Telegram might be a hot topic for numerous reasons, but for Singapore developer Mighty Bear Games, its recent Goat Gaming season 2 release on the social platform has been nothing short of impressive.

To-date, Goat Gaming has hit 250,000 users, who have generated a total of 3.25 million on-chain transactions since its season 2 launch on 22nd August.

Three days prior to the quarter-million update, Mighty Bear CEO Simon Davis posted that it had reached 2 million total transactions, which gives an indication of its rapid growth.

Unveiled earlier in 2024, Goat Gaming is a skill-based wagering platform aiming to feature hundreds of game integrations, both including web2 and web3 games. 

Years in the making, the rewards platform is built on Mighty Bear Games’ own tech stack. It will also offer thirdparty access and advisory services to its proprietary tech, powered by AI. According to Davis, it’s already onboarded a few developers, but it’s a work in progress. The infrastructure needs further adapting to external teams. 

The recent growth is thanks to the developer’s pre-TGE activities as it’s building up towards its GOAT token launch. To that end, it offers $10,000 in rewards for quests such as friend referrals, and more.

Notably, it recently completed an event in collaboration with web3 game platform Tribally ahead of its TRIBAL token launch. Mighty Bear’s flagship title Mighty Actions Heroes was the first to launch on Goat, with a Waifu Clash integration also announced.

Discover more of Mighty Bear Games vision for Goat Gaming in our recent interview with CEO Simon Davis.

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.

Still in its early days, Singapore-based developer Mighty Bear Games recently launched rewards platform Goat Gaming. Currently, the studio’s existing mobile-based battle royale game Mighty Action Heroes is live on the platform, with Waifu Clash one of the next games to go live. 

In the longer span, Goat Gaming has plans to integrate hundreds of games, including both its own and third-party developer games. Indeed, “We’re releasing new games every 2-3 weeks”, said Mighty Bear Games co-founder Benjamin Chevalier on LinkedIn, discussing the studio’s use of AI to speed production.

In terms of the games, they will engage players with various rewards including crypto – such as the platform’s forthcoming GOAT token – but also more traditional real-world rewards. Similarly, games will include both web2 and web3.

One of Goat Gaming’s key features is head-to-head wagered battles, something that has already launched with the Showdown Battle mode in Mighty Action Heroes. Third-party developers will have the ability to integrate the platform to run short skill-based wagering competitions between players, which use the off-chain Crowns currency that players can currently buy with crypto.

Launched via its pre-TGE campaign Road to GOAT – which rewards players for completing in-game quests, social missions and content creation – Goat Gaming will eventually distribute tokens via leaderboard placement.

According to Mighty Bear’s CEO Simon Davis, the vision for Goat Gaming goes much deeper however, also taking into account the team’s existing activities making content for Fortnite via UEFN, as well as viral mini-games on Telegram. All-in-all this will provide a wide marketing funnel, which will eventually feed into Goat Gaming.

Built on Mighty Bear’s own tech stack, Goat Gaming will also offer third-party access and advisory services to its proprietary tech, powered by AI.

In total, the studio has raised $11 million for Mighty Action Heroes and Goat Gaming.

Discover more via the Goat Gaming whitepaper, website, and X account.