The road ahead for gaming guilds
With all hands on deck, a bright web3 gaming future is possible.
Definition of a gaming guild
A gaming guild, also sometimes known as a Clan or Corporation, is a group of players converging to play a game or various games.
In World of Warcraft (WoW), guilds were formed so that people could collaborate in an organized manner to do 10, 25 or even 40-man raids against bosses. The top guilds commonly compete against each other for “World First Kills” after new content is released. WoW guilds often act like a large corporation where there would be various management roles given to senior members of the guilds. In WoW, selected guild members would be placed in charge of managing different assignments based on individual skill and preference. For example, Tank, DPS, and Healing assignments.
In Eve Online, guilds are run like real life corporations where you can recruit, rent offices and be involved in research, production or gathering of materials. Corporations work to accumulate resources to grow their fleets, to work together on fleet movement/battle strategies and to battle other corporation’s assets.
There are guilds that fulfill different shared purposes. For example, some guilds focus on:
Social or Fun elements where guild members gather just for the purpose of playing or chatting with friends online
For economical reasons or for profit where people work together in commerce within games.
Competitive esports
In the context of web3 gaming, guilds could fulfill all of the above and more. We will dive into what guilds can do going forward to live up to their full potential, but first, let us look at the current state of web3 gaming guilds in general.
Current perception of gaming guilds
In most discussions amongst people within the web3 gaming sector, the current perception of a gaming guild is a group of scholars that focus on Play-to-Earn (P2E) games and are mainly value extractive to games. This is due to the mechanism where scholars farm and dump tokens, ultimately promoting an unhealthy virtual economy within the games.
While the majority of the guilds have done this in the past, there are also several guilds that have been focusing on adding value to different stakeholders, including but not limited to guilds that have focused on building infrastructure to become a net value-add to the entire gaming ecosystem.
The road ahead for gaming guilds
Gaming guilds should ultimately aim to become a net value-add to a game’s ecosystem where the guild should also benefit players in the collective, very much like guilds in traditional games.
One of the main reasons players want to be part of a guild is to be part of a community, especially games that allow for social interactions. Accruing more rewards (in-game) and actually winning the game (because you cannot win as an individual) also motivates people to be part of a guild. Guilds should also consider working towards augmenting player’s experiences within the game ecosystem, which in turn helps add value to games by retaining players, guiding different players, and sequentially increasing player fulfillment.
Let’s explore how guilds can achieve this,
How can guilds become a net value-add to players?
Building different tools to augment player experiences (quality of life) within the ecosystem of each game:
1. Knowledge Hub
Naturally, guilds will have skilled players that can learn a game quickly and then share with others how to navigate the game. Community generated tutorials or video guides can complement a game’s tutorial to improve first time user experience (FTUE). Additionally, guilds can also provide an internal content creator hub that helps identify, train and support gaming content creators.
2. Game Media
Guilds can support live streamers, create streaming platforms and even work with partnered games to organize streamed tournaments. This adds entertainment value to players and potentially leads to user growth for games. As you watch a streamer playing a game that looks intriguing, you are likely to try out the game or try harder to achieve a better result in a game that you already play. Entertaining players can also have the ability to earn a living through streaming amongst other potential benefits.
3. Onramp Infrastructure and tools to web3
In a16z’s crypto outlook, it was mentioned that they believe gamefi will help bring adoption to defi. The onboarding process for a web3 gamer often includes creating a wallet like metamask or phantom. Inevitably as these players sell certain items or even sell their NFTs earned in different games, they can easily be directed to various DeFi platforms where funds are retained within the crypto ecosystem.
4. Player Data Management
Guilds can create products that help accumulate player achievements from various games they play in. These achievements are similar to that of a player’s “resume”, benefiting them in the long run. Guilds can also help group players and leverage their individual talents for different uses while also adding value to individual players by allowing them to be part of early beta tests and participate in creating game content among others.
5. Game Discovery
Eventually as the web3 gaming develops, there will be hundreds if not thousands of games available for players to choose from. Larger guilds could invent algorithms that match players with game genres that they may prefer (like FPS, MMORPG), similar to how Netflix recommends you movies to watch.
6. Strong community
With reference to Maslows’ hierarchy of needs, love and belonging is one of the key needs for any individual. A strong community helps give players a sense of belonging and to even become more fulfilled. In traditional games, it is known that some players just login to the game to chat with fellow guild members because they feel at “home” with their online friends. Community is one of, if not the most important pillars in human society let alone gaming guilds.
