PART IV: GAMIFICATION ON NFL ALL DAY
“Yall do yalls thing”
BUT
How many of yall play fantasy football? What about betting on NFL games? Based off a report in 2020, fantasy sports were estimated to be worth close to nine billion dollars, with fantasy football responsible for a significant percentage of that revenue. Sports betting is a huge money generator with over $100 billion wagered across sports books for the NFL 2022 season alone. Basically, people love gaming aspects associated with the NFL. When participating, you become more invested in the games played every week because you are tuning in to see how your roster performs and any bets that may hit.
So, where am I going with this? Am I telling you that NFL All Day has fantasy football and I can bet via them? No, absolutely not. BUT they have incorporated gamification using these moments they have created. They release challenges, crafting, and playbooks where you will need moments in your collection to compete in them. They have also used leaderboards within playbooks. So, when you go buy a moment, it does not just have to sit in your collection just as a collectible. It could provide utility — a purpose! So let’s get down to the “meat and potatoes” of utility through gamification.
CHALLENGES
Last offseason, All Day introduced Challenges. These challenges involved submitting moments in your collection that met the challenge requirements. If you completed the challenge, you were rewarded with a pack to rip, with most of these packs guaranteeing a specific type of moment! To help with accommodating all users who have different collection methods, they released tiered challenges. These tiered challenges would differ in difficulty based on moment tiers. For example, their first tiered challenge had 2 levels. It was based around players traded in the 2022 offseason. The first level required just submitting 3 common moments of any player traded. The reward for completing this challenge was a common reward pack that guaranteed a Rookie moment (badged with the Rookie Year and Rookie Mint), an All Day debut of either Hollywood Brown or Robert Woods, and a random common moment from one of their previous drops. The second level required 3 rare moments of any player traded in the 2022 offseason. The reward for completing this challenge was the Level 1 common pack in addition to a rare reward pack guaranteeing the Rookie moment, the random common from previous drop, as well as a rare moment from a select pool of players. These challenges were a blast to compete in. It was fun to chat with others and speculate which moments could qualify for possible challenges!
PLAYBOOKS
As the 2022 season kicked off, NFL All Day kicked it up a notch and announced a new form of gamification that would be used throughout the year. They took the earlier challenge format and incorporated them into what they called Playbooks. Playbooks consist of ‘tasks’ called plays. These tasks ranged in difficulty from as simple as logging into the site daily to completing different challenges that involved submitting a certain tier of moments. Each play was assigned an amount of yardage. Complete the play, gain the yards for that play. Most of the playbooks go 100 yards, with some going further. As you work your way through the playbook, rewards would be given at defined yardage markers. These rewards include new banners to display on your All Day profile and accolades as participating trophies (still wondering if they will incorporate these in some type of manner). If you make it far enough along, rewards included packs and special mint to completion moments. Mint to completion moments are moments minted to the number of how many reached the yardage marker to receive that moment. In the example below, at 70 yards and 100 yards are mint to completion moments. As it stands in this photo, if no one else got to those yardage markers, the mint to completion moment at 70 yards would be minted to /239 with the moment at 100 yards would be minted to /151.
The plays differ each week, usually based around the action on the field. Some could be predictive while others could be based on results. A high yardage play could involve submitting moments from teams you think will win that week. One play could be: submit 5 moments of the quarterbacks that threw for 300 yards that week. Some would require badged moments that would have to be submitted — it is an effective way for users on the platform to stay involved in the games, pay special attention to what they have or didn’t have in their current collection. Let’s say you are missing a moment to submit that would finish off the playbook. Are you going to go buy it off the marketplace so that you can earn the reward? Or just stick at your current yardage because you don’t want to pay the inflated price due to it being needed? Who knows? It is literally based on how you personally feel about it and asking yourself if the reward + that moment worth to be in your collection. Trust me, FOMO can be a real thing!
CRAFTING
So, you could be reading all this, and hearing moments being minted, packs being dropped and even rewarded and you are thinking to yourself, this is a lot of supply. How can it keep up? The same can be said in the sports card world as well. How many different cards are shipped out on a weekly basis? Has to be a ton, right? And how many are just truly valuable cards to you? I go to the store to buy some packs to rip and to hopefully rip some good ones that I like and want to add to my collection. I rip the packs and maybe I come out of it with 3 or 4 cards that are either Titans or players I that I like. So those go straight to the binder. But what about the 20 cards or so? The players I don’t care about or a team I don’t root for, those cards usually end up thrown into a random box or eventually the trash can, so they don’t take up space.
