scaling so welcome everyone my name is iman i'm a co founder of superscale we are full funnel growth management platform and we help games and blockchain apps uh to scale to their maximum potential so

we work with the companies of all sizes from from from successful one-man indie shows like nimblebeat up to ea's of the world and the only kind of a criteria for us is where the game our app is now and where belief it could be and we help with the whole journey to the top um an example how how for example a big game that we worked on ended up with uh so we were able to get 10 extra million to the bottom line which produces another 20 million in profitable spends per year by looking on each step of the funnel and finding pcs to optimize and bring better value so fundamentals let's talk ab let's talk a bit about web3 where we at one where the market is going to be or where some people think orgy some other people thinks it's going to be so

the interesting thing about blockchain market compared to i know vr ar or streaming or some other uh maybe some of them will call over hyped new gaming markets that just didn't didn't follow or follow through on their expectation is that it's already it's already pretty sizable market we generated quite a bit of buzz revenue and interest so it's no longer just just a couple of crypto enthusiasts you know uh crypto investors doing some some shitty things on uh coins but as you can see we've already have 1.4 million active wallets every day interacting with games apps uh games distributed apps the growth was 100x compared to the previous year and what we look at we see i see parallels with a mobile mobile platform where you see that 49 transactions uh from all blockchain transaction came

from gaming related ones so uh so as you see on the mobile 80 plus of revenue generated is also from games it looks like the whole blockchain and nft space will be again very heavily tilted towards gaming related content and business and obviously we have we have couple of bigger launches or bigger games coming forward like you know x infinity and so on but there's nothing that expects we expect this and following years um so this will be definitely everyone expected this year will be uh will be when blockchain apps actually enter gaming mass market and high quality products with triple a productions and with the blockchain infrastructure come into play so how big this market gonna be this is a good question obviously uh if you have somebody the uh if you if you ask different people they will say different numbers i took two that i think is worth

noting so uh let's let's consider that the blockchain will be growing as much as mobile games mobile games were growing as a business when they were introduced so by this logic which again it's it's something that i picked just to just to compare but this logic we would end up and 22 for about 12 billion market so again not not let's say a massive chunk of the whole gaming ecosystem but still something worth considering even in this case if we to get some more bullish predictions for example bloomberg if we subtract the gaming part of the whole blockchain and an ft ecosystem they expect to be somewhere around 160 billion in 2024 so the question is obviously we'll be closer to 160 billion or close to 12 billion you know take your peak to take your guess but i do believe that it's fair to say it will be a noteworthy part of the whole games industry and uh

and you should definitely be and look out for that if your product or if your future business strategy involves in some way blockchain so uh what is current let's say problem or the the trillion dollar question that someone they will call so we see companies with uh with a with a blockchain background that trying to get into the space and uh already proven that they are are able to attract crypto investors and blockchain community into games but the next step for them is to really really become the 100 billion dollar market and business they need to attract what they call web 2 or traditional games audience and this is obviously not as easy as it sounds because uh if you try to play anything from x infinity to uh to to to other type blockchain channels out there you know that it's not easy or or even understandable experience for

for casual players at the same time we see the gaming companies trying to figure out how their ips and how their games could attract and become part of the blockchain ecosystem so we see movements from both sides obviously and why it is hard so as we will talk a bit about audience journeys and how how big of a problem it is and how to how to essentially understand this of this problem the new dimensions of data that you will need to understand these journeys and you you didn't kind of have to think about those when scaling mobile or other games and obviously no new needs for infrastructure to be able to make something out of its data so ultimately what you want to get into the growth loop which as you see is a web 3 growth loop which looks exactly as a web 2 growth loop or any other growth loop in

free to play or or game as a service business you need to analyze optimize scale and reason repeat to reach your maximum potential so analyze if we look at mobile games as a business analyzing a mobile game is not again i wouldn't call it trivial by any any means and i'm doing this most of my life and even though we have a lot of tools apps and pieces of ecosystem you still need to every studio needs to do a lot of work to essentially integrate all the ua related data to attribution data to store data to uh to essentially in-game data and so forth uh to be able to to understand how they are doing and what to do next if you're talking in web 3 apps these parts the whole part that mobile gaming is concerned about and it's not

trivial we're talking at dozens of different data sources it's augmented by what is called on-chain data or essentially the data available in a blockchain uh itself which is again uh for for anyone or to to various degrees publicly available to any developer publisher or or analyst that would like to see um what what kind of a transaction different wallets or users are doing with other apps and so forth and it's very valuable to think about when you're building out your business model or business strategy to grow in this space but again it's another layer of complexity that you need to put in and merge with your own in-game data and ui data and so forth and so on and on top of that obviously a web 3 it's still it has still web in its name and for example compared to mobile you are able to uh and many companies do um to collect for example email addresses and bunch of other data

because they have direct relationships with their customers such as e-shops or e-commerce companies compared to mobile developers where where it's still between apple and google to own this data and to do this a life cycle management of them so again completely new dimensions of data and something an order of magnitude more complex than we've been used to so far without any tools right now or very little tools available to help you with that so you have all the data from all parts of your business right what now into optimize so for uh if you're looking at the a mobile game or free-to-play game as a as a business optimization problem uh you usually would like to look at it as a form of a funnel or a player journey where you would go through acquisition conversion activation retention monetization and then churn or when the player stops playing and try to understand what kind of an actions you