7. Commerce
In world of warcraft, successful guilds speed-run new players or less skilled players who want to purchase good in-game items (gear) for a fee, basically the player will pay the guild to get “carried”. The fees collected from the players will be either shared amongst the other members in the raid or will be kept in guild treasury to buy resources and/or consumables (like health potions) for future raids.
How can guilds become a net value-add to partnered games?
1. Help onboard gamers from web2 -> web3
While web3 games are still in their infancy, guilds can find ways to help onboard web2 gamers to web3. For example, guilds that are involved in games like Sipher may consider how to attract FPS/Top Down FPS players from web2 to give Sipher a try, with the purpose of eventually retaining them. This might start by sharing the ethos of web3, from ownership to composability of NFTs, etc.
2. Game design
Professional gamers are often highly skilled because they are able to “break the game”. This skill can help with game design, providing insights into how a professional gamer would think, what the gamer would do, ultimately reverse engineering the game.
3. Game beta testing
Beta testing is an important process in game development with the purpose of helping find bugs, provide feedback on game mechanics and suggestions to improve the game balance. Often, professional gamers are the best people to help with beta testing because of their skills and intuition for playing games. Guilds that have a good player database can select their best FPS players to beta test a web3 FPS game, where the players themselves can also be rewarded by either the guild or partner game.
4. Help bootstrap the initial community of a game
Potentially reduce Go-to-market (GTM) cost for partnered games through initially bootstrapping the guild’s community of players. Since games need to spend money on user acquisition, why not incentivise the right community from the get go – actual gamers from guild’s community.
5. Increase player retention within the game
A guild can facilitate player retention for games by
Organizing events for players
Organizing tournaments for skilled players
Providing players a close knit community which leads to social immersion.
Ultimately, the more activities for players, the more fulfillment a player has, the higher the chance of player retention.
6. Esports Team Management
As the web3 gaming sector matures, selected games will have game modes that have team competitions. Axie Infinity had 3v3 tournaments, Crypto Raiders will have a tournament with a prize money of $1million. While only the top 0.01% of players within a game will be skilled enough for e-sports, guilds having a large player base, naturally, are in the best position to select players and start e-sport teams focused on these games.
7. Fan management
When web3 gaming advances to a stage where there are large followings for pro-gamers and streamers, guilds can manage their own player fanbase, much like how football clubs manage their fans. Guilds can sell merchandise, NFT tickets, etc, which generates revenue streams. While this stage may be still far away, growing a community and preparing for this stage starts now.
From Net-Value Extractive to Net-Value Adding
Instead of looking at scholar profit/loss statements, guilds may look at totally different metrics (KPI) in the future. Some of these KPIs may include looking at new recruits for a game, monitoring players Day 1/7/30 retention rates to help partner games, number of hours played by players, and player performance metrics.
Take for example Valorant, there is a 3rd party platform that provides an overview of how your performance during the game - tracks your stats, k/d ratio, win %, headshot % (image 1) and other data. This feature adds value to players and may also promote user retention (stickiness) as players may want to continue improving their stats. Guilds with a good technical team can consider venturing into creating such products.
Image 1: Shot analysis by blitz.gg
There are also several other ways to be a net-value adding guild to players/partner games as highlighted in the sections above.
Concluding Thoughts
Gaming projects provide the supply side (games) while gaming guilds can help provide the demand side (community of players). The type of game mechanics or incentives created by web3 gaming projects does play a huge role in influencing a gaming guild’s behavior. When there is ample supply of game incentives like those in many P2E games, naturally gaming guilds gravitate towards being value extracting, while if there are less incentives, it would be assumed that gaming guilds would be more of a value-add.
For the future of the web3 gaming space, it may be mutually beneficial for both stakeholders to have both gaming projects and gaming guilds have a more collaborative relationship with one another to align incentives, provide mutual feedback and help evolve the web3 gaming sector to its highest potential.
With all hands on deck, a bright web3 gaming future is possible. Armed with the right team, strategy and sufficient resources, gaming guilds have the potential to add value throughout the entire life cycle of a game. When the lego blocks are finally set in place, we can envision a future where some gaming guilds can potentially fit the criteria of “Fat Application Thesis” within the gaming sector.
The end state would look more like a gaming platform, where majority of the value within the gaming sector could be accrued to the platform.