Press Play Podcast: Why Web3 Gaming Is Built for Superfans

Recently, Gabby joined Ted Mui of Chibi Clash and Corey Wright of Honeyland to discuss player liquidity and retention with the hosts of GAM3S.GG’s Press Play Podcast, Omar Ghanem and George Bracher.

Over the years, web3 game developers have tried different approaches to onboard new users into the ecosystem. One route that has gained popularity is through “web2.5” games, which keep the web3 elements of the game completely optional, similar to how free-to-play games work in web2. Titles like NFL Rivals use this model to give an existing fanbase a softer entry point into web3. Users play the game as is right after installing it on their phone, and they can connect a web3 wallet later on, should they be interested in trading and collecting the game’s digital assets.

Other games, especially those establishing new IPs, use web3 as a way to reward a game’s most active and involved players: the superfans. Pioneering organizations such as YGG have also been leaning heavily into the value of ownership in web3, focusing on the bottom of the funnel to drive organic growth. Initiatives such as YGG’s Guild Advancement Program (GAP) and Superquests encourage users to group together and create bonds through the pursuit of common goals, and this sense of community inspires them to continue participating.

Recently, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon joined Chibi Clash founder, Ted Mui, and Honeyland CEO and co-founder, Corey Wright, on GAM3S.GG’s Press Play Podcast, hosted by GAM3S.GG’s co-founder and CEO, Omar Ghanem, and Head of Game Exposure Management, George Bracher. Over the course of the podcast, they had an in-depth discussion on player liquidity in web3 gaming. For Gabby, fostering the growth of organic communities in web3 is shaping up to be the most sustainable way of building up this metric. Through YGG’s questing programs, groups of friends have found the motivation to band together in web3 as guilds, and with YGG’s infrastructure, gained the opportunity to scale their groups into operations resembling small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in web2.

The following is an excerpt from the GAM3S.GG’s Press Play Podcast, where Gabby, Corey, Omar and George weigh in on the effectiveness of hiding web3 features in games by packaging them as “diet web3” or “web2.5” games to grow their player population.

Listen to the full recording on X.

Press Play Podcast: Where Are the Gamers? | Press Play #53

Corey (28:48): Web3 elements, oftentimes, are only going to be available to web3 users, unless we really figure out ways — not just from the surface level, but from the true, full user experience level — to say, “How can we make this usable?”

I always use my mom as an avatar. She's not somebody who's our target market, but from a tech standpoint, she is tech-curious. She owns an iPhone. She loves to do things, but web3 is just nowhere in her vocabulary. How could I get her as somebody who can participate in this if the game was a style that she wanted to play? I think that's really important. Thinking all the way down to the full integration of the user experience for somebody who doesn't want to deal with web3.

Omar (29:24): Yeah, exactly. That's one of the points I've been harping on all of my calls this week. I've had people speaking to me from both sides of it, some of them with the most fantastic sinks and burn mechanisms programmed into their token, because all games need a token. Despite what I believe, they all do and will have a token. Then you find out that all their token interactions are completely optional. Those burns and sinks are useless if no one chooses to interact with it.

Making it so it's easy for these people to interact with, and something they need to interact with to actually play the game is definitely something that I think web2.5 needs to be doing. Personally, web2.5 is my favorite. I'm not 100% just web3. I don't think that's ever going to get enough players in.

We're going to throw it over to you now, Gabby. The other two speakers are part of a project, and they're doing it from a game standpoint, but you're someone that's with players and gamers and bringing players and gamers to these games. So how do you feel about the idea of these web2.5, diet web3 games?

Gabby (30:27): We've seen a whole range — web2.1 to web2.5 to web3. Web 2.1 just calls it “a game with a token,” but they don't seem to be actually connected. There’s web2.5, where a lot of a game can be experienced without actually needing to interact with the web3 part. Last, there’s fully web3 games where they really lean into the web3 portion of the game. 

Let's focus on the web2.5 games right now. It's kind of a merging between free-to-play and web3 elements. If you go back to free-to-play, what was really new and what broke people's minds about it was, before free-to-play, everyone had to pay for a game right before you could experience anything. With free-to-play, up to 98% or 99% of your players don’t actually pay for the game. They just play it for free, then maybe they watch some ads, and then 1% to 2% play and pay.

People thought that, “Oh, only the paying people are important in the game.” And that's not true. Even if you don’t pay for anything, you're important to the game because you bring player liquidity. You may have been active on the leaderboards or whatever. Web3 changes that, because with a lot of web2.5 games, there's the free-to-play portion, and there's the web3 portion. The web3 portion typically is at the bottom of the funnel. That has to do with ownership, that has to do with passion. So, you're doing things like owning assets, trading them, making UGC, oftentimes, bleeding into things like creating content and esports. These are actions by the superfans at the end of a funnel. I think these are things that web3 really excels in.

So you can have a web2.5 game where, if you're a casual player, you can play the game without any web3 elements, and you'll be fine. You don't need to interact with it at all. But I think where web3 really shines is that if you're really passionate, you get to have a chance to have ownership in the economy of a game. Whether it's paying for these assets, whether it's working for it, being a creator in esports or whatever. I think that's where web3 really shines. But I don't think it's fundamentally incompatible with a hybrid free-to-play approach.

George (33:06): I like the comparison to free-to-play and the fact that most players don't end up spending. I think that's something that is going to be true in terms of these web3 games as well, especially when you consider the cost of some of these NFTs. Like you said, those free players aren't worthless or unneeded. If I was going to be a whale in a game and I liked having my expensive assets, if there's no one to show those expensive assets to, it doesn't really have the same impact. You can't have a game that's just fishing for whales, because otherwise there's none of that power of achievement, power of, “Hey, look how cool I am, I have all this stuff,” compared to people who maybe don’t.

I think that's where we'll end up seeing it the same. Like you mentioned, some people will own in web3, but it won't be a big majority of the game. But, the game will need those web2 players to interact with enough of the elements to make it viable for the whale structure. You want to get involved heavily and spend into it.

You can listen to the full recording on X.

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