Chibi Clash One Year Later Part 1: A Short View Back to the Past
Edit: You can now read Part 2 here
“A Short View Back to the Past”, 7 words that will instantly ring a bell for Formula 1 fans. During a press conference eight years ago, a German reporter ask what is perhaps one of the most long winded questions ever:
Gentlemen, a short view back to the past. Thirty years ago, Niki Lauda told us ‘take a monkey, place him into the cockpit and he is able to drive the car.’ Thirty years later, Sebastian told us ‘I had to start my car like a computer, it’s very complicated.’…
Looking back at the past year in the NFT and web3 gaming space, I can’t help but to feel the same way about NFT projects. This time last year, you can literally “take monkey drawings, make it an NFT collection and it will instantly print millions”. This applies even more so for web3 games: everyone was looking to place their bets on the “next Axie Infinity”, leading to extremely high valuations for any web3 gaming project tied to a token - even if the game itself has yet to launch.
One year later, while it is still relatively easy to launch a NFT collection, the amount of resources and knowledge required to make a web3 project into a long term success has become increasingly difficult. The bull market attracted top web2 talents into the web3 ecosystem, leading to highly quality projects with better execution both from a product and marketing standpoint. On the other hand, once the bull market ended, collectors realized that not every project will survive in the long term (nor do some even have the intention to ever survive). Those of us who are still active in the space are now far more selective with choosing which projects to purchase and which communities to participate in.
Struggles in the Beginning
When the Chibi Clash genesis NFT collection launched 1 year ago, we knew there were many opportunities to capitalize on the market conditions. At the same time, we launched the project with one goal in mind: to build a web3 (then play-to-earn) auto battler game based on the Chibi Clash IP. We had the blueprint for what we wanted to build, but as well-known web3 and Chibi Clash investor Santiago Santos tweeted recently: Games take time to build.
The first year of Chibi Clash can be summed up as a constant struggle between wanting to immediately deliver for our holders v.s. maintaining the long term vision of delivering a high quality web3 game. The 2-3 months following the NFT mint were perhaps the most stressful I’ve ever experienced in my life: maintaining the expectations of a live NFT community, recruiting and hiring the team needed to execute the project, keeping up with the non-stop grind during a crypto bull market, and kicking off business conversations that would eventually lead to our project’s successful fundraise.
Spending more time in one area meant having less time for another. During the initial months recruitment and business development took precedence over product, and our game development got off to a slow start. This was probably the right decision in hindsight as we were finally able to onboard most of our core team members by Q1, but at the time it definitely felt like we were missing out on some short term opportunities - especially when you start seeing the valuations of other similar projects based on their (then) token and NFT floor prices. I remember having a conversation back in November where a potential investor suggested that we should sell land deed NFTs; at the time we had a tentative design for land gameplay but was far from ready to actually release gameplay tied to it. Perhaps it would have made us more money, but I can’t imagine how we’d be able to salvage our product design now if we had actually committed to that direction.
From Incubation to Pre-Alpha
Despite some early misses, we were fortunate to have also come across many great opportunities, particularly that with the Alliance web3 accelerator. Taking part in the accelerator allowed us to learn from veterans who have been through the ups and downs in the crypto space, as well as connect with other builders who are going through the same challenges and obstacles as we are.
We were also fortunate to connect with many leading web3 investors who provided us with insightful industry knowledge, valuable contacts, and of course the funds for us to scale the project to the next level. Unlike traditional venture capitalists, web3 investors tend to be younger, have a much higher appetite for risk, and often times are entrepreneurs and builders themselves. We are fortunate to have completed our fundraise during favorable market conditions while not having rushed out a governance token - which would likely be underperforming right now regardless of what product we deliver or how much we spend on marketing it.
And speaking of product, we’re proud to have finally launched the playable pre-alpha build of Chibi Clash a weeks ago. Only available for our Legendary Seal NFT holders and a selected few individuals, the game has thus far been very well received by our community members. While our game design was clear from the start, changing requirements relating to a number of things including authentication systems, server tech and game economics (more on this below) had led to us scrapping and redeveloping code throughout production. There’s still a lot of work ahead leading up to Alpha → Beta → Full Launch but we’re more confident now than ever that we’re on the right track.
Evolving from Play-to-Earn
While it is easy to look back and point out how unsustainable the tokenomics of projects such as Axie and Pegaxy are today, the duo token “play-to-earn” model at the time was hailed as a huge success. Revenue and retention numbers were unlike anything ever seen in the gaming industry, and who doesn’t want to buy into the idea of playing games for a living?
Chibi Clash began as a play-to-earn project. Similar to Axie, our original design was to have an inflationary token, and to allow players to Recruit (Breed) new Legends that can be sold or lent to other players to earn more tokens by playing the game. With time, we realized that:
This economic model can only sustained via a continuous growth in player population, and will eventually hit a peak before crashing in value and hurting the holders. Other mechanics can be applied to slow down this process (ex. STEPN), but the result will be the same.
We are only scratching the service of what can be accomplished with web3 gaming, with many design ideas yet to be explored.
When Chibi Clash first launched, we were still students in the web3 space learning about the basics of tokenomics, smart contracts and blockchain technology as a whole. One year later, we are now ready to take on a leadership position and introduce our own innovative ideas into the web3 gaming space.
Stay tuned for Part 2 as we talk about the future of Chibi Clash!