We’re rebranding to Coda Labs, a mobile gaming company 100% focused on building and enabling fun web3 games.

We began exploring web3 gaming in mid-2021, started shifting company resources to web3 in Q4, and launched our first web3 project (Infinite Arcade) in February of this year. We believe web3 has the power to save mobile gaming (more on that below). We also believe mobile gaming has the opportunity to improve web3 and bring it to the masses (more on that below as well). Therefore, we’ve decided to focus 100% on web3 gaming moving forward. Today Coda becomes Coda Labs, providing games industry expertise, creativity, and proprietary technology to enable web3 gaming for everyone.

TLDR; We’re rebranding from Coda to Coda Labs. Mobile gaming needs web3. web3 needs mobile gaming. The Coda Labs team is now 100% focused on the intersection of mobile gaming and web3; and we have a ton of cool stuff in the works.

Web3 can save mobile gaming

Our mission has always been empowering the small teams and democratising who gets to make games. We built a self-service platform to accelerate mobile game success for game studios, which attracted 16,000 loyal developers from all over the world. Since 2019, Coda has published games garnering over 100M total downloads. But, the F2P industry consolidated rapidly, centralising power in the hands of a few companies. At the same time, BigTech made changes that made it even more difficult for the smaller studios. We believe those two factors led to 2021 being the first time ever that mobile game downloads declined globally year-over-year.

Meanwhile, web3 games began to pick up steam. We saw web3 games break the scale barriers of 100k and 1m DAU consecutively. Web3 became a huge point of interest within our developer community.

But what benefits can web3 really bring to mobile game players and developers? We think the following ideas are the most promising areas for experimentation:

1. Give players ownership and interoperability of in-game assets and currencies, where their time and monetary investments become more than just fees they pay for fun, and become assets they hold forever, that can be traded for real-world value.
2. Give developers new, effective retention tools through loyalty/rewards systems that live on-chain and new revenue opportunities driven by web3 transactions.
3. Change user acquisition with a stronger focus on social and community, opposed to pure paid advertising, which is a huge cost burden for game developers.

Mobile gaming can save web3

There’s no shortage of web3 gaming criticisms and the industry has agreed on the following points about web3 games that have launched to-date:

• Web3 games aren’t fun, gameplay is centred around mindless grinding for yield
• Economics aren’t sustainable and often operate like a ponzi scheme
• User experience is extremely complicated; only the most savvy crypto-natives can navigate and play
• Focus has been on the unrealistic concept that lots of people can get rich from simply playing games

Fortunately, these initial pain points are very possible to solve and we believe those solutions will come to life in mobile games. I know that web3, blockchain, crypto, NFTs, etc. are loaded words for many in the games industry. This is true in mobile, but often most visible in the PC and console space, which as we know doesn’t often rush to embrace innovation. I see parallels with how free-to-play was initially greeted with disdain, despite now permeating all the way from indie mobile games to AAA console IP. The rest as they say is history, because free-to-play changed the face of the games industry with mobile gaming dominating against all other platforms, with a staggering $103.5Bn global revenue, with +5.1% year on year growth. This same spirit of innovation that powered free-to-play can be found in web3 too, hinting at potential benefits which might reimagine gaming once again.

Gaming is so huge because of mobile, not because of Playstation or Fortnite. Mobile brought gaming to the masses in all markets around the world. Casual mobile games are easy to jump into and mobile will play a major role in onboarding the masses to web3. Not because we think people should be paid to play games, but because they will learn web3 through easy mobile games and then benefit from the wider web3 advantages mentioned above. Web3 has a big opportunity to unlock mass adoption by tapping into the seemingly endless supply of creativity coming from mobile game studios around the globe.

Where Coda Labs is headed

Infinite Arcade (IA) was our first foray into web3 gaming with the aim of testing mobile games within the existing Play-and-Earn space. We successfully launched the first F2P mobile web3 product in February 2022 and scaled to 30+ games within 90 days of launch. Today, the IA SDK sees up to half a million DAUs.

Infinite Arcade helped build the foundation of our vision for web3 mobile gaming and we’ve started several key work streams to further test and explore, including:

1. Kicking off development of our own first-party web3 games, with a focus on social and skill-based gameplay
2. Partnering with leading web3 communities like Crypto Unicorns (Laguna Games) and Overlord (Superduper) to bring their IP ecosystems to mobile games as a first step in our common goal of extending web3 to the masses.
3. Providing web3 gaming technology to F2P mobile games who are looking to get on-chain
4. Developing a meta game that connects many mobile games into one ecosystem

It is still very early days for web3 gaming and we’re super excited to be pioneering with some of the best teams in the space. As Coda Labs, we now have even more reason to put all we have behind our mission because we are not just working towards enabling as many creators worldwide as possible, but helping the cause of bringing web3 to everybody whilst doing so.