In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Mighty Bear Games’ CEO Simon Davis about its blockchain gaming ecosystem Goat Gaming.
In particular, the pair discuss the value of Telegram, which is gaining much exposure for crypto gaming in terms of simple tap-to-play games.
Questions asked include can Telegram work well for more engaging games, should we trust the audience metrics on Telegram, and how does Goat Gaming expect to leverage this audience with its 1v1 PVP wagering experiences?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast via the Fountain app and earn Bitcoin.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Can you explain the thinking behind Goat Gaming?
Simon Davis: We released a mode in Mighty Actions Heroes called 1 versus 1 Showdown. The way it works is that both players pay a small entry fee in hard currency to participate, and then the rewards are variable. So it can be anything from 1.3x the amount you paid in to say 10x. And with those variable rewards, players went nuts for it. We realized there’s a lot of pent-up appetite for mini-game experiences in web3 where you can play and win prizes.
In web2 we see the analog with skill gaming platforms. This has been proven out for over 20 years. Within web3, there’s a strong product market fit for a platform where players can play and win prizes. And so the vision for Goat Gaming is hundreds of mini-games, almost like the Miniclip of web3 gaming running in Telegram.
So we’re building out hundreds of these micro-experiences, as well as working with external studios. We’ve already also onboarded two external studios. There’s a game called Waifu Clash and Mighty Action Heroes is also part of that ecosystem.
Telegram is currently the big platform for crypto gaming. Why is that the case?
I don’t think there’s anything new. What we see with Telegram today is basically Facebook gaming circa 2008. You have this platform where you have nearly a billion people that have nothing better to do than send each other pictures and messages. Why not provide them with a bit of entertainment, a way to engage with each other socially? A lot of the hooks or the designs we’re using are lifted from games that were made nearly 20 years ago.
If my thesis is right, that this is essentially a Facebook gaming version two – hopefully without the platform killing it – then this is a potentially huge business. We’re building these games in WebGL and HTML5 and exporting them straight into Telegram.
This means we can run these games on iMessage or WeChat or any other platform that supports this. I think looking just at Telegram is probably a bit too narrow because if these apps within Telegram start to take off, then I expect that both Apple and WhatsApp will have to start improving their app infrastructure as well. And then we can go across multiple different messaging services.
I’m more skeptical about the very high numbers provided for Telegram gaming.
I fully understand why some people are skeptical because there naturally would be questions as to how well some of these games are going to retain when the financial incentives drop away. But if you’re streaming WebGL, HTML5 into it, you can basically build any game you want in Telegram. That means you can build something that’s comparable to any mobile game from the last few years. That’s an incredibly broad canvas to work with.
Are you worried about bots?
It’s an interesting dilemma because as a developer, on the one hand, you don’t really want bots because they’ll devalue your token in the long run. In the short term, actually, you could argue there is an incentive for developers to make botting easy, right? Because then you get these inflated numbers that you can then use to hype up your ecosystem where you start appearing higher in the onchain activity rankings. We’ve taken the opposite approach where it’s not something we really want.
There is probably a high ratio of bots on these Telegram games, but nonetheless, when you’re talking about 200 million players, even if 90% are bots, there’s still 20 million real users. It’s an order of magnitude bigger than anything we could have envisioned in web3 this year. So it’s massive numbers. And in terms of revenues, you can see via onchain data how much some of these games are making. Some of these games are making real money, like real web2 revenue money. I think any studio would be happy with those kind of figures.
What games do you think are going to work well?
We think there’s an opportunity for many different gameplay types and different themes. Not everyone is going to engage with the retro action movie vibe of Mighty Action Heroes. Some people will want … we have a Waifu battler coming out. We have a runner coming out. We’ll find different things that work for different audiences.
I think the other kind of unique angle is that the studio is based in southeast Asia so I think we can create some really interesting content, which is more localized and a better fit for the audience.
How quickly can you open up Goat Gaming for other developers?
We already have onboarded external devs to work with us but right now it’s very much hands-on. We have to help a lot because it’s running on our infrastructure. We’ve been building it for seven years, but it was never built to be used by external parties so we have work to do. Realistically it would take probably close to a year to be a point where it can be self-serve.
Why do you think it’s been so hard for blockchain games to attract sustainable players?
In web2, you have the developer and the player. And as a dev, you have to optimize for both yourself and the player, which is not easy. It’s really hard. But in web3, you throw speculators into the mix. Unfortunately, the speculators are the loudest voice. And so I think as a dev, how do you develop a compelling experience that works for you as a developer, that delivers value to speculators and is still fun to play?
I think that is fundamentally something that very few people have really solved, if really anyone, if I’m totally frank.
Where can people find out more about Goat Gaming?
Check out our website or search for GoatGamingBot in Telegram.
