DEGEN Updates #1
We’d like to kick off a bi-weekly update to provide insight into our team’s progress and plans regarding development, product, marketing and hiring.
Our goal with these updates is to share more information about new features, games, marketing campaigns and collabs, growth initiatives, and other projects going on behind the scenes at Nifty League.
We hope this format and cadence helps provide our beloved community with the transparency they deserve.
Product Updates
- 5/2/22: Launched NFT rentals and a brand new web app — promising early reads on renter retention, organic growth via word of mouth, content coverage on Twitch (from Brazil in particular) and referrals via Rental Passes. We reached +1400 active rentals within 11 days of launch with zero paid marketing spend.
- 5/19/22: Created our new Twitter DEGEN Rentals Bot which tweets each time a DEGEN gets rented.
- 6/2/22: Published an infographic highlighting the tokenomics-related aspects of our product/game roadmap (Tweet).
- 6/2/22: Published a new Careers page, as we focus on growing our global remote team with our partners Braintrust and Blind.
- We are currently building out our data visualization and data engineering pipelines with plans to move away from manual queries to dashboards that can be easily leveraged by the team and investors. Eventually we’ll leverage this foundation for our experimentation system.
- Next week we will be focused on delivering Leaderboards, Gamer Profiles and the front-end flows to support the WEN Game. On deck for the following week is shipping a new feature giving DEGEN Owners and Sponsors the ability to set custom in-game earnings splits (aimed at increasing competition for recruits, and demand for DEGENs, especially those with Common backgrounds).
Game Development Updates
Nifty Smashers
- All gameplay stats are improving with the launch of Rentals — session duration, average # of game sessions per day, lobby fill-rate.
- 5/22/22: Introduced quitter penalties and other measures to ensure a better game experience for all players and timeouts for frequent quitters.
- 5/26/22: Launched the highly requested 1v1 game mode that also helps alleviate issues about the new lobby penalty searching for 1v1 matchups.
- Gym Tutorial map is currently being developed.
- A new game map (winner of the community competition) is currently being developed.
WEN Game
- The game style is single-player featuring a batter and a pitching machine. Each time the batter hits the ball, a fun slogan (that actually came from our Discord) is shown. Count on a few gameplay surprises, thanks to Spike and Snarfy!
- Target Metric: Engagement. Our goal for the Alpha is for 1) 75% of the qualified players who played the WEN Game for the first time to return to play it again at least 1x within 7 days, and for 2) 30% of our total active player base to play the WEN Game at least 1x every 7 days.
- The game is ready and playable, only blocked by authentication and integrating leaderboards.
- We plan to build in additional engagement and retention loops by rewarding top players, regular gampelay, streaks, social features that leverage User Generated Content (UGC); an organic growth loop that’s proven successful in our ecosystem already.
Nifty Tennis
- Gameplay is being developed in a shared effort from our extremely talented external gameplay programmer and our internal art team.
- The basic prototype is complete and deeper gameplay is in development and being prepared for the animation system and net-code integration.
- Nifty Tennis will be used as a demo for decentralizing game development within our ecosystem — one of our ultimate goals here at Nifty League!
Niftyverse
- We’ve made significant progress on the development of a truly unique world for our DEGENs.
- More details to be shared closer to the launch of Niftyverse.
PFP Collection Integrations
- We’ve finalized our strategy for launching our first integration — bringing another collectible NFT project into the Nifty League ecosystem!
- After shipping the WEN Game, our game dev team will pivot to finishing our integration with our first collectible partner.
- The goal with this collaboration is to leverage the co-branding and exposure that comes along with partnering with a top NFT brand while providing their holders with a high-quality gaming experience for added utility.
Marketing & Business Development
- Meeting with marketing consultants for a several month project focused on marketing strategy, community building within gaming, and more.
- Co-Hosting an event, TESHIMI Yacht Party at NFT NYC on June 23rd with the Forgotten Runes Wizard Cult and Worldwide Webb3 for DEGEN owners.
- 5/2/22 & Ongoing: Partnered with Clubs (Guilds) as launch partners for Rentals as part of our GTM strategy. We issued partnership contracts and shared Rental Passes — which helped get their recruits (scholars, players) into Smashers, playing, streaming, and creating content for our ecosystem.
- In total our Club partners have +8,000 active scholars. We issued +1,800 rental passes to our Club partners (with more to come in subsequent tranches) which helped increase conversion rate for players to get started in Smashers. Larger guilds with funds to invest chose to buy DEGENs outright for gameplay or rent DEGENs with rare backgrounds.
- Hosted a Twitter Space with OpenDAO on 5/26 (421 people tuned into the space, the tweet received 193 RTs and 268 likes).
- Successfully launched Satoshi’s First Test Tournament (64 slots, double-elimination, best of 3) and hit 66 CCV (Concurrent Viewers) on our Twitch channel (all-time high) during the Finals broadcast. Congratulations to our winner, SEIYA! Watch the full Finals match of SEIYA going head to head with PhenoMoneal on our Youtube or Twitch. Shout out to Gospodar for a job well done casting our Finals!
- We plan to host another tournament in ~2 weeks which will be in a regional format (restricting time zones for players will help speed up tournament play, stream casting, and prevent language barriers).
Team Updates & Hiring
Our team has been growing like crazy the past few weeks.
We’ve hired Dr. Ashley Godbold aka Doctor Sparkles (Twitter) as our Sr. Unity Engineer. She joins us with a deep background in Unity (she even teaches other devs Unity!), game development and design. She dabbles with NFTs and even helped her daughter mint a collection of adorable critters.
We also welcome our Sr. Game Programmer Will Patrick who has been driving the development of our animation system, and is an avid fan of games, animals (especially his late pup Moose) and editing paranormal fiction.
Finally we welcome Diego Garza to the Staff, with past experience in DeFi and as a FE dev at Spotify and Microsoft.
We have two new DEGENs joining the team next week — we look forward to introducing them to the community!
We are currently looking to fill the following roles and would greatly appreciate any recommendations you may have within your network:
We look forward to providing these updates regularly and to your continued support and feedback as we build through this bear!
Much love.
