The transition from a web2 to web3 game studio
Metaverse, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, defi and NFTs — all are buzzwords that were not mainstream 5 years ago, but today, the world is changing.
Web3 is growing fast and reorganising new economies around digital assets — new tokens, currencies, and forms of property (represented by NFTs) secured by cryptography instead of law. It is a big opportunity for gaming studios to give players a new and improved experience that couldn’t be provided before.
Since its founding, Mighty Bear Games has defined its mission as making games without compromise, and once we learned that Web3 will allow us to bring a better experience to players, we decided to go all-in.
How did Mighty Bear Games Adjust to the New World?
At the beginning of 2022, we shifted our focus to web3. Operating a gaming studio in a web3 environment requires several changes in mindset for a studio that has operated in the web2 space since its founding in 2016.
Here’s what we have learned so far.
Capital Raising
Pivoting to web3 requires some capital that would allow us to hire the right talent, invest in the existing talent, and support their transition into the web3 space.
As we announced in July, we closed a token round of more than $10M. We chose a token raise as we were looking to build something big for web3, and felt that fundraising in the form of a token raise would allow us to build a new ecosystem of web3 games.
Completing a token round means that we are committed to creating a new economy around our upcoming $MGHTY token. This economy is being designed to be driven by players, who will be able to leverage web3 for better transparency and ownership of assets within our ecosystem. That also means a bigger commitment to our community of players, investors, and NFT holders.
Prepare for uncertainty
We are facing a very tough time for the cryptocurrency market, and another important learning was how to keep our funds secure. We never used third-parties to store our treasury wholesale, although we did have to keep a decent amount in third-party exchanges for liquidity reasons. With the recent developments in the web3 space, we’ve since changed that and we improved our processes to support ‘not your keys, not your wallet’ approach. We are strong believers in the technology but are still learning and developing the best policies to support it.
New Hires
In order to adapt to web3, we had to hire the most experienced talent available. This wasn’t, and still isn’t an easy task, as web3 is relatively young, and identifying people with the right knowledge and attitude wasn’t easy at all. However Mighty Bear Games is a very diverse company and very open to people working remotely, and this allowed us to bring the relevant skills to the team.
One big challenge we faced with hiring experienced game devs was with how many projects there have been in the space that have abused the community’s trust. A lot of scams and opportunists taking advantage of that has made web3 look less legit than it really is. We spent a lot of time talking to people and explaining to them how we are different: we are not a web3 project with no utility, we are not here to make money and disappear, and so on and so forth.
The reality for Mighty Bear is that we are here because we know how to build games and we are excited about taking games to the next level. We are here because we believe that by leveraging web3 technologies, we can build better player experiences. Some potential hires were convinced, some were not. But we will continue to lead this open conversation with the industry in order to lead and drive this change.
Training and Knowledge development
Web3 was new for a major part of our team, so we had to develop our knowledge and develop it fast. We took some non-traditional actions to support this learning journey:
- We sent a big part of the team for web3 conferences. The feedback was overwhelming. After you’ve taken an active part in these conferences, feeling the vibe and exploring the innovation that is happening, you realise that something big is really coming.
- We allocated a dedicated budget for each team member to buy NFTs and participate in the existing communities. This step exposed all team members to the web3 community culture, and helped them understand the lingo, general group behavior, and the hype around that.
- We updated our “Zeitgeist” to include more web3 and crypto-related topics. Some topics that we covered were related to the Ethereum merge, FTX crash, Axie Infinity hack, and many more.
Community
There is no way to get into web3 without spending a lot of time thinking about the community. Our community was kicked off when we announced the close of our token raise, and it has grown from 0 to more than 13,000 followers, holders, investors and soon to be players. We’ve invested a lot in this community and have spent a lot of hours thinking about what benefits we can bring back to this community and how we engage with them.
This journey has just started but it feels like we have been in this space forever. What we’ve learned is that the best take is always to stay calm, take decisions and act fast. This is the only way to handle uncertainty in a fast-paced environment, and we hope to continue leading the charge for years to come.
Follow Mighty Bear Games and our project, Mighty Action Heroes, on Twitter to keep up with what’s going on! And don’t forget to drop me some claps if you enjoyed reading this.
Learn more about Mighty Action Heroes on our website, and read up about the MightyNet ecosystem here.
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