Going from 0 to 10,000 users on a blockchain game

Transcript

here you go hello how are you doing everyone so it's a great privilege for me to be here in front of you because on one side i'm kind of organizing this conference with each here in france and on the other side i get to present to you the project that i've been doing with my team here called the comet if you like what you see please click on this link tree or find the link tree or follow us on twittermustcomment.com so today i'm going to tell you a little bit about what we've built how we built it and what you can learn

from your own game on the mistake we made and on the well the couple of things we did right i think and if we have enough time i will show you a demo to where we are now and where we are headed so first off the thesis behind cometh and i think it's shared among the rest of this ecosystem that blockchain is bringing gaming to a whole new dimension um i've been a gamer in my past life playing mostly warcraft 3. you would be amazed of how many people in this community are playing warcraft 3. check out vlad zamfir ask him for a game he loved the game i love to play as well and i remember in my old days how it was cool to own assets in a game or be able to eventually sell your account

uh on ebay because someone else wanted to have your profile and so on and by this time you were banned by blizzard you would bind by the editor and so on now we are aiming to a shift that's asset on ability of what's inside the game it's amazing because you are playing inside the game you are working inside the game and getting to own what you have is really something we all want so that's the tip of the iceberg because it's easy to do like you take the game assets and you say oh it's an erc20 or it's only rc71 or 1155 and that's it you have asset and ability but that's only the beginning of what we can do with blockchain and that's what we are trying to explore at cometh other games also trying the same way for example dark forest

but what we want to do with blockchain and game is aiming towards financialization of gaming or applying d5 primitives to gaming take for example a game like eve online you have lots of resources you have crashes economic crisis inside the game well what can define bring you to prevent that for example that's the kind of ideas that we are exploring with this game for me blockchain is hard it's hard to get people onto blockchain but it's easy to get people to play so using gaming as a mean of blockchain adoption is something i strongly believe in plus once someone has bought one of the asset of the game or has acquired was the asset of the game by playing he feels um he or she feels engaged committed to the game

and that's where we can start to use the the dao movement and all the research that is being done in different dials to involve the player inside the governance inside the balancing of the game one thing we really like at comet is blockchain based game mechanics that's the hard part because the blockchain is limited it's cannot do lots of calculation computation it's sometimes slow it's sometimes expensive but you get to have a shared clock for everyone and you get to do pairing of everyone so i hope we will see a shift between uh multiplayer to peer-to-peer such as the multiplayer online ballerinas like fortnight to maybe blockchain online better arenas like connect with each

other through a blockchain rather than connect to each other through a server and you get all the good things of the blockchain transparency being able to censorship resistance and so on so the title of this talk is how to bring 10 000 users to play a blockchain game well first off uh yes it's bringing to a new dimension it's cool we need to explore it's an innovation great but getting on board into blockchain is probably the hardest thing that we have to deal with in this industry and i've known that working at consensus in my past life working at later and still being involved in ledger in various ways that it's super hard to do flashback in 2018 i was working at consensus and we were trying

very hard uh in the peak of the beer market to bring people to actually join blockchain startups join consensus and join different things so we were heading to all the engineering school that we knew and trying to present what blockchain was back in those days it was not a good sale like yeah they saw either going from the top to the bottom and be like well cool guys it's applied cryptography and yeah good good things but showing them that they can play an easy game manipulating some tokens was starting to get them interested so i need to sparkle some lights so i've always wanted to explore this and i get the the chance now to do it with a super talented team so how to bring 10 000 users to the blockchain with the game first off you need to build the game right easy

or is it well let's see and then you need to get people to play your game uh so you either target people that are in the crypto space or you try to bring new people to the crypto space uh well rationally speaking well number of people that are into crypto that have a little bit of crypto on their wallet is probably rather small right talking about what what 3 million 10 million who thinks we have 10 million if or older well 1 million if you're older yeah that's that's hard to guess like you can look at the number of unique addresses and feel like well maybe that's a good estimate that maybe there's a good proxy at least that's the that's the data gaming retail

uh looking at reports you can feel like you can see like it's 2.9 billion people like at least half the humanity is playing either on their mobile on something so the market is huge so getting them to play your game might be the right the right move and then you push it to the limits you look at what your game can handle inside the blockchain and how the blockchain can handle your game actually so we did a first iteration uh a version of the t-rex game like if you ever had a show an outage of internet on your computer or on your mobile phone you see the little tyrex like hey no connections and then the directs go on and then you can jump and so on so we did a thing that was kind of like this but based on blockchain and we try to put some

