YGG Play Summit: Welcoming the World to Web3
At the YGG Play Summit, YGG Head of Corporate Development Andy Chou spoke with leaders from YGG’s global network of guild partners about user acquisition strategies to onboard Web2 gamers to Web3.
User acquisition (UA) was a hot topic at the YGG Play Summit last November, especially with so many high-quality Web3 game releases in 2024. Discussions about community growth and player onboarding took place between attendees on the conference floor, at the sponsor booths, and carried over to the invite-only Leaders Roundtables, where a diverse group shared their bold takes on Web3 UA and the role of key opinion leaders (KOLs), to inform a trends report to be published soon.
On the Summit main stage, YGG Head of Corporate Development Andy Chou moderated the panel “Web3 Gaming Taking the World By Storm,” speaking with leaders of YGG’s global network of guild partners, W3GG CEO and co-founder Chin Yu, SKYGG CEO and co-founder Joony Koo, Infinity Ventures Crypto Partner Ann Chien representing YGG Japan, and KGeN Elder Council Member Ishank Gupta. Together, the group talked about where they believe Web3 needs to go to reach mass adoption, and the role of gaming guilds in driving that adoption, drawing on insights from their earlier roundtable discussions.
The following is an excerpt from the panel. Chin talks about finding Web2 players who are open to trying new things, given the challenge of uprooting players from their current games. Ishank advises game developers focusing on UA to follow working models in Web2 and decide early on the type of gamer they want to bring into their virtual worlds.
You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.
YGG Play Summit: Web3 Gaming Taking the World by Storm
Chin (3:05:40): There's still a small chunk of Southeast Asian players that are willing to test new things. I think emerging markets are definitely where you should find all these gamers that are willing to try new things. It's kind of a double-edged sword. It's harder to convince them to come over into the space, but it's also easier to convince them to try new things. I think until we have that killer game where you have to experience this to experience the benefits and so on, that's where it's gonna shift.
And again, the blurring of Web2 and Web3 is, I think, not separating the categories into Web2 and Web3, but letting games just incorporate this technology. Rather than separating it, you incorporate these technologies and showcase the benefits in a slow way. It's a bit size. You give them the option to mint an NFT and trade it if they want to do it. Giving the power back into the hands of gamers, rather than forcing and shoving it down their throats, is the right approach.
Andy (3:06:55): Ishank, I know you have thought about this problem a lot, this user acquisition thing. Can you talk a little bit about what KGeN is doing to solve that?
Ishank (3:08:30): I think there are two sides to your question: The how side, and the why side.
On the how side, I think it's very important that we think about how to solve user acquisition in Web3 by learning from models that have been around for a long time in Web2. For example, if you look at advertising in Web2, it's really deeply solved, I would say. You have deep consumer personas. You have deep consumer profiles. You know that when you want to advertise your shaving cream or new game to a particular user sitting in a particular country, exhibiting a particular set of behaviors, you know which engine to use.
In many ways, that's where we drew our inspiration. We are building this engine, which hopefully will unpack a lot of value for developers, at least in targeting users in the Global South. You can say, “Hey, I'm looking for a PC gamer who spends money inside games, who plays MMORPG games,” and so on. If we enable precise targeting by leveraging models that have done well in Web2 over the last 10 years and bring some of those learnings into Web3, I think we as an industry can grow a lot. That's on the how side of things.
On the why side, I think we really need to ask ourselves when we talk about user acquisition, “What are we really going after? Are we going after token buyers, or are we going after game players?” These two sets may intersect, but they are not always the same. Speculators and gamers may overlap, but I don't agree when people say every gamer is a speculator, and I definitely don't agree when people say every speculator is a gamer. That doesn't hold.
You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.
Follow Andy, Joony, Chin, Ann, and Ishank to learn more about the rapidly growing Asian Web3 gaming community.
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