Why build Guild of Guardians out of all possible blockchain games
If you could build anything, what kind of game would make sense with blockchain?
This is a question I asked myself a lot 2-3 years ago. It’s also a question I’ve received more in the recent months.
Today I wanted to dive into some of the rationale and thesis behind how we landed on Guild of Guardians.
Framing the challenge
The mission is to onboard hundreds of millions of players into digital assets.
To do this, we must be competitive with existing forms of entertainment. Whether it’s the most popular gaming franchises like League of Legends, Fortnite or Call of Duty. Or whether it’s alternative forms of entertainment like Netflix, Youtube and so on.
However, the industry is incredibly competitive. Each genre is typically dominated by just a few titles (think of the top MOBA + FPS games), gameplay innovation is extremely risky, and thousands of games get retired each year.
Web 3 also has an inherent challenge. Because of how the blockchain works, its technically challenging to create a good user experience. Meaning users need to want to play despite any UX hurdles.
This means to achieve our mission, we have to use blockchain in away that makes the game so good that players would want to play our web 3 game over everything else.
Thesis for winning
Given this challenge, we needed a very strong thesis for winning. We did not believe that simply making things tradable in a game would be sufficient to win.
To illustrate - yes we could have tried to build Fortnite but make the skins tradable. But would our version of Fortnite + skin economy be more fun than the Fortnite that exists today? This would be a mammoth challenge.
Instead, the core thesis was that we needed to leverage the full breadth and depth of web 3 to really win. See this article on specific examples of these advantages.
The key questions we asked ourselves:
In which genre do we have the greatest likelihood of disrupting as a game?
In which genre does blockchain make the game significantly better for players?
Competition & size of the prize
Building in the right genre is important. Ultimately we looked at several factors when evaluating the space to build in:
How big is the industry and is it growing?
Is the industry dominated by a monopoly / duopoly who have a massive advantage and head start? (e.g. FPS, MOBA)
How difficult is it to create an equally competitive gameplay experience? (e.g. MMOs are notoriously tricky)
Does the audience actually fit with blockchain? (e.g. Games targeting kids is the obvious bad example, or most casual games)
Is this a proven game genre or would we be innovating on gameplay as well as blockchain?
Ultimately we landed on the mobile + squad RPG genre.
Mobile gaming as an industry is massive. It makes $100 billion each year which is twice as much as PC, and is growing 2.5x faster
Mobile as a platform is hyper accessible and can allow us to onboard a global audience, in particular in Asia where 50% of gamers only play on mobile
Mobile squad RPGs are a proven, popular category. There were 300m downloads in 2021, and $6 billion is spent each year on these games
Importantly, it’s also relatively fragmented. The top 10 games do not differ significantly in size, meaning there is more opportunity to break in
Players spend a LOT of money compared with other mobile games, usually to collect and roll for heroes - on average active players spend $200-300
Players are already familiar with real money economies in RPGs - examples like Runescape, WoW and Diablo will make onboarding significantly easier
Market data & insights
Using blockchain to create a better game
Now the important part. How does blockchain make the game better for players?
In Guild of Guardians, we were very deliberate with both the choice of the game as well as the design of the economy & gameplay in order to build the best possible experience.
In traditional mobile team RPGs, players like:
Achieving the reward of progression by grinding, playing, sometimes spending and ultimately building their dream team
Satisfaction from building out a wide collection of powerful heroes, or just being able to summon their favourite character
Thinking strategically about the game, how to best build team compositions, equipment sets, and spend their limited resources (i.e. energy)
Playing together with friends, making new friends and showing off their accomplishments or special characters
In Guild of Guardians, we use blockchain game design to take each of these player motivators a step further:
Spending both time and money on building a dream team is no longer a sunk cost, since heroes are tradable
Collecting is more rewarding because there is true, provable scarcity, plus there are opportunities to show off or interact with your collection outside of the game
Economic gameplay adds strategic depth to the game, making it more interesting, dynamic and enjoyable for players who like to think
Guild mechanics and cooperative earning creates positive social experiences, helps players meet new people and creates more show-off opportunities
Conclusion
In summary, finding blockchain genre fit is about using blockchain in a game that makes it better for those players. Guild of Guardians does this whilst also operating in a big market (mobile RPGs) where we can be competitive on gameplay.
Excited to see how it plays out - join the waitlist here: www.guildofguardians.com
Personal thoughts only. If you would like to chat, my Twitter DMs are open: www.twitter.com/xdereklau
Amazing Derek...that is the reason why GOG is one of my 3 favorites web3 games currently in development.