are able to do to improve each part of the funnel and this what you essentially need to do all the time and how quickly are we able to scale and how high depends how good how well optimized is your funnel even before you start or think about spending some user acquisition marketing money at scale and again this is not something i would consider trivial or simple even for mobile or rev2 games but still ultimately you're attracting the same audience it's a free-to-play players that may differ from their background for the spending habits and so forth but first of all they want to play the game and depending on how much time or money they are available this is how how how they will progress through it but they want to play your game in blockchain actually it's not even the case so obviously and right now as you can see uh like last updates from axe infinity and so on where they understand that they need to attract uh the gamers and so on they they they

try to provide a journeys for free-to-play players as well but in blockchain games you have important audiences or part of the ecosystem who wants to interact with the game that is not interesting in the game itself at all so let's take a look at investors or crypto investors which are people who are able to spend you know seven figures eight figures on a single games without even starting it why because if they believe that the game as the ecosystem will grow they are able to buy uh you know notes and if these tokens even before the game starts if they if they believe that it's rare enough and will appreciate in value but these these people will essentially never even have to start a game they just look at it as another asset in their portfolio uh interesting part is also uh play to earn players where ultimately um what x infinity proof again it's not the players that are interested in the game or game mechanic itself the only they are interesting that it's a it's a

source of income uh compared to another full-time job which could be even worse than just playing and grinding 12 hours a day of a commuter game so so for blockchain games uh you know thinking about how investor thinks when he wants to buy something in the game it's completely different and there are many different ways what can what investor can do can go about and interact with the game ecosystem ultimately you need a healthy portion of every audience which is out there and it has a completely different journeys that you need to be personalized and cater to if you want to scale your blockchain app so this is important to note if you start advertising just nice gameplay pictures to investors or playground players that will probably not work so third scale which again you need to think about in terms of blockchain apps that it's

scaling within different audiences based on the different uh data that needs to work together and you need to have a healthy portion on all of them uh depending on how obviously how your game is set up but but you cannot skip your even block in the most successful blockchain games like x infinity they cannot skip the mass market gamer so they try to attract these players and provide them a journey that they deserve and traditional games if they want to go truly blockchain they need to have a journey and the value proposition for each of other audiences they would interact with the blockchain as an ecosystem and then you would be able to scale properly so ultimately this is what i believe it's it's it's the the biggest challenge and question besides just launching on dropping bunch of nft tokens how to essentially make it as a sustainable business you will need to do this growth loop analyze optimizing scale for every single audience with the

data which tells you about their preferences and intentions to do so so thank you that was with three fundamentals [Music] i'm happy for your questions [Applause] yes so thank you very much hey man thank you that's fascinating and and definitely i know we've got a lot of uh people here interested blockchain curious uh does anyone have any questions for uh even about the web 3 and and what he said about scaling games i'll i'll start actually i've got a question for you you mentioned the battlegrounds uh in your early slides there um is one of the one of the battlegrounds that wasn't mentioned there but it's implicit in what we have to do um some resistance in traditional game players to the editing space place and also with some developers who who haven't you know who resist getting on board how do we what's our education

process there how do we fight that battle um this is uh that is again a super super interesting topic and super valuable for somebody who properly solves it like i um you know there's a lot of obvious resistance for the traditional gamers because they're usually very very vocal yeah about any change ever tried to do an update for a game which has a was a community they will hate it no matter what and just later on they may used to it it's absolutely about still i consider it as a journey as an education so uh coming from the personal experience when i bought i'm a former counter strike player i i bought my first when i dropped the skin economy i bought my first knife for 500 euros in like 2015 16-ish or seven years ago and i was considered insane and by the way to my date it was the best in a purchase ever because every time i whipped it out in one v5 clutch situation you can see it you know headphones what you have to skin wow it's great oh i would love to do so validation all the

time best purchase ever but actually when i look at it and then you know daughter was born and stuff like that when i look at the value in like five years i could sell it for two and a half thousand euros or something so i got five five eggs on my stupid purchase of a worthless item five years ago but the problem is that so we know that it works and people such as me many others are able to able to buy something which has just very very narrow value for from other population and appreciating value but the problem with the without the steam ecosystem for example it's not because it's not blockchain i cannot i can convert it to dollars but it's just team dollars and i can buy only some more steam games right so it's locked into that economy so so so i absolutely personally believe that having that as a blockchain game would give me better liquidity for for the asset and when i stopped playing counter strike because i don't have time anymore but i could invest into some other games that's great value but how to explain it to players it's it's apparent it's very hard and

ubisoft tries and fails you know big companies rise and fail so so it will be it will be definitely a journey but you know when mobile came it was the same right exactly it's the same journey that like free players on and you said that in the course of last year 99 times were people invested in fts is that right was that one of the years yeah so the the growth between 20 to 21 was 100 x right obviously if you extrapolate it there'll be more money than all economies in the world but so the growth probably won't be hundred eggs this year but still it's it's a growing ecosystem and you know anywhere between 12 to 160 billion i think your guess is right but yeah i think weaponry is here to stay such as mobile and uh think about the strategy how does it fit into every studio's business model it's the right thing to do perfect thank you um i think we're just getting set are you ready to to join us perfect in that case a round of applause thank you very much [Applause]

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