Meet Benas Baltramiejūnas, CEO and Co-Founder of BlockGames
The early days
Up until the age of 18, I was a super passionate gamer. I spent four or five years of my childhood just playing console games. Initially, when I started playing games, I didn’t have money. I was only 14 years old, and my parents were hesitant to let me make online purchases. But looking back, maybe they were also concerned because I spent so much time playing games, and it was affecting my studies.
My first opportunity to spend online came when our neighbor allowed me to use their credit card to buy a membership for a game — Runescape. That was my first experience of buying something on the internet.
From that moment on, I got into buying various things in games, and I even tried my hand at making money selling in-game assets. It was a bit of a learning experience, but I realized there was a market for trading virtual items, and an opportunity to make some pocket money. I stopped, but some of my friends carried on and made fortunes.
Then, when I was around 18, I realized I needed to do more than just gaming, so I put the controller in a drawer and started focusing more on my education and career.
Nike
The first job I got was at Nike where I worked as an intern. Over the next six years, I transitioned through as many roles and ended up establishing and managing a predictive analytics team working across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Nike really got behind entrepreneurship. If you had a strong idea, you could ask for a budget, and just do it. That really inspired me. But, it also rubbed off at a deeper level and I realized I didn’t want to work for a large corporation forever, so I left Nike.
And then you met Kipras?
Around that time, yes, I met Kipras. He’s a super entrepreneurial guy who’s been in business by himself, in one form or another, since the age of 16. In his first year of university, at just 18, he started investing and running his own property portfolio. Then he worked in real estate in London, which is where we connected. He had this cool idea for streamlining renting processes in the UK, and I partnered with him on Halo Rent, which was our first startup together. We went on to sell that business, and then we were like: What’s next?
Blockchain bros.
The Web3 and blockchain industry had always been on our radar, and we’d been personally active as investors, and interested overall in the technology and its wider impact. But I wanted to make sure that whatever we did centered around fun. Which brought me full circle to gaming.
Kipras and I were avidly searching for the next big thing, and gaming was top of the list. So we decided to enter the sector and immerse ourselves in Web3 with a laser focus on building out a project that we could scale.
Estoty and the first funding round
We were already friends with some of the founders from Estoty, a world-leading mobile game studio. We partnered with them to found BlockGames as a Web3 gaming company.
We initially started with Shatterpoint, a super-fun, high-octane RPG game, which, as our first game, we’re continuously working on. We wanted to prove to the world that you could create a mobile game in which you didn’t know you were playing something built on the blockchain — just a great RPG with some added, gamified functionality. During this time, while building Shatterpoint and speaking with Estoty and other game developers in the space, we discovered another huge problem that needed solving. And that’s how the BlockGames Player Network was born.
Overcoming industry challenges
The number one challenge is user acquisition (UA). When Google Play and the App Store introduced changes to their privacy policies, restricting the use of personal data, it became much harder for games to identify players and loop data back to their platforms for marketing campaign optimization.
Paid media acquisition channels got severely disrupted forcing some larger game publishers to pull the plug on releasing new games altogether, or redouble their efforts to find alternative UA strategies. Another big shift is games pursuing organic growth through content creators. This is a rapidly rising trend that I think is here to stay.
Fortunately, when it comes to UA, BlockGames tackles it from a completely new angle, one that will bring games and players closer together again with incentivized rewards while improving retention, and therefore sustainability, of its UA model.
What are your proudest achievements so far?
Networking
Firstly, building up the network. Meeting other fellow entrepreneurs, investors, publishers, community members, potential partners, and so on, has taken time but has borne great fruit. Fortunately, people and organizations in Web3 gaming are very supportive of each other; they share the common goal of achieving decentralization and handing power back to players.
Building the team
Secondly, Assembling a passionate, innovative, and energetic team is incredibly rewarding. It’s inspiring to witness not just myself but my colleagues getting hyped on the vision, about what we’re creating, and being fully invested in the product and people. Everyone in the team believes that this technology can revolutionize the industry by bringing exciting new features and utilities to gaming, and we’re working hard together to crystallize this vision.
Product
Thirdly, working hard with the product team to hide the blockchain functionality. We’re going after the masses and we know that delivering a seamless user experience of the BlockGames platform is mission-critical and that nothing should interfere with or interrupt gameplay. So the challenge is to make using BlockGames frictionless, and we’ve made great steps towards achieving that.
Community
Finally, building an incredible community! It’s crucial to build a very close relationship with our members by letting them in and sharing everyday challenges and successes with them. Community size is proof of success or failure, and since we launched the website and our first explainer video, we’ve seen an explosion in our Discord and Twitter numbers. What’s really great is people are staying.
A good community separates tier 1 from tier 2 projects in this space, and I feel confident in saying that BlockGames is already climbing toward the tier 1 category. Community lives at the core of any Web3 project, is an extension of your brand, and should be treated with respect. We keep our members in the loop about everything that’s happening, good and bad, and this is why they are invested in our vision — it becomes their vision. Building out a strong community is as important as building out a successful product because it is the community that gives you essential feedback that helps you improve in every area.
What’s the most compelling use case for BlockGames?
In a phrase: distribution of value. Right now, most of the value of user acquisition in games goes to centralized platforms like Instagram, Google, and app networks. Game publishers spend a lot of money on these platforms to get new users. The Player Network, on the other hand, allows game publishers to redirect their marketing spend towards the players themselves, in the form of rewards. The Player Network essentially channels the value distribution away from centralized platforms and directly into the hands of the players actively engaged in the games. This elevates player enjoyment and fosters a sense of belonging that drives loyalty and retention.
In addition, the concept of offering meaningful rewards benefits game publishers and incentivizes non-paying players to get more involved. Adding digital collectibles or tokens with real value, in exchange for their contribution to the growth of the game, enriches the playing experience for everyone. As for free-to-play users, there’s an increased chance that spending within games will become normalized as they realize how they can leverage the benefits and earn even more rewards.
Any final words on the state of play in the gaming space?
Web3 gaming accounts for a tiny percentage of the total gaming community worldwide. There are only around half a million active gaming wallets and 3.5 billion gamers worldwide. So we need to deliver the functionality of Web3 with the seamless quality of Web2 to achieve mass adoption. In addition, the quality of Web3 games should be indistinguishable from Web2. With this, combined with Web3 functionality and decentralization, we will win the hearts of each and every player that enters the BlockGames Player Network.
BlockGames is the world’s first cross-chain, cross-game Player Network, accelerating user acquisition for games through instant referral and engagement rewards mechanisms for players.
