A gaming blockchain with creators at the core. Will it work?
GC ALPHA 74
Disclaimer: None of this information should be taken as financial advice. DYOR + I will hold some of the assets mentioned in this newsletter.
MARKET TALK
LEARNINGS FROM CAMBRIA
Cambria has been shipping a lot this year, and S3 is right around the corner (will be announced this week). So, last Friday on Sidelined, we spoke with Ben to get an update about what they have been working on, a conversation that largely turned out to be centered around audiences
Firstly, we asked him about the why behind onboarding Pika as an ambassador, not your typical crypto content creator, but someone who’s a degen gambling streamer on Kick:
“Viewers, market-aligned, product-aligned viewers”. Cambria is looking for new audiences, as market penetration-wise, everyone who would’ve heard about the game in crypto has heard about it. So, unless the onchain audience grows, Cambria has exhausted their growth here
At this point, we can say the onchain (crypto-savvy) audience is not going to see much growth moving forward. Therefore, naturally, games have to look for new audiences elsewhere
On the topic of abstraction, Ben adds that a lot of these users “don’t mess with onchain at all”. The team has been building tooling almost identical to Stake.com's deposit flows to create a familiar environment, where users can send (almost) any crypto on any chain to wager in the Duel Arena
Ben noted that it has mostly been Solana, indicative that the newer audiences often get onboarded through here (i.e., memecoins)
“Crypto is almost like a bad word…to a lot of people, it means Ponzi scheme”. Adding that at this point, Cambria isn’t a “crypto game” anymore, and now has to use terminology closer in line with real-money trading (more familiar to the OSRS audience)
More on the difference between the audiences: “You need a combination of things. You obviously need the crypto crowd, that’s your core user base. But for the economics to work…the crypto crowd is very EV sensitive”
Point being, that without a consumer-focused (spend for entertainment) audience, you’ll have this eternal battle of revenue generation vs. users constantly min-maxxing for profits
When we asked Ben about a larger OSRS-focused GTM plan, “if you’re looking at the tech adoption curve, we’re targeting the early adopters right now. A lot of which are already in crypto, right?…as we go along the curve…we’ll eventually start hitting the really big audiences”
Further, he adds to how a “cool product” helps (new) people to get over that initial hump of thinking of it as a scam. Making it easier to get some goodwill
At some point, we talked about the Duel Arena as well (from a token/business perspective), which generated $140M in wager volume. “Maybe 90% of the volume is coming from like 100 people…you need both the high volume players, the very crypto native players, but you also need the relevancy, and the significance that there are literally 25,000 players online”
As Cambria illustrates and as we know, there are very few crypto-native gamers, yet the ARPU/ARPPUS can be extremely high (like LOL Land). But to become culturally relevant and catch larger attention from a traditional gaming perspective, it needs scale
In The Value Thesis #5: Cambria, an article I wrote on the game back in April, I said the following: “In my view, Cambria’s biggest risk lies in its strategy to break into a more Web2-oriented audience, particularly those familiar with Runescape”
But after this conversation we had, I feel more confident that Cambria will be able to attract subsets of this audience
THE GALAXXIA BLOCKCHAIN
The Galaxxia blockchain was announced last week: “The world’s first gaming and entertainment studio powered by its own blockchain, co-owned by gamers and creators.” A new initiative by the studio behind Planet-X, the mobile extraction game
Whilst it’s definitely not the first gaming blockchain rolling out of a studio, Galaxxia is doing something novel here. As a group of ~50 Web2 gaming content creators will be the “co-owners” of the chain
What “ownership” means in this sense remains unclear, other than the creators having some type of token allocation, and/or revenue share
Collectively, these creators have an accumulated 200M+ followers and 30B+ views, many of whom made their name in the mobile gaming (esports) space. Particularly, there are a bunch of creators coming from PUBG Mobile
Naturally, there will be a lot of overlap in the interests of these audiences interested in BRs. Planet-X also has an interesting (P2E) hook, as you can win real-world prizes daily if you can successfully extract
The creator angle is a distribution play, as you probably already figured out, signified by Galaxxia’s tagline: “influence becomes distribution”. A greater attempt to expand beyond the small TAM of crypto gaming
Planet-X is the flagship of Galaxxia, and the studio has two more titles in development, plus one planned for a future release:
“Go Hunt” and “One Pixel” are the two mobile titles in development. The first is a location-based treasure hunt game. The second is a hyper-casual treasure-hunt game, where the players simply tap
The recurring theme within these three titles is treasure hunts. Rewards will be sourced through brand collaborations. From Mr. Yellow: “I want brands to get an incredible marketing platform when they land on
PlanetX”
The 4th title, which is planned for future release, is Planet-X console/PC. Mentioned to be an AAA FPS, combining Halo-like environments with the treasure-hunt game loop
I doubt this will ever come to fruition, but I guess it sweetens the vision
Of course, Galaxxia will have its own token. To become a “co-owner,” users can buy a Galaxxium Bar. There will be 750 bars in total (400 available for public sale), which represent a revenue share across trading fees, gas fees, pack sales, lootbox sales, etc., + a 1.5% of the staking pool and 2% airdrop
The bars essentially represent tokenized shares of Galaxxia
To participate, users must stake $10,000 for full ownership and complete KYC. Galaxxium Bars also only become tradeable after 24 months from the date of staking. Breaking this early on will incur a 20% penalty
The restrictions seem quite heavy, deliberately to attract aligned users. If the team sells all 400 bars through this pre-sale, that will be equal to $4M raised
We’ve seen other games go heavy on big creators, like Off the Grid, with varying results. Will baking them into the chain and giving them a greater incentive (beyond paying per stream) make a difference? We’ll see
ON THE RISE
Claims and stakes are now live for $FISH (trading goes live later)
DappRadar is shutting down due to financial unsustainability
The creator ownership model is intresting, but I wonder if giving 50 influencers tokens is really that diferent from traditional paid sponsorships. The 24 month lockup on the Galaxxium Bars shows they're trying to filter for long term believers. The real test is wether Planet-X can convert those 200M followers into actual players or if they just scroll past it.