In some ways, the current web3 community has become a Fight Club to outside industries. Just as the first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club, the motto adopted by web3 companies and products is to not talk about web3 when explaining how your business works.

For the web3 gaming industry, it’s no different, except for the huge potential to drive mass blockchain adoption from the way games are offered and how users interact with them.

Leading the charge in what it calls “engagement as a service” is the web3 game aggregator and discovery platform Earn Alliance, founded by Joseph “Coop” Cooper, which helps pair gamers with games and game developers through a reward-based ecosystem. The company is Coop’s fifth startup, having previously sold a dev tools platform to Jack Dorsey’s CashApp and another company to PokerStars.

After the crypto crash in 2022, Coop and his team asked themselves how they could best aid the gaming space given market conditions. At the time, for example, Apple didn’t allow games to list on its App Store that contained NFTs or had strict rules about how NFTs could be used in-game because there was no way for Apple to take a cut of the NFT sales, according to {reNFT} Labs. Steam has had a complicated history with NFT and web3 games. Google and Epic have their own rules for how the games can be distributed. In response, Earn Alliance initially appealed to gamers and developers who wanted to experiment with web3 gaming and became a go-to source to find crypto games.

The company has spent the past few years growing its community of active gamers to include game developers. It recently released Challenges. a way for players to test their preferences and abilities which allows developers to enhance user retention and engagement.

A few of the games on Earn Alliance

With 500,000 engaged users and 175,000 monthly active users, Earn Alliance has essentially created a system where gamers get paid to play and test games they enjoy. At the same time, developers are provided access to a pool of gamers so they can target those who are most likely to test and play their games.

The global gaming industry is now worth over $300 billion with 2.7 billion people playing regularly, according to a 2021 report by Accenture. Growth, which shows no signs of slowing down, has been spurred by mass mobile phone adoption, increased screen time and a greater need for social interaction during the pandemic. The blockchain part of the gaming market is expected to grow to $65.7 billion by 2027 from $4.6 billion in 2022, according to research by MarketsandMarkets.

Through daily rewards challenges, gamers are motivated to become return players, propelling consistent user engagement and helping developers grow their fan bases—engagement that could prove to be a gateway for web3 mass adoption without the gamers even knowing they’ve been on-boarded.

“Our users are opting to be like, ‘Check me out, I’ve played 1,000 hours of Counter-Strike so I’m down to play shooter games,’” Coop said to me in a recent interview. “They’re actually opting to give their data to this marketplace and are then receiving opportunities because they’re a first-person shooter gameplayer being paid to check out similar games. It’s a very different way of user acquisition.”

Since part of the gameplay involves the collection of in-game items—which are really nonfungible tokens (NFTs) – a large majority of the players are participating in a web3 experience that they probably aren’t aware is being powered by blockchain tech.

“Last Remains is a live game we have on the Epic Games store, and there are over 200,000 users who play,” Coop said. “But 70 percent of the players—that we know of—do not have crypto wallets. You don’t need a crypto wallet to play the game—you just play it like a normal game.”

Take your stuff with you

He continued, “Players enter a zombie apocalypse world with 30 other players where they find rare NFTs like lightsabers and other cool items. If the players find the items and they survive to the helicopter at the end—there’s only three seats for 30 players—you can keep the gear you find when you leave.”

The gear players leave with—in turn—can be sold on the blockchain because they’re NFTs.

“But 70 percent of our users don’t even know they own these NFTs that have hundreds of dollars of value,” Coop said. “So I look at blockchain as more of a feature that hardcore fans will learn about if they decide they want to explore transacting these digital items in the crypto world.”

In this way, the onus is on the players to go down the rabbit hole to become “hardcore” players and learn about how the blockchain impacts both gameplay and the ability to sell items on-chain.

It’s also a big bet for game developers who are looking for more innovative and cost effective ways to reach their target audiences. 

“Usually you put out ads for a sexy looking game, a potential user might click on it, and then might go down the line to install the game and become a fan,” Coop said. “But what’s really cool is that we’ve incentivized things through crypto, so you can get an NFT—a really rare jpg—or can receive straight up cash.”

Another feature is the ability to distribute cash in exchange for gameplay testing. “You don’t need a PayPal account, you don’t need a bank account, you just need a web3 wallet and we can drop cash,” Coop said.

Off-ramping issues

But what happens to that cash once it’s in a player’s wallet? How do they move it from their web3 wallet to a non-web3 account?

“Off-ramping is a bigger problem the industry needs to solve in the coming years,” Coop said. “It starts with first having the ability to get something of value. We sold Last Remains passes for $60 last May and they’re now currently worth around $350 at the floor. One recently sold for $1,500, so there’s a lot of speculation on asset value that gets built around these ideas.”

The future of gaming could thus be a world where players wake up one day to an offer for their lightsaber, with someone willing to purchase it for cash. All they’ll need to do is hit a button, sell their lightsaber, and money will be deposited into their wallet.

“That’s where I think we’ll head but we’re taking baby steps as we build it,” Coop said. “I also look at it like referral programs psychologically. If people tell their friends to use their code to get something, they’re essentially selling a product. As an industry, we need to start thinking about that same selling point of how you get your first wallet. While off-ramping money is more difficult, bringing money in is easy. After we onboard the world to web3 wallets, we’ll figure out the off-ramping, or we’ll just start buying goods and services in crypto.”

lead image: Joseph Cooper