Hi there, I am a non-developer who has been thrust into the world of IC for the past few years. I am co-creator of Dragginz. One recurring issue we encounter is that any game mentioning crypto is often perceived as a scam, shilling a worthless coin, or something worse.
This misconception is frustrating because it couldn’t be further from the truth. The technology and possibilities that crypto offers are the reasons why the Dragginz Team wholeheartedly supports IC.
I am considering setting up a blog on Dragginz.io to explain why we chose IC as the backbone of Dragginz and how it will positively impact our players. The aim is to overcome common misconceptions and help mass-market users understand IC. For instance, Dragginz’s use of Internet Identity to associate a person with a specific account offers numerous benefits for players. These advantages include eliminating password scams, preventing the sale of email addresses, avoiding the need to share personal information, preventing data leaks, and more.
I am wondering if there are any explainers out there specifically tailored for people who know nothing about crypto, which I could direct potential players to. While there are many excellent videos explaining the tech, none seem to target individuals completely unfamiliar with crypto concepts. Some terms like “reverse-gas cost” keep cropping up, which may confuse and discourage potential users.
I just don’t want to start from scratch if there are already existing resources available.
Not the answer you are looking for but I would suggest going a different route. Average people don’t care about the backend and probably never will. Focus on outcomes without any crypto terms. Terms like crypto, tokens, NFT, decentralization, etc… were technical in the first place, but now all the terms are associated with all the projects that have collapsed. So what about dragginz is unique and what things can a game do that it couldn’t before. Hope that’s helpful
This so much, I’ve always found it quite silly that web3 games usually sell themselves with fancy buzzwords like NFT, on chain, etc… and imho that is cause in majority of cases they have no market other than attracting a few crypto natives looking for a quick buck. Like imagine if during E3 or Gamescom Sony were to say “yeah our game is amazing, we use MongoDB and AWS”, that never happens cause the tech used is a mere implementation detail, the game itself is what actual end users care about.
I wasn’t going to go into detail about the back end, more how Dragginz is using blockchain tech to do things in a far better, more efficient way than we could do before.
Solving real problems, not just trying to make a quick buck.
Maybe it is naïve, or too soon. It took over a decade for Bitcoin to be common knowledge and that is a pile of poop compared to IC. I’ll still try however. If people are asking questions, may as well answer them…
What @Gekctek and @Zane are recommending is exactly what I recommended to @jonit. Perhaps Jon might be able to share some of his experience if you reach out.
Adding on to what others have said, the game experience is the most important thing - nothing else comes close. But I might add a parallel, secondary marketing pitch to present the game from an web3/ownership perspective, where your abilities, items, and achievements in game are directly proportional to your ownership of the game, including the mechanics of the game and the direction of the project.
How many times have hit games been ruined by Blizzard or a big studio changing a piece of the game, nerfing an achievement, or releasing an expansion filled with Pandas that pissed of millions of gamers worldwide.
Ownership is a huge responsibility, so you probably want to introduce a tiny slice at a time (sort of like introducing game mechanics), but I’d lean into a “play to own” or “leave a legacy” message rather than a “play to earn” (which tend to be shitty/scammy games).
Oh absolutely. We played wow from beta and the flavour of the month tactic got v old v quickly. This wasnt about explaining the game, just the IC specific parts. There seems to be a blinkered view of “crypto is evil” which I am hoping to dispell.
I’ll give it a shot and we will see. Right now nobody really gaf about Dragginz but if we manage to pull it off, it will be a massive game on IC. That will hopefully benefit the ecosystem as a whole and get the focus off the price of icp (which is quite frankly irrelevant) and onto underlying tech.
My 2 cents on this as someone who has experienced both sides, gamers are usually terrible at game design, they tend to suffer from tunnel vision and come up with band aid solutions to address balance/design issues, when it comes to evolving a game what they propose is always very disjointed and most of the times completely non sensical, the range of ideas I’ve seen proposed goes from making me laugh out loud to wanting to pull my hairs out.
One might say: “but what if only the most experienced and dedicated players had a say?”
Well that has its issues too, players with tons of hours tend to underplay or completely ignore certain issues cause they aren’t affected by them as much as others and sometimes even propose changes that’d “kick the ladder away” for newcomers and less experienced users, cause they are so good at the game they want an harder challenge.
It is my opinion the issues you have highlighted are better solved by a good company culture rather than some form of tokenization, if you look at all best forms of entertainment they are rarely if ever produced by hundreds of people steering the helm, but by a restricted group or individual that steers the direction based on feedback and its own vision, in some instances help by tons of people is required, but only in order to make the idea come to life, think about movie productions or AAA games.
One of the unique aspects of Web3 games is certainly actual item ownership and open standards for collectibles, but an even more interesting one would be to unite the practices of FOSS software with the capabilities offered by open services.
There are some games like Skyrim which 10 years after release are still played and being modded beyond recognition, it is absurd what passionate fans are capable of even in the complete absence of monetary incentives, unfortunately there is a ceiling to what they can accomplish dictated by engine’s limitations. Now imagine a scenario where a game’s development can indefinitely go on as long as someone is willing to work on it, ownership could be gradually transitioned from the OG creators to the most active contributors like we see happen in open source projects, the entire backend infrastructure could be owned by a DAO so that as long the game is profitable either through sales or donations it never goes down.
I think we should fund game creatives more than anything. It is upto great game designers to lead and help sell the game vision before even building the game. I know poked studio is doing a great job with video animation. In a way that is a great way to present the vision and get feedback before making it. Making a game no one wants to play sounds like hell for everyone involved.
I would advice to go into video animation and character dev before building a full functioning game. I mean Cyberpunk 2077 built the game first and then build the anime series. It would prob have been better to build the anime series first.
To explain IC to average users, I think the entire community should wait a little until the ecosystem is mature enough. At the moment, most IC DEXes don’t have enough liquidity and the docs are almost entirely focused towards developers. Enough resources needs to be written/created before we can market it to the masses.
Often time, it is hard to find resources on how to use applications in the IC community.
Explaining IC to the average persons is almost impossible right now. Many still struggle to add L2 chains in Metamask, and understand the difference between the same stable coin on different chains. For the game I would just plain and simple stick to what it does and what the gamer needs to do in order to be able to play. The fact that it runs entirely on IC should be considered a bonus. The majority of todays games that use blockchain technology in any shape or form just suck so if this one will be even a little better (I am confident it will be great) it will be a great success.
It’s more that we have users that are coming from Neopets who have just pivoted to a (sort of) crypto NFT game, and then got a horrific response from the community and pivoted back. That said, their investors are Polygon and Avalanche so I don’t think it’ll stay crypto-free for long.
I think we just need to work on a nice infographic or something that explains that we take literally no identifiable information from the user, and there’s nothing to “hack” as it were.
If there’s nothing out there, that’s not an issue. I know we’re way ahead of the curve when it comes to tech but we’ve still got a lot of Neopets players who hate crypto and want to know what we’re about.
The second part dealing with creating an Internet Identity is now live on our website. The keyboard hack seems a bit shoe horned but I thought it was too important to leave out.
