We are expanding the scope of the project drastically! Read all about our reasons, our updated vision and our project plan revamp.
Background
This project was initially commenced and the planning started around the summer of 2021. At this point, there was only one existing NFT “game” (when I say “game” I mean something with actual gameplay in it) out there — Axie Infinity. Its immense success story, that began the same summer, was what launched this initiative. We saw the potential of NFT games, Play to Earn and crypto gaming, and as our two greatest passions (gaming and crypto) had just started to merge, we instantly knew that this was a wave we needed to ride.
Our original plan was to start an indie game development company and try to out-perform Axie Infinity in terms of game quality, economic sustainability and fun. While designing the game, gathering the essential people and launching the project as fast as we could, we saw many other initiatives, with much bigger budgets than ours would have, advertise themselves as nearing completion. We kept working hard to organize ourselves and gain ground towards our goals (finding investors, expanding our social media presence and building partnerships), and during this process we learned a ton about what it means to launch a crypto project. Two lessons in particular stood out:
- It takes time to build a fundament of capital and backers to launch a crypto project.
- The crypto space is moving extremely fast.
As new high-budget triple-A initiatives emerged, it became clear to us that just being better than Axie Infinity was no longer a sufficient goal. While we continued to have faith in our core game design, the way to really build an enthusiastic early community of players and investors was to wrap our concept with objectively cool graphics and a slick, professional presence in all respects. A larger budget was required.
Connections with Traditional Gaming
A while back, we started utilizing advisors within traditional game finance (we would love nothing more than to be able to list them officially, but they have contractual obligations with Sony that prevent them from going anywhere near NFT gaming). We learned from them that it would be somewhat awkward to pursue an equity investment deal of anything less than $3,000,000 dollars at a self valuation under $20,000,000. The investors they worked with are simply not interested in smaller players, even when looking at the NFT gaming space. Of course, this also required the project to look like a $20,000,000 project for any investors to find it interesting. We made an appealing case, wanting to explore the NFT gaming space as it is expanding vastly, but the strategy we had chosen to keep the scope small wouldn’t fly well with gaming VCs. We decided to label the pursuit of equity investment as secondary and optional, for the time being.
Our Development Team
As this company was formed around this initiative, it became natural to hover towards the minimal-effort solution (i.e. make a small project scope and bring in relatively few developers for the job) to minimize risks and make it easy for ourselves. Finding the talent interested in a gig like this was a bit too easy though. As it turns out, after explaining the situation with crypto startups and having your own cryptocurrency and an associated team allocation, literally everyone we asked was willing to commit to and sign such an opportunity — given, of course, that the necessary funding was secured and the development phase launches. Thrilled about this, we decided to consider this problem solved, after having interviewed our top three candidates.
The Meeting that Changed Everything
The date was Thursday, March 17th. We went over all our recent contacts, plans and thoughts. We were discussing the fact that a crypto VC recently gave us feedback that “the [NFT gaming] competition we face is steep”. We started toying with the idea of what it would mean to pursue the “bigger” project scope, i.e. develop a cinematic 3D game from the start, able to compete with the biggest and most serious-looking games in the NFT gaming space. Initially, we had thought that it would be harder to find backers and investors with such an approach. But as it turns out, it’s the other way around. So the main risk seemed to revolve around building a team for such an initiative. But remembering our previous experience, it made sense to investigate the difficulty of recruiting a top-tier team to develop this game on a high-quality 3D engine such as Unity or Unreal.
As it turns out, our network of developers in Stockholm was stronger than we had anticipated, and it didn’t take long until we found the right guy, with enough connections to recruit an entire team for this purpose. The appeal of developing a game and launching our own cryptocurrency hadn’t changed, especially after sharing some statistics about how previous NFT projects have performed. Of course, we cannot sign anything with anyone until we have raised a secure amount of capital investments, but it was very reassuring to yet again find out how easy it was to find developers for such a commitment.
The Decision
We reconvened for Part 2 of the meeting on March 28th. This is when we made the decision: We are now scrapping our indie plans. We are going all-in on building this game properly! Looking at our competition, still seemingly centered around being crypto projects first and games second, our faith in the potential of this project has never been stronger. We will expand the project scope, revise our roadmap, restructure our tokenomics and utilize development resources of the highest quality to build this initiative. Every serious investor wants to be a part of an ambitious project with a chance to lead in its space, and we are going to pursue both equity investments and token investments. The investments that we’ve already received will be enough to get us started on this upgrade. We can’t wait to overhaul the official plans to match our bigger, better vision!
What Will Happen Now?
This decision comes with a number of action points and consequences:
- We will take the next month or so to update our web page, tokenomics, darkpaper and roadmap.
- We plan on revamping our tokenomics so that we will go to IDO with a fully diluted market cap of $30M instead of $12M, as previously planned. This means that for everyone who is holding ZIBER tokens today — the value of your allocation just increased by a factor of 2.5! It also means a number of other things, such as private sale allocation going down from 24% to about 10%, while still raising the same amount of money.
- Our public seed round will remain unchanged until it’s filled: You will still buy 20 ZIBER per dollar you invest. The deal just became 2.5 times better. Don’t sleep on this one.
- We will not launch the beta this year, unfortunately. Things are going to take more time. Instead, the beta will be released with the entire Cinematic 3D experience in 2023.
We will continue spending our initial capital on building out the Ziber Army, and expanding our network of investors and supporters, and we will now restart the pursuit of equity investments. We have already been promised warm introductions to Andreessen Horowitz and Galaxy Digital, and we continue joining investor groups and accelerator programs to finalize the investment round.
Summary
We can now genuinely feel that we’re developing a product to be 100% proud of. We are not taking any shortcuts to save time or money, and our game will look as good or better than any other professional game out there. We are no longer playing for a share of the market. We are playing to own the market.
We are an initiative working to merge Play to Earn with competitive gaming. Our mission is to greatly increase the number of professional gamers in the world.
Stay in touch!
The ZiberTeam
https://ziberbugs.io
