Interview with Animoca Investment Director Jenny: Product is king, and game playability comes first

链捕手ChainCatcher · 2023-08-10T10:23:01.000Z

Author: All Things Island Dozens of founders of the Wanwu Island community talked with Jenny, the investment director of Animoca, and gave in-depth thoughts on entrepreneurship and investment in chain games. The following are some selected transcripts: Wanwu Island: How to evaluate chain travel projects? Including timing, track, team Jenny: Animoca’s vision is to rely on good content and IP to attract tens of millions or even billions of users, join Web3 and complete the popularization of digital property rights. Animoca Group started from traditional games and found that many small and medium-sized game companies were in great need of distribution support and were severely squeezed under the existing traditional framework. Therefore, in 2017, it began to focus on the chain game ecology. Our team is still very active in looking at projects and is a little more cautious in making moves in a bear market. It is difficult to predict the timing of the prosperity of the application layer. It will be affected by the capital bear and bull cycle, and more importantly, it will be driven by hot products. In the final analysis, products with real application value rather than pure hype need to appear.

Author: Island of Everything
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Dozens of founders of the Wanwudao community talked with Animoca Investment Director Jenny, and in-depth thoughts on blockchain game entrepreneurship and investment. The following is a selection of some transcripts:
Wanwudao: How to evaluate blockchain game projects? Including timing, track, and team
Jenny: Animoca's vision is to attract tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of users with good content and IP, join Web3 and popularize digital property rights. Animoca Group started with traditional games and found that many small and medium-sized game companies are in great need of distribution support and are severely squeezed under the existing traditional framework, so it began to focus on the blockchain game ecosystem in 2017. Our team is still very active in the project now, and we are a little more cautious in the bear market. The timing of the prosperity of the application layer is difficult to predict. It will be affected by the capital bear-bull cycle, and more importantly, it depends on the promotion of popular products. In the final analysis, it still needs products with real application value rather than pure hype.
We think the core competitiveness of game applications lies in differentiated innovative products. Choosing the right track is also the most important thing, which determines whether the market is big enough. What behaviors or factors of the founders will make me feel extra points? The most important thing is to pay attention to product details, preferably have their own well-known works, and continuous entrepreneurs are the best. In addition, it will be a plus if the founding team has real money investment, and investors really care about whether the founding team is all-in.
Island of All Things: How to face the low cycle?
Jenny: There have been a lot of discussions about Web2.5/Gamefi recently. I think these two things are not in conflict and can be developed in parallel. The early seed user groups that the two types face are very different.
Fully on chain game (FOCG) will be the core application scenario of ZK technology in the next cycle. The development cycle of FOCG is relatively short. Due to the limitation of the whole chain, it may not be able to compare with traditional games or GAMEFI in terms of content richness and playability. Early users will be mainly DefiOG and technical people who pursue geek spirit, and through them, it will radiate to the external generalized population.
Gamefi's target group is relatively broad, and it attracts traditional game users with innovative gameplay and monetization models. This group of people is very large. It empowers game content through an open economic model, strengthens digital property rights, and can improve user stickiness. Of course, the premise must be that the game itself is fun, otherwise, no matter how powerful the token design is, it is impossible to make a product that is not fun. In addition, Gamefi's open economic system can also attract native Web3 users, who may not be game users themselves but can also participate in the form of speculation or gambling. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it can provide more liquidity for game assets.
Wanwudao: Which chain travel categories do you think are more optimistic?
Jenny: I am optimistic about SLG strategy games. Compared with other types of games, they usually have a longer lifespan, have their own economic system, and are mainly fun with team battle simulation and trading interaction. They have strong krypton gold properties and are suitable for tokenization or even an open economy to allow in-game assets to circulate more effectively. We are also working on innovative FPS+online gambling gameplay. FPS is the world's largest game category with a large number of players and a good user base. In addition, we are also very interested in the cultivation type that focuses on trading.
Wanwu Island: The R&D cost of games is relatively high and the cycle is long. Does the NFT-first model still work?
Jenny: The NFT market is very cold now. It is not feasible to raise funds by selling NFTs to develop games. It cannot raise enough money. Creators need to build Alpha or Beta first, constantly improve the details, and then rely on innovation to attract users to the community. After having a certain foundation, they can sell NFTs. The initial development funds mainly come from VC financing. NFT will become a long-term consumer product. At present, people are more cautious about super-large-scale 3A games. Web3 does not need to compete with traditional big companies for large-scale production. It might as well focus on innovation in gameplay, while paying attention to execution and delivery capabilities. Asian entrepreneurial teams have advantages in production and research cost control and execution efficiency.
Wanwu Island: In what scenarios will NFT be used in the next wave?
Jenny: It depends on its functionality. Combined with rights and interests, the main scenarios are in the fields of games, social networking, live broadcasting, etc.
Wanwudao: How do content creators pitch to investors like Animoca?
Jenny: As a capital provider, we first look at what problem the product solves, whether it is innovative, and the willingness of its users to pay. Finally, we must look at the match between the team’s experience and their vision, as well as the founding team’s understanding of the entire ecosystem.
Wanwudao: Advice for blockchain game entrepreneurs?
Jenny: "Product is king", the game must first be playable. Category selection is also very important. For example, traditional casual games can quickly achieve high daily activity, but if its monetization model still relies on advertisers, it is more suitable to stay in the traditional game track. Web3 games also need to ensure that the cycle of their open economy is sustainable. The design of tokens must be very closely integrated with gameplay and values. This will directly affect the success or failure of the game, so it is best not to outsource. The last point is to control the pace of financing, the valuation must match the stage of the product, and make long-term plans for cash flow.