It’s not often that a group of colleagues who have worked together for years have the opportunity to come together at the exact moment in time and found a startup. Yet this was the genesis of Mighty Bear Games, a globally-focussed web3 game studio in Singapore. 

In 2016, when Activision Blizzard acquired King, the gaming studio responsible for the annoyingly addictive Candy Crush, it also absorbed King’s Singapore subsidiary NonStopGames. Benjamin Chevalier and his colleagues Simon Davis and Fadzuli Said were later given the option of moving to Europe with the new entity or taking severance pay and remaining in Singapore. With decades of deep gaming industry experience between them, they decided to band together and with mighty aspirations, build their own gaming studio.  

However, the reality of once being part of a resource-rich gaming studio to now being founders of a fledgling startup soon hit, and they were forced to acknowledge that their first in-house project was too ambitious. They pivoted and were soon given the opportunity to pitch games to Apple Arcade, Apple’s subscription service that offers players access to a large catalog of games on the platform for a monthly fee. 

Their first title on the platform was Butter Royale, a quirky take on a traditional multiplayer battle royale game, that swapped out rocket launchers for baguettes and guns for ketchup bottle blasters. It established a trusted partnership with Apple that opened the doors to working with Disney for their second game, Disney Melee Mania, where players choose to play as their favorite Disney characters. 

I recently spoke to Mighty Bear Games’ co-founder Benjamin Chevalier about his transition from web2 gaming to the future of web3.

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Decential: What prompted Mighty Bear Games to explore and then wholly embrace web3 game development?

Benjamin Chevalier: Blockchain gaming was kind of on the rise and we were paying attention to it. Of course we saw CryptoKitties at the time, and we understood the potential there. But it was still very early. When we saw Axie Infinity exploding in number of users and revenue (2020), we found it very interesting. Simon Davis, my co-founder, and Abel, one our earliest team members were pretty deep into crypto. And they were looking at that very, very closely and introduced it to the rest of the studio. 

Mighty Bear Games founders (L-R) Simon Davis, Benjamin Chevalier and Fadzuli Said

The market was also shifting. Apple removed IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers), which was on Apple devices as the way to target users with marketing to boost user acquisition. In order to protect privacy, Apple decided to remove that. So it made marketing a lot a lot harder than it used to be. We looked at everything that was happening and started working on our first web3 game, Mighty Action Heroes, with a very small team initially. But within three months, we pivoted the entire studio to building this game and building an ecosystem. We did a token raise to build that product and from there we were essentially all-in on web3 as a studio.

D: After your long career in the gaming industry, what elements do you feel make up the perfect game?

BC: That's a huge question. I keep getting surprised by the audience and the way people experience certain things. There really is no perfect recipe outside of listening to our players, listening to the audience, looking at the market and being open minded. Essentially questioning every single assumption that we've ever had is the key. And acknowledging that whatever we thought we knew a few weeks ago, a few months ago, may not be true anymore because it can change, people change, the market changes.

D: How has web3 challenged your preconceived notions about gaming?

BC: We're still shaken by how different web3 is. So traditionally, with web2 games, we have a tendency to have a linear development. We have our concept and our ideas, we write them down. And then we execute on all of them. You get to your early access, if you let people see the game, and do a closed alpha, open alpha, and beta, and then launch. The launch itself is probably with a smaller subset of players. It is all pretty closed, until the moment we really open and launch. Marketing is usually handled in web2 by publishers, who would spend money on ads to get people to install the game, look at the return on investment, and if it fits into the strategy or not. 

A screenshot of Mighty Action Heroes

Web3 is completely different. While the actual development of the game itself is fairly similar to a classic web2 process, you then have the meta-game design, economy design, ecosystem design, and all the activities that exist outside of the game itself. That's very unique and new. And this needs to be very agile. And that's fundamentally very different from web2. 

On top of this, we have the community, which is not something that traditionally you do in web2, where the community has no visibility on what is being done with the game until it launches. In the case of web3, communities are 100 percent part of the development process. They have strong thoughts and they're often even investors in the ecosystem. In our case, we launched a Genesis pass and then a [profile picture] collection. Meaning our community has a stake in the game, so a stake also in the development. This is very unique, right? Even marketing is community-first, with community building and partners. We just had to learn a lot and question everything that we thought we knew.

D: With my career of working with startups and SMEs, we advocated the lean startup methodology, where you iterate your product or service in direct response to how your consumers engage with it. I feel this approach got forgotten, and with web3 we are now coming back to this.

BC: Yes, exactly. The sense of secrecy that exists in traditional gaming, where people will not talk about ideas, and studios won't necessarily share what is being developed. It is the total opposite to web3, where everything is a communication opportunity. Onboarding our players, letting them know what we're doing, even giving them the tools for them to advocate for the project outside of the player base. I mean, it's such a shift in mindset, right? And not being shy about sharing what we're doing, and about our learnings and failures. The community appreciates that.

