DCentralCon Miami: Onboarding the Next Billion Players to Play-to-Earn
In this virtual panel, Sarutobi Sasuke, head of partnerships at YGG, talks with the founders of CyBall, MOBOX and Blinkmoon on how they plan to onboard the next wave of NFT gamers.
DCentralCon Miami, a conference dedicated to NFTs and DeFi, took place last year from November 30 to December 1 in Miami, Florida. The largest conference of its kind, the event was an opportunity for top NFT artists, influencers, brands, the media and DeFi enthusiasts to participate in and promote this new industry.
YGG head of partnerships Sarutobi Sasuke was joined in a virtual panel discussion by:
Tin Tran, co-founder of the futuristic football-based blockchain game CyBall. The game recently released gameplay trailers that you can see here.
Sam, co-founder of the gaming platform MOBOX, also recently released their third game on the platform called Chain Z Arena.
Hugh Behroozy, founder and CEO of Blinkmoon, a gaming studio behind the soon-to-be-launched game Bravelings.
The panelists share their insights into how to build decentralized, player-owned economies for a more inclusive user base and fun experiences. They also discuss the blockchain gaming landscape from the perspective of game developers who wish to lower the current barriers to entry on the road to mass adoption.
The following is an excerpt from the discussion. Watch the full panel here.
Onboarding the Next Billion Players to P2E Virtual - DCentral Miami
Sarutobi (4:01): It's been so incredible to see how much great talent has been drawn to the blockchain space, now the play-to-earn space. I don't think people would have expected it to move as fast as it has. Obviously, Axie Infinity has been able to achieve millions of daily active users in a fairly short time, so what I would love to hear from you guys is, what do you think will be something that would enable play-to-earn games onboard even greater numbers? What do you think would be the core technologies or features in games that might assist in lowering the barrier to entry for traditional games?
Tin (4:55): Currently, most of the games consist of a lot of crypto native users already, not too many traditional users. The onboarding process for games typically is very friendly these days, so games have evolved in the past 20 years or so. It's very easy to get into a new game, but for crypto, we are still technically very early, and the UX is not the best for non-traditional users or gamers that are not into this kind of thing.
I think, especially on mobile, I still am not a fan of the mobile experience when it comes to crypto. And if you can't use a Dapp with your mobile wallet easily, it's going to be even worse for a non-crypto native user to try and integrate or start a new game, especially when mobile gaming is taking over the entire gaming market more or less, eventually. That is something that I would imagine is quite important to onboard the next millions or billions of users.
For PC users, personally, I don't think it's going to be a big barrier to entry anymore, because the onboarding instructions are clear enough and most of the PC users are quite used to signing up to a new account or registering a new wallet and just linking it to a game account and playing it immediately. That process is very standard now.
Hugh (7:10): I would agree with a lot of those comments. For us, our focus when it comes to onboarding, our strategy, is to just go after the traditional player. And we are going to be using a free-to-play onboarding process, where you don't have to get into blockchain day one. You can get into blockchain, hour one, week one, month one, or maybe even never, but it's always there for you to utilize.
But when people talk about play-to-earn, it is something that needs to be seen as more of a monetization method than a genre of games, and I think because it is so limited it is seen as a genre in gaming. And so over time, as it becomes more popular, it will be parallel to how the free-to-play movement originally happened. Before that, people were looking at premium games, and companies were afraid of the free-to-play model. And now we have the play-to-earn model.
I think there are going to be a lot of hybrids between free-to-play and play-to-earn, and the only way, I think, to mass adoption, is to smoothen the transition for a lot of those traditional players that don't want to get on an exchange, who don’t necessarily want to learn how to use MetaMask, before they figure out how to play the game itself. I think those are the key takeaways.
Sam (9:48): Definitely, the onboarding process is a big barrier to entry, and blockchain games have been out for a while now, about four years since Crypto Kitties, and I don't think we have still seen any advancement in how to lower this barrier to entry. So I think this is the number one problem, and just like Hugh said, does the user need to know MetaMask or private keys and whatnot? Users need to have an onboarding process that they are used to. They want to sign in with Apple, Google, and Facebook and get straight to the game.
Another thing that Hugh said, which is also the slogan of our mobile platform, is, “free-to-play, play-to-earn.” The reason why there are free-to-play games with in-app purchases is that this is the easiest way to onboard users. It's the quickest way to have them get a feel for your game, see if they like it or not before they actually start playing. I think the big problem right now is that in most play-to-earn games, you need to know how to buy the first token, which is already quite difficult for the traditional user. If it is not the token, then they have to learn how to buy an NFT in order to start playing the game.
This is where YGG made a big splash, in this whole play-to-earn model, where they have mentors and scholarships, so there’s someone actually holding your hand and teaching you all the steps to start playing and earning. And being able to rent and lend other users NFTs makes the barrier to entry a lot simpler. I think this is something that everybody in the industry has to work together on.
You can check out the full recording on YouTube.
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