GOB Update — Grand Vision & Next Steps

Do Gamers Really Care About Web3?

You just finished an 8-hour study day and are looking to wind down, so you boot up your favorite game and you get to grinding. You do this for one of many reasons, some of which are:

• Competency — ex. your ability to score headshots is unparalleled and it feels good
• Competition — ex. your current rank of 101/100,000 is just below epic bragging rights
• Exploration — ex. the next level is a snowy landscape that looks surreal and you want to see it all
• Creativity — ex. my castle is cooler than yours, I spent 100 hours building it
• Earning — ex. this e-sport pays better than my boring job

These aspects of gamer psychology have existed for decades and will continue to do so, with or without NFTs. In fact, e-sports and competitive play have enabled gamers to earn from their performance long before crypto, P2E and NFTs.

For the most part, blockchain game studios have been experimenting and working on a trial-and-error basis. Launch an NFT collection, decide on the specific game to build, assemble a team and craft a virtual economic model — these are the common steps familiar to most, but not all, NFT gaming projects. During development of the virtual economy, teams encounter new, exciting opportunities that result in additional NFT collections, or game features, or even entirely new games. Economies are complex beasts, forcing teams to gather all their experiences and skills to make the best decisions possible.

This is where I’ll state something controversial, but important. There are different kinds of NFT projects, some of which have passion for experimenting with the latest web3 tech while others show fascination in game theory, economics or egalitarian ideas. None of them are wrong in doing so, we are all paving the future and don’t have all the answers. Within the gaming sector itself, we find differing visions, perspectives and objectives. In addition, NFT gaming studios have a diverse range of talent, bringing their individual experiences to form a cohesive whole. These experiences particularly fall into the buckets of either web2 or web3. GOB encapsulates all of the above, and as a result, we have over-complicated the vision, diverging into too many experiments. During our time in Dubai for GITEX, we have identified what we believe in the most and where our strengths lie — we are gamers above all else; a group of people who want to build the coolest trading card game ever (and games of other genres afterwards).

The average gamer doesn’t care about any of the aforementioned web3 complexities. Crypto enthusiasts generally do, but they are a tiny minority compared to the global gamer masses. Also, we cannot compete with the web2 gaming giants directly, with their massive budgets and hold of the gaming markets. How do we position ourselves best to grow the user base and achieve greatness?

What Is The Grand Vision?

GOB will re-position as a traditional game developer that leverages key, FOCUSED, benefits of web3 tech.

• Real asset ownership — Did you spend $2,000 on in-game items but are now bored of the game? Your items aren’t worthless, you can trade the NFTs at any time. Do you seek exclusive game access? Present a Goon character NFT at login.
• Interoperability — Want to use Goons characters in that new racing game GOB just partnered with? You can! Want to build your own mini-game that instantly has a user base and brings more value to the Bods collection? As you wish.
• Financial injection and hype — Brilliant minds and deep pockets are flocking to the web3 gaming space, it’s an exciting, dopamine-infused journey to be a part of. We’ll be positioned right in the middle of that.

There are other benefits, which you’ll certainly find on a Tweet of the popular NFT gaming influencers. However, giving players real asset ownership is the main one we need right now — it is a huge selling point. This feature of web3 solves tangible problems gamers face which makes our game attractive and helps to onboard gamers more effectively.

GOB is building a game that intends to stand pridefully among the most innovative trading card games, while leveraging focused web3 features to create a revolutionary experience for gamers and NFT speculators alike. For the gamers, we utilize our wacky, rebellious branding to give them something desperately missing in trading card games — these design skills have already been proven, instrumental in capturing the community’s attention before we had any game product. That is going to continue, stronger than ever. For the NFT speculators, we offer web3 technologies to give people power previously unseen in the gaming world — economic power enabling them to profit off of the game’s success.

Here is our grand vision — utilize our gameplay innovation and design skills to onboard traditional gamers to web3 in an organic, sustainable way where NFTs are a no-brainer solution to their real problems.

GITEX Dubai was instrumental in giving our fully-remote team a chance to bond over a clear vision and practice the pitch 100s of times throughout the week. During these live rehearsals, we narrowed down on what appeals to people the most, regardless if they are marketers, gamers or investors. Honestly, the connections we made (and there are quite a few, which will be detailed below) are secondary to this opportunity to unify and simplify the vision. Having nailed that down, we move onto the execution and priorities.

Priorities

We have several NFT collections, a community of thousands, a complex economic model and a working beta version of the game. Based on everything said until this point, it is clear we need traditional gamers for our vision to materialize. These are the value injectors necessary for a thriving economy and they want a fun, innovative gameplay experience to spend their hard-earned money on.

Thus, GOB now enters the most critical stage in the development of this game, where we consider your feedback, the harsher the better, and make difficult decisions to re-model the gameplay as deemed necessary.