This same issue is in All Day. But how do you throw away digital moments? Is that even possible? Why yes, it is. In this blockchain/NFT/cryptocurrency space, there is a term called burning. Without getting too technical, just think of burning as throwing something away in its entirety. It basically removes it from the blockchain and there is no way to get it back. But why would anyone would want to burn their moments? Well, if I buy a pack and don’t hit on anything that interests me, that moment is useless to me. It would go in that box of random cards I didn’t want earlier. And while that box of physical cards that just sit there in the attic taking up space, these digital collectibles can be burned for rewards.
Say what exactly? Yep, you heard me right, NFL All Day has a completely different form of gamification that is not related to actual NFL games called Crafting Challenges. Crafting involves burning moments to get rewarded with something new. I get it — your head is spinning, and you have no clue what this means, trust me, I was in that same place when this was introduced. But really the idea is simple. From NFL All Day’s standpoint, it is a way to introduce new moments while getting rid of some of the supply. You burn a certain number of moments that match the requirement of the crafting challenge then you receive a new moment to add to your collection. A big plus to crafting is this — this new moment would be minted to however many completes the crafting challenge. For example, for an easier crafting challenge, the new moment would probably fall in the common tier (but most likely one the lower minted commons on the platform). But for a harder crafting challenge, the new moment could be minted as a legendary. It is an interesting concept and the challenge for NFL All Day when it comes to crafting is making sure the craft provides value by reducing supply at the same time. Again, like deciding if participating in a playbook is worth it, crafting is no different. You can choose to burn the moments needed if you feel the new moment will be more valuable than the moments you need to burn. Or you like those moments needed and not sure if the new moment will be as valuable so you don’t participate and maybe look to just buy it off the marketplace once released.
FANTASY FOOTBALL
The last thing but very important gaming aspect I will mention relates to 3rd party sites using NFL ALL DAY moments by accessing the publicly accessible blockchain data. I mentioned fantasy football as one of the leading industries in the sport. One 3rd party site, OTM has built a fantasy football game based around All Day moments. It is called Rumble. It is a DFS (daily fantasy sports) style tournament game (free entry) where you use moments from your collection to build out your lineups. Just like other DFS games, points are awarded based on stats. They incorporate a ‘hero’ position which means you can use a 1 rare or legendary moment for one the positions in your lineup and get point multipliers. Last season, Dapper credit was rewarded to the top scoring rosters each week.
Gamification through NFL All Day has implemented puts your collection to use. They just don’t sit in a binder waiting to be shown off. Build your collection how you like to collect, and it just provides benefits and opportunities for it to grow. And the cool thing is that these gaming ideas are just scratching the surface of the untapped potential All Day has at its disposal. They can literally go in so many ways in how to construct their challenges and keep them interesting. Imagine a challenge that requires double digit serials or one that favors low serialized moments. Imagine one that requires specific badges in combination with past or live stats from games/seasons.
Through this gamification based around these moments, it does create a natural roller coaster of moment values. You will see certain moments needed for a challenge or craft rise in value. So decisions have to be made if you own such moment. Do you sale to make money off the increased price? Or if you simply want to hold the moment so that you can participate in the game. On the downside, you will see value of moments not needed in the challenge decrease, as those wanting to play will list moments not needed to raise funds so they can acquire the moments that are needed.
As stated at the top, fans and collectors alike enjoy being able to connect sports with some form of gaming. It has been proven over and over again. When you are connecting to sports via gaming, there is just more vested interest in how the games play out. With NFL All Day, gamification keeps you connected to the product and on their site. So, in my opinion, while collectability and scarcity are at the absolute forefront of the NFL All Day experience– including gamification to provide utility for these digital collectibles was a good decision.
LINKS:
-Final Thoughts:
– NFL ALL Day Blog on Introducing Playbooks:
– NFL All Day Blog on Introducing Crafting:
– OTM :
