AMA Highlights: Gamee
By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
May 20, 2021–7 min read.
On Tuesday 18 May, we welcomed Gamee co-founders Bozena Rezab and Jan Castek into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA.
Gamee is a casual gaming platform with over 25 million registered users on its platform. Their games are highly social in nature due to strong integrations with Telegram.
Backed by Animoca Brands, Gamee recently launched its GMEE token, bringing crypto-gaming to an established userbase.
They’ve also recently released their limited edition G-Bots NFTs, through which they are driving NFT innovation.
We were eager to learn more about bringing crypto and NFT to an established casual gamer userbase.
In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Daniel Dal Bello
Hi guys and welcome. Could you please start us off with introductions and some background on what you are working on at Gamee?
Bozena Rezab
Hi everyone! It’s a pleasure to be here with you! My name is Bozena, I am co-founder and CEO of GAMEE. With a team of 25 people, we have built a global gaming community of 20m registered players, our brand was selected among 100 Most Disruptive Brands by Marketing Week. Last year, we joined the Animoca Brands family. I am excited about building consumer tech and entertainment products.
GAMEE is an entertainment platform that recognizes and rewards players' effort, skill, and loyalty. We are now working on taking our free-to-play gaming experience to the next level, by introducing GAMEE’s own token as a means of purchase and reward on the platform.
Jan Castek
Hello guys! My name is Jan Castek, I am co-founder and CPO of GAMEE. I have been in the tech industry for more than 10 years. Prior to Gamee I co-founded software development company Cleevio that has created over 100 software projects all over the world for companies like McDonald's, O2, Volkswagen, and Coca-Cola, and incubated several startups.
Raymond Reijnders
Gamee is currently at the start of its recently announced six-week-long GMEE Liquidity Mining Event.
How has this event been received by your community? How has participation been thus far?
Bozena Rezab
Our liquidity mining event has just been launched an hour ago and it was designed to reward people who already hold GMEE. Now, obviously, the situation with gas fees is not great, but we will see how it goes.
We have 6 weeks and 100.000 GMEE tokens ready for participants.
Feel free to check our staking event here.
Raymond Reijnders
Why is it important for you to have an active community around the GMEE token? What is your community strategy moving forward?
Bozena Rezab
Community is a key not only for tokens but for gaming! Games are connecting people and are more fun when played with friends, groups. Gamee is strong on referrals and shareability, we will continue building on that. Same for the token, since it will be so interlinked with our gaming platform.
Jan Castek
We’re coming to this blockchain industry with an ambition to build a mainstream ready gaming experience, where players show their skill in matches against each other. For that experience is a big community crucial.
Gabriel Tan
The nature of Gamee’s operations is the centralized creation of its games by in-house developers. Without them, new games or updates likely won’t happen.
How do you reconcile this with the governance function of the tokens?
Bozena Rezab
Right, this is how we start, however, the direction is towards decentralized game launches. We are working on Parcel NFT’s which is in essence a form of land and a way to allow the community to launch their own games on a platform.
Secondly, a part of GMEE governance topics is on voting on game launches for dedicated Parcels.
Jan Castek
Otherwise — we’re really happy that we have an experienced intern games team. Since the new product is still in progress it gives us the ability to innovate and iterate the entire experience much faster.
Raymond Reijnders
Extremely popular games like Axie infinity and Alien Worlds have done well as standalone games due to their expansiveness and depth. From what we can gather, the strategy for your side is different, instead of focusing on a larger quantity of “mini-games” to sustain engagement.
Could you describe your strategy to retain engagement? Are there any specific games coming up that you could share with us?
Bozena Rezab
The key here is that you have one platform, one community, and series of content (mini-games) that can change in time, renew, evolve, include multiple genres, basically never get old. This is how Gamee free-to-play was built with over 80 games and 25 million users. Now stepping into crypto, we will be able to take this to a next level, by enabling users to earn gaming currency, game assets, and vote on the future of the product, and make them part of it.
The upcoming batch of 10 games, all ready for the 2nd generation of GAMEE, will include ATARI-themed games, card games, and 3D arcades!
