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Mighty Bear Games gave out free non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for its upcoming Mighty Action Heroes Web3 game. And it found a way to roll out the red carpet for fans who were enthusiastic about joining a fledgling blockchain gaming community.
Simon Davis, CEO of Singapore-based Mighty Bear Games, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the company wanted to come up with a way to build the right community with the right supporters through its Red Carpet meta program. The company’s upcoming Mighty Action Heroes is a real-time multiplayer third-person battle royale going into early access on December 16 to December 18.
Rather than auction off its NFTs to the highest bidder, Mighty Bear Games gave its MightyNet Genesis Pass NFTs to players for free.
To create the community from scratch, Mighty Bear looked on the blockchain itself to find people who had invested in other blockchain game NFTs that were similar to Mighty Bear’s whimsical battle royale title. And it could easily see from the blockchain — the immutable ledger technology — how long those players had hung on to their tokens.
It didn’t want to find players who would receive free tokens and then immediately flip them to other players, selling the tokens for a profit, Davis said.
So the company started creating its own tokens for Mighty Action Heroes. And it curated a list of people that it planned to invite to mint their own free tokens. These players were necessarily blockchain savvy, as you have to be that to mint NFTs. So the company invited those people and gave them priority access to minting.
While many Western gamers have expressed hostility toward NFTs, Asian gamers are welcoming the new tokens and business models, much like what happened with free-to-play games decades ago. Davis said the company has a lot of fans in places like Hong Kong, Japan, Africa and other territories outside the West.
“I think that’s really cool. Web3 is very big, especially in the developing world. And yet pretty much everyone I’m seeing is just making games targeted at Western gamers,” Davis said. “And it’s like they’re missing the biggest opportunity and they’re not really listening or observing who their community really is. And so we make games for our community, and we see that we have fans in in India or Hong Kong or Japan and then we go out and we we build content that we know will resonate with them because we want to show our appreciation for them and their culture as well.”
Getting back to the minting, the key to a successful token for a blockchain game is to get people to hold it. If everyone is a speculator and they sell off their tokens quickly, it inevitably results in a crash in the price of the NFTs and everyone running for the door.
To discourage speculators, Mighty Bear put the minting price at about $15 worth of Eth, (0.01337 ETH), the cryptocurrency associated with Ethereum. Davis said the company didn’t want to price the minting for the tokens at hundreds of dollars; it is, after all, a game.
In the past, there were other minting strategies. Companies would ask fans to grind away on Twitter, follow and retweet, hang out in the Discord community and otherwise be active in order to get a slot on the allow list. Then other companies started asking for applications, explaining why they should be on the allow list.
“We took a different approach where we looked at the communities that we think really embody the values of the fan base we’re trying to build,” Davis said.
The team identified a few thousand wallets of people that had held onto collections for a long time. It invited those people and figured about 30% of them would accept the tokens. They had to remember to show up on the minting days at the end of November.
After those players minted their tokens, the company opened the floodgates for another set of collections. And within a matter of minutes, the collections were all minted. While the number of tokens were limited, Davis said it was important to have the right players playing at the outset.
Davis said he is proud of the game the team is building and that the company is proving that it is building a real game and it’s worth playing.
And it gave them incentives for holding on to the tokens for a long time.
To reiterate, Mighty Bear wants the right communities to be a part of the MightyNet community. Decentralization has no boundaries, and the right community or individual could appear anywhere on the web. With the Red Carpet meta, the company was able to bring these folk directly into the community.
For Mighty Bear, it’s really about finding people who are invested in and emotionally-connected to the studio’s project and who want to be a part of the wider MightyNet ecosystem in the long run and hold Mighty Bear tokens for a long time, Davis said. It also will reward those holders with in-game items that are valuable to those who play the game.
This is important at a time when it’s hard to hold onto tokens and cryptocurrencies. The market for both has crashed during 2022, and things like the bankruptcy of FTX and others aren’t helping to breed optimism. Giving players an incentive to hold and real utility for the NFTs beyond being a collectible.
