W3GS: How YGG Revived UA for Axie Infinity
At W3GS, Angel Pui and Chris “Caldie” Calderon joined Juntaro Iwase to discuss how blockchain, AI and gamified education are transforming user acquisition in web3.
A major topic of discussion at the YGG Web3 Games Summit (W3GS) was growth drivers for web3 gaming, especially with emerging technologies like AI being adopted more widely by marketers. To talk about user acquisition (UA) strategies for web3 games, YGG’s Global Head of Growth, Angel Pui, took the W3GS stage with Chris “Caldie” Calderon, co-founder and CEO of the AI-powered UA platform Superfine, and Juntaro Iwase, Senior Growth Manager of Sky Mavis, the studio behind Axie Infinity.
The group talked about content creators taking part in gamified learning programs, the ability of AI to understand market nuances, and how these are taking UA methods to a whole new level. Angel also shared an exciting announcement about the future of YGG’s Superquests. After a successful first campaign, with Axie Infinity: Origins gaining more than 4,000 new and returning players, Superquests is now Sky Mavis’ official training partner for Origins, opening up the program to everyone wanting to play the game.
The excerpt below features Angel discussing her vision for Superquests and how it capitalizes on collaborations with experienced gamers like spamandrice and Kookoo. She also mentions common onboarding challenges, such as information overload and scams, explaining how Superquests helps reduce web3’s learning curve through step-by-step guides.
Bringing his experience from web2 games like Dots and 2048, Caldie also shares how he applies learnings from his journey to web3 games and talks about his vision for user acquisition in web3. To hear the panel discuss growth strategies for video games, challenges in onboarding gamers into web3, tailoring user acquisition strategies for different game genres, and more, listen to the full recording on Facebook.
W3GS: Turbocharging Gamer Acquisition
Juntaro (2:21:25): So in the context of lifecycle marketing, which all marketers have to face, I want to hear about your respective vision and what you're seeing so far. Let's start with Angel. Can you talk about your vision for Superquests and how you see a gamified and educational approach has impacted user onboarding and other metrics?
Angel (2:12:47): As YGG's mission is to level up everybody, our vision is to teach players how to play. Our hypothesis is that, in order to increase engagement and retention rate, players need to really love playing the game, having fun and mastering it.
Some of you might have already seen the talk earlier today. But we partnered up with two of our stars, spamandrice and Kookoo, to teach players how to get started, master the basics, and then learn from the best of the best — the former champion, spamandrice — to learn how to play competitively and win.
Our vision is really to teach players how to play. But as a gamer myself, getting onboarded to web3, it's really quite a learning curve. So at first, when I was joining all these Discords, there was just so much noise, I didn't know what to really believe. There were so many scams. And if I click on the link, I'm not sure if it’s real.
So, our vision with Superquests is to teach you so that it covers every small step — a step-by-step guide — so that you’re never feeling like you have to figure it out on your own. And how else could you learn if it wasn't from the best person? Just like at MasterClass, you want to learn how to make your scrambled eggs with Gordon Ramsay. Maybe with all the yelling at you hard, but otherwise, my scrambled eggs turned out pretty good.
It was a combination of learning in bite-sized, step-by-step guides with a level progression, much like Duolingo, having a fully integrated experience, earning instant rewards immediately. I believe that will be able to unlock a lot of these web2 players that might see that big barrier and not be able to get started.
Juntaro (2:25:45): I come from a digital marketing background, paid UA. I do want to see more experimentation, more innovation in the space. Now, from your standpoint, what's your vision for Superfine? And also, how does paid UA for web3 games differ from traditional web2 models?
Caldie (2:26:00): Most of the positions that I've ever worked in a game team have been the sole marketer responsible for marketing a game. I share the idea that not a lot has changed positively for paid user acquisition over the last 10 years. In fact, despite all the new potential innovations that we could have with blockchain and AI, we've seen mostly a negative impact on paid user acquisition. So I think that's where it changes. The marriage of blockchain and AI could allow us to do things that we were never able to do before.
One area is when we marketed Two Dots, which was the number one game in 100 countries. Our main channels were Facebook and Google. Today, there are now thousands of channels that you could advertise on. And each of these channels has its own nuance: what you can and cannot say, the size of creatives that you can use, and so on and so forth.
And one of the cool things about AI is a language learning model can understand this nuance at scale. And this was essentially what used to be the secret sauce of a UA manager — knowing the nuance, knowing how fast you could change your bid or budget without it negatively impacting performance. Now, AI can help do this for you at scale across hundreds or thousands of networks. So, I think that's going to be one of the greatest innovations that we see, bringing AI into paid marketing.
You can listen to the full recording on Facebook.
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