The My Crypto Heroes Playbook — Episode 3: Community Building
A behind-the-scenes look into one of the most played blockchain games in the world. A written format of a presentation I gave at Blockchain Game Portal in Taipei this year.
Building good games is hard. Building games with an open economy is even more difficult. This multi-part series will explain how we managed to build one of the leading blockchain games out there: My Crypto Heroes.
We will explain how we achieved a weekly trading volume of ~650 ETH, why currently ~6,500 users play the game daily, and how we structured our primary sales that resulted in 13,000 ETH so far.
You will understand how we aligned our incentives with our community and why we designed the digital asset economy the way it is.
Short Recap of My Crypto Heroes
My Crypto Heroes is an auto-battler that features Heroes and Extensions, which are unique assets (ERC721 tokens) stored on the Ethereum Blockchain. Since these assets are stored on-chain, it allows players to buy and sell items for Ether, anytime and anywhere. This creates an interesting economic challenge: How do you make sure these assets stay valuable over time or even increase in value as more players join the ecosystem?
It’s actually pretty complex. I’ve put together a concise overview of the game, along with our different NFT asset classes and game design. If you’ve never heard of My Crypto Heroes, you should definitely read this first! I’ll wait for you here.
If you’re interested in our NFT Economics design, have a look at Episode 2:
Ready to go? Great, let’s dive in!
Community is King
Building a Tribe
A few months after My Crypto Heroes was launched, we sold Land to our community for 5,000 ETH (~$812,500) in total .
The Land sale was split into 2 parts: Private Sale (4 Lands) and Public Sale (5 Lands). During the Private Sale, we’ve approached very active community members and directly sold land to them. Until today, they’re one of the main reasons why our MCH community is so strong.
The King of Strawberry: Fao
Fao, the King of Strawberry is running the most famous MCH blog and writes extremely high quality guides for My Crypto Heroes. He publishes regular Hero Tier lists, analyses the Meta for PvP cups and releases news about our company to the Japanese community. (Google Translate on Chrome works well for this) We even created a community event to honor his involvement:
The King of Lime: YamaP
YamaP is extremely involved in the Japanese crypto community and one of the strongest players in MCH. To get more people into his Land “Lime”, he teamed up with TokenPocket and hosted a 55 ETH giveaway to attract new players: He gave 0.01 ETH to every new user how created an account with the new MCH mobile app.
The King of Ocean: ⛹️
Mr. ⛹ is the only non-Japanese King in My Crypto Heroes. He made Ocean the home for the international community and interacts with them through well designed giveaway campaigns.
Every season (about 1 month length), he holds a PvP reward giveaway and a giveaway for users that purchased specific heroes that season.
Recently, Mr. ⛹ collaborated with the player ⚡CrypτØGeeK⚡on a leveling service for items. What’s interesting: The service is insured by Mr. ⛹ for up to 5 ETH. It’s like a combination of Proof of Stake and a Social Contract.
Alignment of Incentives
You might now ask yourself: Why do all those Land owners invest so much time, money and energy into this? Here’s why:
We distribute 30% of our Revenues back to Land owners
Every player joins a Land when they start playing. Every time someone spends Ether in the game, the Land owner of that player’s Land will get a 30% cut from that transaction. In other words: Whenever an Ocean citizen buys our in-game currency GUM with ETH, Mr. ⛹and all other Ocean Land owners get 30% of that.
This creates competition between Land owners to attract the most (active) players. That’s why Fao publishes articles to engage with the community, that’s why YamaP did a 55ETH giveaway to lure new users into Lime, and that’s why Mr. ⛹ is rewarding his most active Ocean players every month.
Land itself is an ERC-721 and can be traded on OpenSea. We think that selling Land to active users is a key to incentivize them to add value to the community over time. However, it depends to whom you sell Land to. Similar to how you want ‘smart money’ as a startup when raising money from Venture Capitalists, you want ‘smart money’ from Land investors that actively contribute to the community, besides their investment.
Off-Line Events and Esports
Besides building an online community, it’s also important to create local, micro-communities of players. We’re very fortunate to have the majority of our best players in Tokyo, which creates an amazing atmosphere at our meetups here.
Besides discussing the best strategies for the Flag Battle (the most competitive PvP mode), users enjoy meeting each other in Real Life. Imagine seeing your ~$10k investment battling against someone else’s ~$10k investment on a huge cinema screen, while the whole crows cheers for you. That’s what happened two times in Odaiba, Tokyo this year! Here and here are some (Japanese) articles that sum up the event nicely.
Creating Passion and New Experiences
As like any other new form of entertainment, blockchain gaming aims to excite you in a way that you’ve never experienced before. Following the success of our public viewings in Tokyo, we’re hosting our very first esports tournament in January 2020!
Build with us!
At My Crypto Heroes, we’ve spent the last 18 months building, launching, and growing this game and community. If you’d like to get in touch, reach out to me on Twitter or join our Discord.
If you need support with your economy design and want to work closer with us, have a look at our MCH+ accelerator. This a program aimed to support game projects to dive into the crypto world:
PS: If you’re looking for a referral code when creating your MCH account, feel free to use mine: 5yXJ