As awareness of the Web3 space grows, it’s going to get harder to cut through the noise to find the right
communities who will not just support a specific project, but also want to stick around in the long term.
There is already so much competition in the space, even gaining awareness for a new project is tough.
“The other parts of doing things right then are to incentivize them to hold on to it,” Davis said. “You find the right type of person to hold on to it and then make them believe that it’s going to happen. And that if it does, that it’s going to be around for the long term. And the way to do that is to have a real game.”
The Red Carpet meta approach could help Mighty Bear build an ecosystem from the ground up the right way, or more specifically, the way they want to build: with people who share the same interests and values as Mighty Bear, and who want to contribute to the long term success of projects they’re invited to.
The company recently launched the MightyNet Genesis Pass through an invitation process. The invitees had to meet specific criteria, like being members of other communities like CryptoPunk, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, CloneX, Doodles, Space Doodles, Axie Infinity land holders and more.
In addition, Mighty Bear Games launched the Big Bear Syndicate PFP (profile picture) collection, which is more accessible and higher in supply. It will come in a two-part collection, the first of which was released last weekend. It’s directly tied to Mighty Bear’s upcoming multiplayer third-person Web3-native battle-royale, Mighty Action Heroes, so the studio wants Red Carpet gamers and as such, invited people from other web3 game communities to be a part of its community.
Ahead of the BBS mint last weekend, Mighty Bear rolled out the Red Carpet to gaming communities. Holders of any of the following game-related collections were invited to enter a raffle with dedicated
allowlist spots for their community. All the raffle links for allowlist spots were released on Twitter via the @PlayMightyHero account.
The Big Bear Syndicate is the MightyNet’s Gen 1 PFP collection. Being part of the Big Bear Syndicate by
holding a PFP (or several) will set players up for success in the game.
Members who own this collection will be guaranteed the earliest possible access in the world to Mighty Action Heroes, a top-in-class battle royale built for the blockchain, and have additional utility right out the door.
Benefits for holders include using the NFTs as a PFP or an in-game avatar, playing Mighty Action Heroes before anyone else in the first ever early-access weekend, and hibernating your bear characters to earn honey and exchange that for in-game rewards.
Holders will also get special holder-only skins for use in-game, be able to invite friends to the early access squad in Mighty Action Heroes, and get immediate access to a collection-specific holders-only section of the Mighty Action Heroes Discord.
During the minting, Davis was keeping an eye out for people who had any technical problems with wallets or accessing NFTs.
“I would say that one of the barriers to mass adoption is not just the like the crypto purchasing chore, which is big enough, but also just the fact that it feels scary,” he said. “And it’s not intuitive. And so I think as a developer, we do have a responsibility to help space move forward as well. So we’re looking at ways that we can, we can help people make these things easier. So I hope that we can share a bit more about the current model.”
Regulations don’t necessarily make it easier. For instance, Mighty Bear Games could mint the NFTs itself and then send an NFT directly into someone’s wallet. But if you send an NFT into the wallet of someone who is in a territory where it’s not allowed, you could be in breach of a country’s regulations. So people have to be responsible for claiming their own NFTs and minting the tokens themselves.
As far as the reaction to the minting process, Davis said, “The people are very happy with how the team communicated, and the actual minting process on the site was very smooth, very flawless. The price of the assets we released has been pretty stable. And it shows that people really believe in the ecosystem.”
Mighty Bear Games will keep on working on the game through early access and hopefully launch the title in the middle of next year. If people wait that long, they will be rewarded.
“People that lock their tokens shows how they are committed to the ecosystem. And so we reward them with endgame goodies. So we’re looking at basically rewarding people more generously, the longer they they hold their NFTs,” he said. “When the game launches, they’ll have a ton of in game items and heroes and cool stuff they can start playing with, some of which will only be available to people that lock.”
Davis isn’t necessarily expecting a certain price to be the floor. He knows that if you have only 3% to 4% of the total supply listed at any given time, that’s a healthy market.
“I think, more importantly, is that we just show people that there is value, and there is stuff coming to the game, and it’s worth hanging on to them,” he said.
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