blockchain primitive inside of it like for example say we generate the the level and we take uh the block cash as a randomness for the for the number of uh wormholes or the numbers of asteroids that you see here pretty fun you get to see your nft inside the game yay so we have a blockchain game but we are only on the tip of the iceberg actually just showing nft or blockchain-based assets inside the game second iteration i admitted that i loved warcraft 3 so we built an rts yay um well so what do you see here all of those blue blue squares are actually nfts of players that they have launched into the

game um one nft one player many nft one player different players different strategies some holds of large armada some like to purchase one spaceship and play with it but the basic principle here is that you have comments passing by so here's a little comment it's going this direction and you as a player you need to position yourself close to it and the way you position yourself close to it is by interacting with other players you jump on someone else you click on someone else and say hey how much does it cost to jump next to you well it cost this amount as a player i choose what amount i'm willing to charge for jumping and you can jump multiple time and if you get close enough to the comments you mine it

and we put tokens on the comments to make the game uh interesting financially or give an incentive for people to play and what we saw is that players were super super interested super super into it changing their price to leverage their position in space uh trying to say well i'm in front of the first pixel that's going to hit the comet in 20 minutes so i'm probably going to have my price and so on and so forth and then well how do we bring that to the masses well first off we try to get crypto players to play so in january on the 26th we opened a shop on openc i bet you're familiar with this

marketplace um we were super successful in the beginning making it in the top 10 for a while but unfortunately pretty soon the market got completely clogged there are tons and tons and tons of small shops on open sea that's the success of the nft space so we had to start doing something else maybe we started to partner with different companies that you might recognize in on the slide and what we did was saying well we can do a collection of spaceship with you uh try to get a pickle-shaped spaceship trying to get a young finance shaped spaceship and so on and try to show that we have a cool game where you can play branded nft for from your favorite

project inside our game and that was pretty successful like we could bring people from other communities to meet our communities and also have our community meet this other project and see what they can do with it and then as a complete degens we tried to do a tick-tock campaign yeah i know coming to that later eventually as i said well the openc market got a little bit hard to play with uh if the openc folks are watching us we would love to be able to promote our shop for example that's super hard to do like they do some promotion they do maa with their communities and so on but it's much less uh well organized than if you have

a a shop on ebay for example so we have developed our own shop very simple page where we show the different spaceships that you can get don't try to get this one it's sold out don't try to get this one it's sold out well sold out is a common word at hcc but this one you can still get and we also opened a staking mechanism where you can put some tokens inside the comet tube and at some point you can redeem new spaceships so some players we discovered like to hold the token and then unlock more nfc and see the value the team can get from a gaming perspective with the different primitives that we expose and now we tried the hard way trying to bring gamers to play a

blockchain game so we found out that gamers were very very into gaming for sure but they were also wanting to have a great experience so we followed our tiktok campaign and asked a couple of uh uh gaming gaming influencers to talk about the game to talk about something that was going to happen and since we had a better arena why not host a giant tournament so we received a small ground from polygon to organize this grand prix and we decided that it was a good occasion to tell people from outside of the blockchain space hey you should come and play because there is huge reward and we have a tournament it's esport on blockchain yay um and unfortunately a couple of days after we started it tick tock band

banned the campaign about crypto but still we had people that got interested starting to look at uh what was available how to play this wow that's a huge amount you guys are dropping so why not play and this is how we decided to change the onboarding so having people install metamask was like well okay i need i need a wallet i need this i need that and i'm super impressed by how uh games like axe infinity managed to grab people from outside the blockchain space to install an application outside of the of the of the shop of the ios shop or the android shop and then get to install metamask and so on and so forth that's like a tour de force to to to watch but for us we were in a rush and

bootstrapping so we had an email about it and the consequence was great honestly people were just trying the thing out putting their email trying to uh load the wallet and try to get into the game um so you can see on this graph like uh 31st of june we had about 1000 people committing to the game and then we have 2.5 and then 2.8 and 2.3 and so on and so forth and now we are close to 9 000. so people who wanted to play people wanted to get in but they needed a way to access crypto the um yeah so we started out by having offering the players a way to play for cheap uh a way to grab a basic spaceship for cheap and get

accustomed to the game and those that didn't get to the end of the onboarding we were saying to them well you know you've tried hard you click on buy crypto operated by onramp you try to do the kyc and then well it's too complicated too complicated you put your id to complicate it to pay even for 10 and then grab a thing but yeah you put your email that's cool we're giving out we're giving away a spaceship to you and giving you also a little bit of magic token and of mustache so you can try to play actually um and that worked pretty well so first thing of conclusion if you want people from outside the blockchain to play on your game offer them stuff yeah basic customer acquisition actually and now this is what we expose um we

