FastBreak: The New Hardcourt
How the new NBA Top Shot game corrects the market undermining issues of prior Flash Challenges… but leaves one big one
Let’s get this out of the way first: almost everyone who has played Fastbreak on NBA Top Shot loves it. Hell, I love playing it!
But are we as Top Shot users accepting the improvements it has made over the prior flash challenge format (and man, it’s made a lot of those), while ignoring its likelihood of repeating some of the flash challenge system’s same economic mistakes because we see a short-term edge in it?
To know, first we need to review specifically what needed to be changed from past Top Shot game design and why. Then we’ll be able to see if some of those same long-term economic issues are still present in Top Shot’s utility design with FastBreak.
Perhaps you’re a user concerned about the potential implications of our discussion, especially if you’ve found personal success through seeking edges within the current system. However, it’s crucial to recognize that prioritizing personal short-term gains over the long-term sustainability of Top Shot’s economy can pose significant risks to this ever growing into a true generational product.
Or maybe you already know where I’m going with this, but I promise the review will be a valuable lesson. Then I will stop dunking on the mistakes of the past so we can all learn from them and move on.
So if we like FastBreak and Top Shot and want them both to stay around, let’s review.
A Brief History on NBA Top Shot Gaming
During its early 2021 gold rush, Top Shot had promised a game was coming where collectors could use their moments called Hardcourt. But no one knew the specifics. Would users be able to play a video game with using the players you held? If collecting more moments of a player reward power-ups? Would it be like being able to buying and selling Fortnite skins?
The reality of gaming using moments would be very different: Flash Challenges. Users who held any moment from all the players who hit some random requirement of the night would get a free reward after a snapshot the next day.
This engagement design led to very foreseeable economic issues on the platform (I have receipts of seeing these issues far in advance if anyone needs those):
- Distortion of values toward players with minimal supply out for potential “bottlenecks” vs star players
- Systematically generating opportunity cost that devalued anything but the absolute current cheapest moment of each player
- Pump & dumps, teaching users to rush for the exit or get stuck holding the bag
- Requirement-begging online, then undercutting the reward by those that got it cheap
- User exhaustion at fear of missing a temporary spike opportunity to sell
Users would put up with this exhaustion because doing so could be very profitable with minimal availably supply out. But the writing was on the wall…
Incoming supply from new mints needed for revenue was going to compete for demand with the moments the game players now held. So in time those requirements became less and less valuable to hold, the rewards easier and thus less valuable to earn. Many users left saying the stress of keeping up with challenges wasn’t “worth it” anymore without being able to to put their fingers on why, taking their demand with them, worsening the issue incoming supply was creating.
Dapper’s initial solution was to add more layers of randomness and complexity to the game to make it harder in the face of that incoming supply: some nights only rares of the required players would count, then only rookie badge moments, then only series 1, then only moments with a debut badge, or a rookie year badge, etc. This just predictably led to new problems: calls to create a challenge requiring some specific moments that user was holding (asking for a very transparent personal offramp), making greater ratios of moments not receive the added utility, and exhausting users more.
The better answer was that they needed to create churn.
Any supply faucet that the game ran on (packs it was minting for revenue, reward moments the game needed to drop), as well as any supply already out, needed a sink.
First they tried this by making challenges require users to lock players for a year if collectors were using them to complete a challenge. This predictably lead to the negative feedback of “So now I’m stuck with all these players I didn’t want for a year, watching their values plummet because their utility was already received?” This was only a temporary sink anyway — like an overflowing faucet running into a bucket, then when the bucket fills up dumping it back into the still overflowing sink. So next they tried making users burn some required moments to complete a challenge, leading to the predictably negative user experience of “Well today good players hit that random stat, so you’re asking me to destroy good players for a worse one?”
Basically they hadn’t created a consistent user value proposition to drive the churn. So with the sink changes either not fixing anything or just creating different user abrasion points, demand continually left the platform, which deepened the vicious cycle of dilution. Calls came to “make users whole” requiring the business to spend revenue on loss leaders like cash giveaways, moment giveaways, T-shirts, NBA League Pass, etc. in an attempt to retain engagement, then repeated layoffs when that did not drive the spend required for revenue.
Okay, with me so far? Good. Because then a hero came along…
Dapper attempted to fix the sink for Flash Challenges when the real issue was that the demand driver made no sense. FastBreak has largely fixed that:
- The players that have demand in FastBreak now make sense (so long “bottlenecks”). Users are happier and in more control now of what they hold and why.
- The above has removed the pump & dump scenario because a player who scored a lot in a current run is likely to do so in the next, and users are staggering when they use each player.
- Demand has shifted away from the absolute cheapest moments per player, and driven renewed (and non-coerced) demand for rares and even legendary moments of good players.
- The game is more fun to follow along with the real action on the court.
- The UI is slick, using semi-live access to NBA game data to inform scores.
- It is causing users to share their lineups and content creators to regularly share strategies.
- The predictive nature solves the previous Flash Challenge issue of more available supply than users playing who need it.
- No one has said “Dapper Bingo” since Fastbreak came out.
All positives.
But it has no sink.
So now, before our newly beloved FastBreak goes the way of Flash Challenges becoming “not worth it” due to the same dilemma and loses active users again, let’s take some time to ask the following questions:
- Do all Top Shot utility systems have an ongoing sink to balance the faucets of incoming rewards for users, the market for existing moments, and the demand for pack drop revenue the business needs?
- Do all Top Shot moment types have an ongoing sink to balance the faucets of incoming supply, the market for existing moments, and the demand for pack drop revenue the business needs?
If not, do we need to accept any of those ecosystem gaps given the power of digital collectibles over physical?
Because not only do all utility systems need a sink if they are creating a faucet, but all types of moments do too. Otherwise we would need to acknowledge that systematically giving up on entire categories of moments that have been sold, users would want to hold, and that Dapper would like to mint in the future- makes some moments an automatically losing proposition and is a pretty poor user experience.
Especially when true sustainable engagement is so close within grasp using the tools available to the platform.
There are small, medium, and large tweaks we can make to these same systems that exist today, which will balance them and ensure every utility system and moment type has an ongoing value proposition for users and a revenue driver for the business, and that certain types of moments aren’t excluded from churn until the market can no longer keep their demand up and their sinks overflow. But not without first acknowledging the gaps that exist.
In the next article I will analyze any gaps that currently exist along that system/moment type matrix, propose the system tweaks that close those gaps in the most consistent hands off and automated way, and reanalyze that matrix to see if there is qualifiable data to prove their improvements.
Stay tuned...
