Mighty Jaxx and Smobler Studios say ‘I do” to web3 at Singapore Comic Con 

Marina Bay Sands came alive with Cosplay enthusiasts, fans, gamers and geeks for the return of Singapore Comic Con (SGCC) recently. For an event which capped off a year of major brands activating metaverse campaigns, I had high expectations. Sadly, it felt more like a fancy dress party within a giant retail store. Thematically, SGCC missed a huge opportunity to present how this space is experimenting with web3 and the metaverse. The only exception - Singapore’s Mighty Jaxx. 

When done well, Comic Con events showcase the best of the world of comics, animated movies, online and offline games, and the collectibles associated with them all. In addition, they feature a lineup of guest speakers from these industries, presenting on timely topics. In 2018, Singapore Comic Con reached fever-pitch with the presence of Robert Downey Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch, Karen Gillan and director Joe Russo, who came in to promote Avengers: Infinity War. 

While that may seem like a hard act to follow, the boom in technological developments since then offers a depth of content that any event manager would be delighted to exploit. Advancements by way of extended reality (augmented, virtual, mixed), the creation of several new metaverse worlds and games, and the birth of the mainstream NFT collectibles have brought in new consumers and communities. With brands like Disney, Marvel, Nickelodeon, Lego, Pokemon and Epic Games all playing hard with these new technologies, I expected to walk into Singapore ComicCon and have my senses blown away. With the exception of Nickelodeon, which committed a large budget to promote their new Transformers: EarthSpark show, other notable brands were represented only as retail stores selling merch and collectibles.

Read more: Your NFT Spacecraft to the Open Metaverse is Waiting

The only exhibitor to showcase these new technologies in any meaningful way was Singapore’s Mighty Jaxx, which occupied a large central stand on the main floor. Mighty Jaxx partners with some of the world’s leading brands like Netflix, Formula 1, Warner Bros, Hasbro and Adidas to produce digital and phygital toy collectibles. 

Phygital is the term used to describe combining a physical product or experience with its digital version, and sold together as one offering. It has already proven to be a lucrative way for major brands to cross over into the web3 space, and is set to transform the retail customer experience. Eric Hazan of McKinsey predicted in April 2021, “We are entering the world of ‘phygital’— where there is not a physical world or digital world in retail, but rather a completely connected one.” Mckinsey believes that the value that the metaverse presents for brands will be as much as $5 trillion by 2030. 

Tapping into this potential,  Mighty Jaxx teamed up with metaverse architecture firm Smobler Studios to showcase an interactive game, limited edition NFT collectibles and even a wedding. Their collaboration has opened up real-life offerings and metaverse experiences to Mighty Jaxx collectors, transforming them from consumers into a community.  To find out more about how it all came together, I spoke with Mighty Jaxx’s Head of Metaverse, Darryl Tan, and Co-Founder of Smobler Studios, Dr. Loretta Chen, who partnered with the company for the event. 

Mighty Jaxx started out as a physical toy collectibles company and has incorporated NFTs, and now the metaverse, into its business model since 2019.  

left to right:_Nat Lim of Smobler Studios, Darryl Tan of Mighty Jaxx, Belinda Lim of The Sandbox, Sharon Beh of Smobler Studios, newlyweds Clarence Chan and Joanne Tham with their wedding diormama collectible gift

“When you think about purchasing a collectible, establishing provenance is very important,” Tans said to me. “Being certain it is the real deal and not a knockoff. Exploring how we could ensure authenticity with NFTs was our initial digital push into web3. Since 2019, every single physical collectible that we have produced has been embedded with an NFT chip to authenticate it. Today, our company has over 40,000 blockchain entries.” 

With Smobler Studios, Mighty Jaxx has been able to realise their vision of amplifying fandom in new ways. Smobler Studios is financially backed by virtual land gaming company The Sandbox and was one of the first 30 recipients of the Sandbox’s Game Maker Fund.  

“Because we are so early in the space, I definitely think that the phygital applications are really crucial,” Chen said. 

For their first collaboration, Smobler Studios built a metaverse game for Mighty Jaxx within The Sandbox which was launched during the Halloween season in 2022. The MightyVerse Presents: Spooky Season was based on characters from Mighty Jaxx’s Creepy Cutie collection, capturing local ghost and monster stories. At Singapore Comic Con, a fresh layer of the MightyVerse game was showcased, featuring a Christmas theme based on the German folklore of Krampus, also a Creepy Cutie character.

Visitors to the Mighty Jaxx stand were encouraged to play MightyVerse via desktops incorporated within the pavilion. The game ended with players finding themselves in an exact digital replica of the Mighty Jaxx pavilion, tying the entire experience together. Chen added, “Seeing the visitors’ faces when they realised they were both standing in the physical space, while their avatars stood in the metaverse space, embodied everything Mighty Jaxx and Smobler Studios were hoping to achieve with this activation.” 

Mighty Jaxx used the platform of Singapore Comic Con for its first foray into NFT ticketing. They partnered with the organisers to launch SGCC × MightyVerse XPass, an NFT entry into the event embedded with perks and offers. Tan said that the idea was to have “something to offer before, during and after the event. We are investing a lot to see what the ‘after the event’ side of things looks like, whether it's for next year's Comic Con, or something that's actually more nuanced in terms of some of the entities and IPs and experience that they were building and bringing to the world.”

image: Unsplash

Oh, and about that wedding. 

Loretta Chen and Darryl Tan originally met in June 2022 while on a panel with Sebastien Borget, Co-founder and CCO of The Sandbox. Chen said,” I was answering a question and just started riffing about merging real life events with the metaverse as the ultimate phygital link. We had just created a wedding experience which hadn’t yet been published which I started talking about.” While I was speaking, Sebastien took a screenshot of my presentation and tweeted it asking if anyone wanted to be the first lucky couple to host a metaverse wedding.” 

As it turned out, a young Singaporean groom-to-be, Clarence Chan was on Twitter at that moment. With his wedding coming up in a few months time, he messaged Chen. And so in August, officiated by Sebastien Borget, Chan and his bride Louise Tham got married in a metaverse wedding built by Smobler Studios. It was a first for Singapore and attracted media attention at the time. For Comic Con, Mighty Jaxx had something special for the couple. They designed and presented them with a 1/1 wedding diorama collectible at the event.

“It is a beautiful story,” Chen said. “A union of different brands and partners coming together and bringing a real life romance into the metaverse. And what better partner than Mighty Jaxx for making it all come to life again in a whole new way at Singapore Comic Con.” 

Tan said, “one-of-one printing was definitely something that we are exploring quite heavily to see if we can bring it as a service, something we call avatar-as-a-service. So many web3 projects are centred around PFPs (profile pictures) but these are 2D representations. We are able to bring these characters into three dimensions and that actually is something that's very powerful.” 

Hopefully Singapore Comic Con 2023 will incorporate more experimentation with and exploration of web3 and the metaverse, to make it a more relevant event for a city positioning itself as Asia’s metaverse and crypto hub. 

“There's so much to learn, to uncover, to grow together,” Chen said. “It's not tried and tested. So many things are being invented as we speak, created as we speak. So fundamentally, it boils down to having great team communication and being really open to the process of exploration.”