D: How are you designing your web3 games with an educational component that helps your users understand that, yes, they own this data, they own these assets, and can potentially monetize them? Is that part of your message? 

BC: We made a choice to allow people to play for free and to not have a wallet when they start playing the game. And that's the way we believe we can onboard traditional players. At a later point, we will let them know that those assets that they spent so much time either crafting or acquiring can be traded, and for assets they are missing, they can get them from the marketplace. And that's where we would start onboarding people. At the moment, we have services that help us, for example, hide the wallet initially behind the social login, which is really great, because people don't have to create or manage a wallet, we can manage it for them. And if they're more crypto native, they can connect their own wallet. I think that's the way we can softly onboard and educate people about those new features. 

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D: What are the key learnings you took away from Axie Infinity’s year in 2022?

BC: It is very interesting. I have a lot of admiration for them. They're pioneers, first movers. They had great ideas, but it showed that building a sustainable economy is very hard.  I think guilds and  scholarships, for example, sounded really good on paper. But that was assuming that there would always be a fresh income of players plus sustainable growth for people to essentially buy into the ecosystem. 

The price was the barrier to entry here. And unfortunately, there is a point where you don't find those people anymore. So the blockchain gaming ecosystem took a lesson from that, which is, play-to-earn is not for everyone. I think play-to-earn is a possibility if you're competing and you're at the top of the leaderboard, you could earn some money. But I feel it can't be the main motivation to play a game on a daily basis. I think the game has to be really fun. Axie Infinity showed us that to be really sustainable, people need to be playing the game for the sake of playing the game before thinking about making money. It’s very, very hard to design something sustainable that would allow everyone to make money. We realized that is not realistic. 

D: So what are your thoughts about web3 gaming in Asia? Is it bucking the global trend?

BC: I feel that the Asia region is generally a lot more advanced than Europe or even the U.S. when it comes to how open people are to adapting new technologies. Traditionally in the region, a lot of people don't necessarily have bank accounts, but they do have digital wallets. So, you know, a crypto wallet is just a step further, and I think a lot of people here are very comfortable with that.

Europe is not exactly ready for blockchain gaming for multiple reasons. One of them being the negative sentiment that exists around NFTs and NFT projects, and crypto in general, which I think is shifting over time. But adoption in Europe and the U.S. has slowed, while in Southeast Asia or Asia in general, I think people are more practical. They're looking at the future for what it is, and asking ‘is that useful to me or not?’ I feel that adoption is much, much faster here. We are learning and looking at our community. I have a feeling that Southeast Asia, LATAM, probably some countries right now in Africa, like Nigeria for example, and India are probably going to be our major audiences.

D: And are you building for all these markets?

BC: Yes, we're building for all these markets. And actually, we're building to the point that our game are inspired by classic action-hero film characters that are very specific to those regions. And we reference characters and film heroes that people might not know outside of those regions, because we believe those markets are really important.

D: I want to finish talking about collaboration. You have worked in so many large organizations. Now you're in a startup. What does collaboration mean to you? How has your understanding of collaboration evolved now that you are a founder looking to grow through collaboration?

BC: Well, it's very interesting. It tended to be a bit more one-sided, where a collaborator would probably have been more of a client, who we collaborated with. If we talk about Apple Arcade or even Disney as the IP holders, they gave us a lot of creative freedom, but they had the keys to their IPs and how we could use them. 

The thing that is completely different now with web3 is the alignment in incentives with collaborators and the breadth of collaborations that we can have. Which is something we never experienced before we went to development.

Now, our collaborators can be marketplaces, they can be chains. They can be guilds. They can be esports teams. For example there are only a handful of web2 publishers that could help us reach the scale that we need and only a handful of very big IP holders as well, that would maybe finance a game using their IP. The experience with collaboration in web3 is so much richer. 

D: I totally agree and I'm so happy to have in web3 a community of like-minded people who share the same spirit.

BC: I completely agree with these sentiments. It was such a long time since I felt this way in my work. If someone else in the web3 space wins, we all win. In web3 when you acquire new users, you onboard new users in the space, we all win. That is not something that you feel when you work in more traditional gaming, where other studios are definitely competitors, and you're going to fight for the same users. It is an uplifting feeling to talk to people that I would have seen as competitors and now I’m speaking to them as potential collaborators. 

Also the transparency that blockchain brings to the table is something absolutely amazing. The fact that we have this accountability on how we are using our funds, and that it's all on chain. We had a token raise, so people can see what we're doing with these funds, and I love that. I love the accountability.