Having spent a lot of time in the mobile gaming sector, it’s no surprise I’ve drunk the kool aid about the importance of retention.
Indeed, one of my favourite pieces of blockchain game data viz was something I came up with while at DappRadar way back in 2020 when we were first looking at the monthly retention rates of a bunch of what now look like pretty mediocre blockchain games.
Despite that, the best of the bunch could retain more than 75% of their audience month-on-month when we looked at their onchain data.
(Actually My Crypto Heroes was a nice JRPG, just a little to ‘Japanese’ for me. I look forward to its resurrection on Oasys.)
In turn, this reminds me of Jiho’s famous retention curves during the glory days of Axie Infinity.
Of course — as was pointed out at the time — many people were then playing Axie Infinity as their main job or side hustle.
Nevertheless, it always strikes me that the ability to own your in-game stuff does have a strong impact in terms of how players interact with games, and I think that’s something which extends beyond the usual caveats of a golden cohort or core audience.
For example, the graph below is something I’ve been working for an onchain game which has been running what’s effectively a very barebones technical alpha — no retention features other than the game — for the past year or so.
As ever, it’s a small sample and there are a bunch of weird methodical assumptions that have to be taken into account; it’s a single cohort over a long period. But despite the fact that this type of game is inherent sticky, it’s pretty clear to me that allowing people to own their own stuff is a key element for 20% retention over 6 months.
That’s something at odds with what we see in mobile games where 20% can be considered a decent day 30 rate.
And that’s before we get into the subject of monetization; something else that blockchain games are inherently good at.
Indeed, I do sometimes wonder that despite its enormous growth as a sector since 2012 whether the whole free-to-play model wasn’t a horrible mistake, or at least a model with a very obvious fatal end point — diminishing returns from attempting to over-scale advertising — baked in from the very beginning.
In this manner, by encouraging monetization — not through psychological sleight of hand — but through real asset ownership, which in turn improves retention and kicks off the flywheel, I hope blockchain games can solve many of the issues that developers now appear to be struggling with.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of games
Calendar
Mojo Melee’s Harvest of Doom season starts — 6th October
Guild of Guardian’s Friends and Family Demo starts — 9th October
Axie Game Jam 2023 launches — 15th October
Synergy Land launches testnet early access — 16th October
Aavegotchi is going live in The Sandbox — 25th October
Peter Molyneux’s Legacy launches — 26th October
Phantom Galaxies goes into early access — 2nd November
Axie Infinity Season 6 ends — 11th November
Funding news
TON (The Open Network) blockchain has announced an “eight-figure investment” from MEXC Ventures, the venture arm of the MEXC crypto exchange. As part of this deal, MEXC will be promoting TON-based products on its platform and also support TON with free trading pairs.
As detailed in a recent email, TON was originally developed by Telegram, then went open source with its own foundation when the SEC said it was a security, and is now being integrated into the Telegram social platform — which has an increasing number of games — with all 800 million users getting a custodial TON wallet.
You can use this to hold TON, Bitcoin and Tether and send these assets for free to any Telegram contact. Users can also create a self-custodial wallet called TON Space, which is designed to handle TON-based tokens, NFTs and other collectibles.
Axie Season 6 Live news
Common consensus may be that Axie Infinity is now passe but it’s the sort of passe that’s allocated around $500,000 in rewards for its 49 day Season 6 event. Labelled as the most accessible and the most competitive season yet, Season 6 will reward the top 10,000 players with the game’s AXS token, with the top player of the final tournament getting around $2,500.
For the first time, the game is also rewarding holders of Mystic, Origin, Xmas, Shiny, Japanese, and Meo axies with the ability to earn special chests but only if they can rank sufficiently highly on the leaderboards. For new players, there’s a streamlined tutorial and onboarding.
Additional Links
OpenSea has launched its new NFT Creator tools.
Nike’s .SWOOSH — integrated with EA Sports — is dropping its first physical sneakers to NFT holders on 20th October.
Google Podcasts is going away so listen to all your podcasts in Fountain and get paid in Bitcoin