We need your help, the community, to play our TCG in potentially unstable conditions, encounter annoying (sometimes even hilarious) bugs and shape our thinking while the game is raw; before the masses experience it. The game has to be stellar across the board — smooth UI, beautiful visuals, fun gameplay and addictive engagement mechanics (leaderboard, tournaments, achievements).

November is a month of pure tech, which may lead to instabilities as we test vital features in a live setting — detailed below.

These features are essential for stability and handling many concurrent players:

• Reworking deployment — maintenance mode for smoother updates
• Creating new benchmark tools — figuring out the limits of our infrastructure and patching the weaknesses
• Developing scaling solutions — spreading servers globally to remove lag and player advantages
• Implementing special logging SDKs to capture DDOS (which APIs & how often)

In order to use data effectively, we need the following:

• Data warehouse in BigQuery — consolidating all databases into a single point for easy access
• Data analysis — querying specific requirements and building dashboards around them
• Data engineering — improving database structure and flow of information

Equally important, we intend to make gameplay modifications based on beta testers’ feedback, here are some EXAMPLES (not finalized ideas):

• Only 1 copy of each card in a deck
• Increasing deck size to 40 cards
• Balancing power levels and patching exploits

We will be rewarding all participants in this period of beta testing with guaranteed loot, on top of players’ performance on the leaderboard and other competitive play we develop. It is precisely this stage of development that forges games people actually want to play.

GITEX Dubai Networking

Our trip to Dubai was a phenomenal opportunity for personal development, essential experience with hosting a booth and gathering a wide array of contacts, which we are pursuing on a daily basis. There are many stories to share but I’m sure tangible results are more interesting to you at this time.

Game Studios

We met game development companies of different genres and business stages. We are communicating to share knowledge that is mutually beneficial, with the hopes that we can make better tech decisions and speed up the process. More importantly, we intend to expand the utility of our respective NFTs by granting access to each other’s games — an important part of the web3 partnership ethos.

Marketing & PR

Several companies within this sector got our attention, ranging from those with strong portfolios of NFT drops to experienced projects dealing with digital marketing. One interesting discussion was had with a representative from a division of Google that can help improve our digital marketing with their innovative tools, when we make our next marketing push. We also spoke to a few PR firms, one of which encouraged us to talk about our personal stories, and they’ll help provide the platform to do that on. For instance, they took great interest in our design department being women-led, saying we absolutely must expose the genius behind our artwork.

Investors

Of course, investors play a big role in a growing start-up. We met a bunch of potential strategic partners, some of whom are massive players that we’ll reconnect with prior to our Series A in 2023. However, a few of them sparked new opportunities, being explored right now, that were quite unexpected. One of those is a financial management platform out of Africa that is venturing into GameFi, consisting of a massive user base in the millions. Another great lead is a guild from the Philippines who have shifted their investment strategy from P2E to fun-first titles, like ourselves. Our game is still quite raw, but we will pursue all possible avenues to bring in partners with databases of players, especially from continents we haven’t expanded into yet.

Random Leads

There was a good number of walk-ins that led to conversations we certainly could not have expected. One of these is a Dubai local who was ecstatic to see a new trading card game, having previously been disappointed, by earlier GITEX exhibitions, from the lack of innovative gaming projects. He bought a Goon on the spot and is constantly providing awesome feedback that we’re acting upon. Another interesting walk-in was a lady from VISA who noticed our art from a mile away and couldn’t resist but come by to take a closer look. It’s not a typical company we discuss collaboration with but who knows… maybe we’ll come up with something clever.

More Conferences

One thing we quickly learned about GITEX is the audience isn’t gaming-focused. That helped us stand out but didn’t provide as many gamer conversions as we’d like. Many non-gamers walked by the booth, taking interest in the visuals and asking for more information about the project. This gave us a great opportunity to practice our pitch and helped solidify our understanding of the advantages we bring to the GameFi space. We do need players though, as stated in the announcement a few weeks ago about DAU (Daily Active Users). Therefore, we are filtering the many leads we gathered of upcoming conferences, determining the ones most suitable for attracting new gamers. Three candidates stand out so far — one in Bahamas, another in Lisbon and then a third one in Dubai itself. We know there are many gaming events throughout the year, many of which are in America. However, the aforementioned events are smaller-scale, quite selective with the teams they invite, and focus mainly on fun-first GameFi projects — we check off all the right boxes. Additionally, they feature hackathon competitions with significant cash prizes and deep-pocketed audiences.

Closing Thoughts

We’re gamers, but we’re also human. Over the past year we’ve been building, growing, and learning alongside our amazing community that has supported us every step of the way. We remain committed to facing and overcoming every challenge we encounter, and putting out an amazing product that will shake the foundations of the web3 space. And, with your support we know it will happen.