Jan Castek
Our strategy for how to retain engagement consists of 2 main parts.
- Top content
- Gamification: “play to earn” layer which rewards the user for his skill and activity
Daniel Dal Bello
You mentioned you’ve managed to grow your registered user base to an impressive 25 million. To get a better idea of your vast user base could you tell us more about their demographics, retention, and churn metrics?
Bozena Rezab
Most active users are young adults, 18–34 years old and the audience is truly global.
We have gathered the audience in the past 6 years and currently, as of now, there are over 2M monthly active gamers playing our games, 40M game-plays every month.
Jan Castek
It depends a lot on the platform. GAMEE is currently running in native apps (iOS, Android), on the web but we also have the biggest audience of players on Telegram.
Bozena Rezab
Right! You can mention @gamee in any Telegram chat and our bot will offer a game.
Gabriel Tan
I realized that I first played one of your games at least 3 years ago when it was shared in one of my Telegram groups. The integration with Telegram is extremely good, making it very easy for me to play casually. I also find it extremely interesting how deeply entrenched Telegram’s use within crypto is.
On that note, clearly, Telegram has been pivotal to your success. Could you elaborate more on how that came to be?
Jan Castek
Our Telegram success is connected with the ease of use. You just pick the game, share it with the group and you can easily play with others. This approach we apply in every product we build.
Right now we’re focusing on native mobile apps, later on, we’d like to find a way how to bring GMEE experience also to Telegram.
Raymond Reijnders
The topic of metaverses is extremely popular. I cannot wait for a Ready Player One-Esque future with the mainstream adoption of VR, NFTs, and more. What’s your personal take on metaverses and how it will develop in the next few years?
Bozena Rezab
I am personally excited and a huge fan!
With Gamee, we have chosen a bit of a different approach to take smaller steps, and introduce the value of crypto and blockchain to people who do not yet have an idea of what is what. They understand the concept of virtual currency and digital assets from games, but never really thought about the possibility of really owning it, being able to trade, etc.
This is going to change the gaming industry and certainly open space for new genres and worlds, and we want to show them the first steps.
Daniel Dal Bello
Who do you see as your biggest competitors in the space currently and perhaps upcoming?
Jan Castek
The traditional gaming market last year generated 150 billion USD in revenue, more than music and film combined and engaging 2.6 billion people worldwide. So we do not really look at other blockchain gaming companies as competitors, the market opportunity is beyond the blockchain audience and more companies in play make the market bigger.
Daniel Dal Bello
We touched on how Telegram is important for you and we know that Telegram has a close tie with the crypto-community. What is the strategy to go about competing with the broader gaming market?
Jan Castek
Our only strategy is to be ready for the broader gaming market. And how do we approach it? We want to deliver an as frictionless experience as possible. An easy way to join, how to play, how to connect with others, all with payments with no/minimal gas fees.
Daniel Dal Bello
In 2020, you went through an acquisition with Animoca Brands. Has much has changed for you since then?
Bozena Rezab
The team is the same, we continue working independently. Animoca inspired us to step on a blockchain journey and we are super excited about it and it makes so much sense for our community and platform.
Jan Castek
It was a meeting of 2 different worlds. The mainstream one (GAMEE) and the blockchain one (Animoca Brands). Right now we just take the best from both of them and use it in our products.
Gabriel Tan
You’ve recently announced a partnership with Immutable X as your layer-2 solution provider. Could you walk us through the considerations made for the choice to partner with Immutable X (vs others)?
Bozena Rezab
We are preparing the launch of our G-Bot NFTs, game characters, and we need to solve the obvious — low to no gas fees and security. Immutable offers this, but what really made us decide was the communication with the team, when we were able to share the roadmap and discuss how and when they can support the exact features we need to build.
Raymond Reijnders
To wrap up, what are some of the things that you’re currently working on and what are you looking forward to the most in Gamee’s future?
Bozena Rezab
Next generation of GAMEE. Taking our current platform to a next level, with NFTs and GMEE token. Stay tuned for summer!
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
Gamee is a casual gaming platform bringing crypto-gaming and NFTs to an established userbase.
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