W3GS: Unpacking the Product Strategies of Regional Web3 Guilds
At W3GS, Akio Tanaka, Irene Umar and Rohit Gupta joined Andy Chou to reflect on how regional guilds are setting themselves apart in terms of their business models and product strategies.
At the YGG Web3 Games Summit (W3GS), YGG Head of Ecosystem Development, Andy Chou, moderated “Worldwide Web3 Gaming,” featuring Akio Tanaka, co-founder of YGG Japan, Irene Umar, co-founder of SEA-based gaming guild, W3GG, and Rohit Gupta, co-founder of the New York-based esports guild, NYXL.
The panelists talked about their regional initiatives, such as W3GG’s questing platform that enables their community to create their own events in web3, NYXL’s loyalty software to help prepare fans for web3 esports, and YGG Japan’s Stickey, a multi-chain, multi-game wallet for the Japanese market. Akio also highlighted the strengths of each region, such as the esports culture in Southeast Asia and the iconic game IPs of Japan, a lot of which comes from anime culture. The group discussed how these strengths in esports, products and community could be leveraged to further drive the adoption of web3 gaming at a grassroots community level.
The following excerpt covers how regional web3 guilds are starting to differentiate themselves from other guilds while staying aligned with YGG’s user acquisition efforts. Irene shares how W3GG’s rebrand reflects its evolving values, such as rewarding contributions to prepare its members for opportunities in web3. Akio explains YGG Japan's strategy of building tailored products to address the language barrier preventing the Japanese community from fully leveraging the power of blockchain in gaming. Rohit highlights NYXL's shift from web2 esports to web3 activations, emphasizing the potential of major IPs like Call of Duty and Mountain Dew to onboard gamers into web3 in partnership with web3 games and franchises.
Watch the full recording on Facebook.
W3GS - Worldwide Web3 Gaming
Andy (2:37:25): Gaming guilds have been around for some time now, whether it’s the era of web2. So how is it different in web3, but also, how is your guild starting to differentiate from both a geographical but also on a business model standpoint?
Irene (2:40:02): There are three pillars that W3GG embodies. The first part is, as a gaming guild, we play. We believe that playing is the birthright of every human being. So if you go to w3gg.io, you'll be able to see that the games catalog is being updated on a weekly basis, if not daily. We have around 263 to 270 games. All of those are web3 games. But for me, I'm a believer that web2 and web3 games are, essentially, games. Games that themselves have to be playable and fun. The games that are fun for me might not be fun for the gentlemen here and vice versa. So we want to give a suite of games.
If you were here over the weekend, we also did the Web3 Game Jam for indie game developers and also for students, so that we can promote the talents of game developers within the region. This is something that we've been doing for years, personally with Gabby and also with the team at YGG. We want to put that as a transition into web3. All those games will also be listed in w3gg.io.
The second pillar is learning. We see very similar tractions that's going to happen in web3. That is how it was in esports. When esports started, everybody would like to become the top players, but not everyone can become Ronaldo in football, right? In web3, similar things happen. Not everyone can be the top Axie players, not everyone can be the top content creators, but there's a suite of jobs that are to be created.
Esports today, there are still new jobs created and new gaps that are still not yet filled. And why is that? It is because, in the beginning of esports, nobody looked into filling up the spaces. So that's why we're skilling up our communities across web3, to make sure that we equip the communities to change and empower them so that they can get into the third pillar, which is earning.
Last year and in 2021, earning was all about the play-to-earn scholarship model. But we know that this industry is bigger than that. And we want to prepare our community for it. Because earning can come from not only gaming but also content creation and filling in all the other jobs. But what it's solving, fundamentally, is the proof of contribution. We'll be able to see who contributed, and hence, they will be rewarded accordingly. That's the basic concept of the DAO. And that's what we're implementing at W3GG.
Akio (2:43:16): Japan is actually a very interesting market. We don't have a strong esports culture like the US and unlike Southeast Asia, Japanese crypto wallet users are a much, much smaller percentage of the whole population. So these are things that we don't have. But then, at the same time, there are things that are actually very strong assets in Japan.
First of all, it's a country with strong game IPs. In fact, in terms of user ARPU (average revenue per user), among paying users, we are actually one of the highest in the world. So we have high-paying gamers — not too much into esports and PC games, but console and mobile are very strong in Japan, with great game IPs — which, also, some of it comes from Japanese anime culture.
Now, within the context, when we partnered with YGG to launch YGG Japan, we had a little bit of a dilemma. We realized we couldn’t just build the guild community in the way that W3GG is building in Southeast Asia, because that model doesn't quite exist. Because we never had this strong esports culture, which, of course, the guild is very affiliated with.
So we took a very different approach. We said, “Okay, we do have 50 million casual gamers. Most of them are used to paying, though they're not a play-to-earn type of people, but they are definitely into paying in games if they deem the gameplay worth it.” We wanted to figure out how to convert that into web3 gamers, and in Japan, we lacked many things. So we started actually focusing on products, and as Andy mentioned, we have several products as YGG Japan.
Rohit (2:48:32): Being a franchise owner, one of the benefits is that we get to exploit the game IPs. So, obviously, Call of Duty is played by many people globally, and we had Mountain Dew as a big sponsor of ours, and we hosted a 10,000-person event in Brooklyn and they wanted to replicate that experience in Decentraland, where we actually could bring Call of Duty and do a watch party there.
I think we're the only org, I think, so far, that did a sponsorship event in a decentralized Metaverse, where it was our brand with Mountain Dew, brought in Call of Duty, and they paid a handsome sum for that. And I think a lot of brands you saw — even FTX with TSM and Riot with Coinbase — people wanted gamers. And that's why a lot of esports teams saw the value of that consumer. Obviously, that's gone away in today's market, but that doesn't mean that it's not coming back in the future.
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