have a same the same screen that you see before and we are extending to display other stuff inside our universe so you have portals the two the two uh pink circles that you see here that allows you to travel from one arena to the other discover the academy start to learn to play uh when you when you don't know how or start to um go on the solar system number three solar system number four with experimental features discover different things and we tried to grow the different offers of services that we had so notably letting people stake of course letting people swap the tokens that they earn inside the game letting people shop easier and also we realized that the game that we were exposing was not super active all the time

so we had to find a solution for people that were sleeping or people that were on weekend or during holidays and enough time to play so we open the rental so we have also a leasing service so if you have a spaceship and don't want to play it just lease it and try it and now the big challenge for us is to move everything to mobile that's going to be fun because 99 90 49 of the gaming is actually happening on mobile so another good thing to know is go mobile first i think that would have been the kind of thing that we should have done from the beginning well before i tell you to come at the booth and grab some stickers i'd like to show you what it looks like

when you are actually trying to play if i still have some time oh yes i do whoop so all right if you go on game dot comment dot io here we go oh damn i need a wanted provider well good thing is i've already registered my wallet come on you can see how stressed out i am that this demo is not going to work so i receive an email asking me like hey

are you sure you want to log into this and it turns out i really want to log into that there we go so that's a pretty fun way to onboard people but of course you don't get to have access to the private key it's operated externally it's complex so we need a better solution in the short term we need to migrate people to something else like you know this is safe like another smart contract based wallet or something but that's a good enough beginning just start simple then you click and click on uh well i can i can go to the shop for sure you see you have the grand prix going on this uh this sunday i can try to buy crypto oh yeah that's uh that's cool uh i can leave on ramp and uh i can start to play

okay let's try to play here we go so actually this is the first time i load this game on this computer so i have the elpa boat asking me like hey that's cool thanks you for coming uh i'm going to explain to you why you can move so what i was explaining to you earlier that uh oh we have cool music let's shut this down so we can actually hear it okay so what i was telling you is that people are trying to leverage their position in space and some people are trying to be opportunistic i would say because there's lots of newbies not just new players playing in the academy so they are all trying to some of them are trying to extract lots of value from new players

so this guy for example it cost a lot to get next to him 0.001 and the guys in greens it costs only zero zero zero three so that's fine here you can see uh my spaceship in its grandiose beauty but you get much nicer spaceships playing in arenas like sultry sulfur so one and so on and that's the galactic stadium where we are going to host the grand prix this weekend so let's see who's there was there oh yeah all right so coming back to the academy uh i can filter the players that are expensive because i don't want to lose all my wallet playing and now i'm going to try to get close to a comet let's try to aim for this one for example okay

one two three four so i'm going to do four hops here one hops there one up there uh i think we have pro gamers in the room so what do you think i'm going to hit it or not let's try it out let's try it out putting it in progress so that's the randomness factor of this game is sometimes the transaction can't get in as soon as you as fast as you would have wanted and you miss it okay okay okay yeah yeah yeah is it going to be in the money or not let's look at it i want it yay first first attempt so i just i just mining successful so we think that this

is a good game to oh it doesn't want another one no almost a double but my spaceship needs to cool down i cannot mine that fast i could have mined faster by using an item but i don't have any so anyway so let's look at what i've won i've won something in my wallet which is a lp token so we distribute lp tokens of the decks inside the game so the players can actually earn the liquidity of the decks that we run and we create the liquidity of these decks by selling nfts and providing liquidity with the sales process the thing is if you are a new player to to uh if you are a newcomer to

blockchain you eventually end up playing this game and you end up having different types of tokens in your wallet so you get to discover defy indirectly we put some d5 token in your wallet and we get them to try it out discover what you can do with it and probably go try something else in the space hopefully so that's what i wanted to tell you about and i hope you liked it if you did uh come and see us at the comet boost uh if you have a game and want to chat with us about how you can make it better how we could have make it better we are very keen to hear what you think you can show lots of information on the link tree here follow us on twitter and if you come to the booth to grab a poap you can also participate to

the air dropping of le france and mint an nft solid nft with the solid nft team that are at abuse thank you everyone [Applause] i think we have time for one question or two so good questions as you can see on those spaceships there is no lasers there is no cannon yet maybe in the future it turns out that in france if you want to apply for

subsidies for video game creation it shouldn't be violent so we have to figure out a way to make pvp without having fights and um we have many ideas about that uh naturally it will more go first to team versus team because one v1 is complex but pvp can be done with this kind of thing like hey i challenge you to duel [Music] can you make a better score than me on this uh this instance of this t-rex game for example but the pvp inside the rts uh is going to be first time at first it's going to be a team

a team versus team thing or capture the flag thing all right well thanks for listening i hope you come and grab some some tokens and i'll leave the floor to the zk evm talk you