Why You Can’t Miss My Neighbor Alice
by Raydius Research
In the book, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore described the adoption process of a disruptive technology and argued that there is a chasm between the early adopters and early majority. There are different expectations by users in the different segments and that it is important for marketers to address the needs of different groups in order to make the transition.
For a very long time, the crypto space has been stuck with early adopters if not innovators. Even though Bitcoin is the most profitable asset class over the past ten years, the active addresses as of 2021 is only around 1 million. To put in scale, the market cap of Bitcoin (~1 trillion USD) is larger than that of Tencent (~777 billion USD), while for WeChat alone, Tencent has more than 1.2 billion users. There are multiple reasons why blockchain still hasn’t become a mainstream technology — usability is probably the most significant cause. For users, there are limited things that they can do on a blockchain other than making transfers before decentralised financial products (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) come about. And frankly speaking, Bitcoin is more suitable for store of value considering the confirmation time and cost of using it as a payment network.
At the moment, DeFi and NFT are the hottest topic in crypto space; despite being considered as a bubble (or “constructive bubble”), they represent the best chance that crypto has to cross the chasm and become mainstream. DeFi is set to disrupt the current FinTech industry by disinter mediating the current financial products and offer more attractive returns for users. NFTs, on the other hand, is set to disrupt the whole creator economy or the incentive system for the web. It is a crucial building block for the Web 3.0 development — giving back the profit to users and contributors rather than platform companies (like the FAAGs and BATs). Leveraging on NFT issuances and NFT marketplace, users could monetize their Tweets, essays, artwork — anything you can think of as you own. As long as you want to tokenize it, there might be a market for it.
In November 2020, we invested in the blockchain game, My Neighbor Alice (MNA) by Antler Interactive. It is a multiplayer builder game inspired by Nitendo’s Animal Crossing, but with all its game logic on the blockchain. In the game, players could design their avatars, build up houses and decorate their islands as well as social with friends and other non-player characters. The ambition that the team has for MNA is to create a second space for players — to relax and have fun in the game play, while also monetizing the time spent. By enabling users to create in-game assets and exchange in the in-game marketplace, players could export the assets from the game and generate revenue from their creations. Blockchain games are always challenged on the necessity of introducing “blockchain” element — we do think the use case is weak if the game is only using NFT to represent the in-game items or to change the in game currency to fungible tokens. In MNA, the game world and its economy system is designed with decentralization in mind at the very beginning. The blockchain technology is used as an incentive system to cultivate user behaviors and to achieve a better game experience for all the players. Compared to traditional games, it provides the infrastructure to build a game economy that is transparent, user-friendly as well as governed in a decentralized way. As a metaverse game, MNA offers diverse options for players of different tastes through different quest designs.
There are social activities that players could enjoy with friends and also individual quests with NPCs to allow players to explore the Alice world.
Being a veteran in gaming space, Antler Interactive has successfully launched several games in mobile, VR and AR; they have created among the best selling Therefore, MNA is never a game for crypto users only but for millions of gamers even though they don’t have an experience with crypto before. We believe this is the best approach to drive adoption for crypto — and also the opportunity for crypto to cross the chasm.
Moreover, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, our lives has been changed dramatically in terms of how we work and how we play. It accelerates the process of adapting towards an online reality with tools like Zoom, Gather etc. taking over most of our times. With social distancing rules, our world also see a surge of demand in online gaming. As a leading social games platform, Roblox is valued over 45 billion dollars in its recent IPO. Once a sci-fi idea, we believe that metaverse like Ready Player One, are not that distance a thing especially as the technology in VR, AR and blockchain are more mature for main stream adoption.
