Web3 Growth Podcast: How YGG Quests Help Games Grow Communities — and Retain Them
Gabby joins Justin Vogel and Quinn Campbell to discuss how quests reinvent marketing in web3 gaming, an industry that values community more than app installs and other traditional metrics.
The Web3 Growth Podcast features interviews with leading web3 growth practitioners who are playing a crucial role in shaping the next generation of great businesses and providing valuable insights to help people grow their businesses in and beyond web3. The podcast is produced by the creators of Safary, a privacy-friendly marketing analytics and attribution platform built for web3 projects. As a community-first company, Safary has built a network composed of the top web3 growth leaders representing companies like Ledger, Dapper Labs and CoinMarketCap.
This episode of The Web3 Growth Podcast was hosted by Justin Vogel, co-founder of Safary, and Quinn Campbell, co-founder of Superfine, a growth platform that gives web3 publishers the tools to scale. They are joined by YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon, who describes how YGG’s questing systems — Superquests and the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) — do more than educate and onboard new players to web3 games.
In the following excerpt, Gabby talks about how these questing systems go beyond building brand awareness for web3 games and encourage player retention through community involvement. He then explains how the Superquests initiative onboards new members to the community by leading with status through soulbound tokens. They also discuss how the guild’s go-to-market strategy has evolved from acquiring game assets to building community-centric products. Listen to the full recording on Spotify.
Web3 Growth Podcast: Growing Yield Guild Games with Gabby Dizon
Quinn (20:24): So Gabby, switching gears slightly, I'm super excited to start diving into the future of UA, the future of growth and the web3 growth tech portion here. To kick off, I would love for you to tell us more about Superquests and your thesis around building a more long-term engagement questing versus a top-of-funnel questing system.
Gabby (20:50): I come from the free-to-play space. If you look at mobile free-to-play in the last 10 years, how your product does well depends on how you can scale user acquisition in those games. And honestly, in my mobile career, we were not able to hit that scale. A big part of it is [that] I started my mobile game studio in 2014. A lot of the winners of that era were already defined by the Supercells of the world. That led me to figure out what's new — what's the new technology that can usher in a platform shift in games.
That's what led me to NFTs and web3. When web3 started growing two years ago, my mind shifted to, “What is the growth stack going to be like? Who are going to be the winners in this space?” The biggest difference between web2 growth and web3 growth is that web2 growth is very platform UA-dependent. There are the big platforms like Facebook and Google. There are the ad networks. None of them solve for the community, which is the cornerstone of web3. The main question in my head, and most of you can really resonate with this, is, “What does it mean to have a growth-oriented community?”
That was the question that stuck in my mind shortly after founding YGG. One of the conclusions I came to was that a quest is the native ad unit of web3. If you look at web2, you have your static ads, you have your video ads, and you may even have your playable ads. All of them lead to the installation. When you're thinking about community-based growth, it's not just about the installation. It’s about what people are doing post-installation and how you can help retain people for a long time with the use of community.
I saw this firsthand with my experience in Axie. It was the community that got a lot of people going and the different roles that people could play within the Axie ecosystem. Whether you're a player, a guild manager, a scholar, an esports player or a content creator. There was something in there for everyone to play according to their strengths and interests. That was the most interesting thing for me.
Coming back to YGG, I was thinking about how we can help organize guilds so that they can form together [and] do these different kinds of things that can help grow a community. But we need to use different kinds of strengths and then incentivize them so that people will help each other grow a community.
Quinn (23:46): Gabby, “A quest is the native ad unit of web3.” I love that. Justin, it may have even been in our first recording where we were talking about skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism is when new tech comes out, [and] people tend to apply old design principles to new tech. The classic example is newspapers on the internet, the first iterations of it, which were copy-pasted on the front page of the New York Times.
Now, it's much more native. We’ve been trying to brainstorm what the web3 native ad unit will look like. I love the idea of quests being just that. You also touched a little bit on the future of the growth stack. So, Gabby, I'd love to push you on that. What is your thesis here? What does the future web3 growth stack look like? What are all the pieces of the puzzle that fit together?
Gabby (23:46): First, you need your top-of-funnel acquisition, which everyone thinks about. When you think about user acquisition, it's about, “Did I get that right? Do I do this action and get a reward?” How you define those things can be a lot more nuanced and sophisticated. Many people have thought this to mean, “Okay, I'll post a quest, and we give out tokens right afterward,” which has led to the rise of what looked like web3 incentive networks.
That’s a valid form of doing it, but that's not what we're interested in. We've always been interested in quests that allow player communities to grow and retain themselves long-term. That means you're not focused on immediate monetary or liquidity rewards. That’s why we are leading with status, with soulbound token achievements, native to any gamer who's played on Xbox, Apple, and Steam, where most games have achievements.
They are useful in web3 because this is now a user-owned reputation. If you look at what led to the rise of web2 growth, it's the personalization of each user through cookies. A soulbound token achievement is the web3 version of a cookie the player owns and is proud to show off. That differentiates them from other people because they can proudly show off what they've done. On the advertiser side, it allows you to carefully target which community members you'd like to invite to your community and give them custom quests and custom offers.
You can listen to the full recording on Spotify.
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