[Short #163] The Beacon's Settlement Launch Retrospective

PLUS: 🦍 Apefest is doing its own thing

It’s been raining a bunch in Northern California. As my luck would have it, I’ve been without power since yesterday afternoon and my neighborhood is the slowest to get back online. Good times.

Thoughts and prayers go out to the food in my fridge.

The Beacon’s Settlement Launch Retrospective

I’m not the biggest gamer (my hand-eye coordination is terrible), but I do keep tabs on the web3 gaming as it is one of several spaces that has the potential to bring blockchain tech to the masses.

One game that I was recently introduced to and played is The Beacon, a Free to Play Role Playing Game..

As an uneducated gamer, I would describe The Beacon as Animal Crossing with Minecraft-like graphics and a daily dungeon where your characters have to fight enemies to escape. As development continues, there’ll be additional quest features, pets, and game loops.

Here’s my home, I’m a minimalist.

Note the collaborative items they have. I have special Cool Cats and Smol Brains statues and there are more depending on what NFTs you hold. This may hint at a larger interoperable game they’ll be building 🤔

In this prototype build, there are 3 main activities you could partake in:

1. Design your home

2. Answer the daily quiz in the tavern. You get a prize if you answer correctly.

3. Complete the daily dungeon. You get a prize if you complete it.

The Tavern

Simple, but fun and playable.

So why is The Beacon interesting to me? It’s not just that the game is decently fun for what it is. It’s that the team has been transparent in sharing the stats around their settlement launch, which lasted ~3 weeks.

The recap includes a variety of stats and along with an explanation of how they define their metrics. None of those ‘We have 10 million signups users!’ BS.

TLDR:

• F2P (free to play) players: 18,436

• Paid players: 24,934

• Free to paid conversion rate: 10.4%

• Most paid players played almost every day

The Beacon defined players as unique wallets. Makes sense as you have to connect your wallet in order to play the game.

43k+ unique wallets (after filtering out 100k bot accounts) is…a lot.

At the conclusion of the Settlement launch, 45,169 Founding Characters were minted at $40 a pop and 4,096 eggs (companions for the characters) were minted at ~$80 a pop. That’s a total of $2.1M in primary sales.

For anyone in gaming and web3 gaming, these numbers are pretty impressive. The big question here is can this momentum be sustained? How many of those users are in it for the game itself, and how many are here for the potential financial upside (eg: Axie Infinity)?

If you’re curious about other updates from the team, check them out here.

ApeFest does their own thing

As we all know, we live in an attention economy and web3 is an attention economy with ADHD.

Projects and brands are expected to produce viral announcement after viral announcement. The best ones empower their community to sustain the momentum as they build behind the scenes.

Even though Yuga and BAYC dominate any news cycle, they’re beginning to create a cycle of their own.

JBond @jbondwagon

ApeFest has just decoupled from @NFT_NYC

Smart move by Yuga for multiple reasons:

Captive audience: No need for ApeFest attendees to worry about the 20 other events they might miss out on. There’s only one event and its with your best jpeg friends in the world.

Gary Vee has done this with VeeCon and Gutter Cats have done this with GutterCon. I’ve also written about how the cute meta can create their own festival.

Yuga calls the shots: Yuga and BAYC was on NFT NYC’s schedule. Instead, Yuga sets their own agenda and has the flexibility of date, location, and side events to their main event.

Leveraging NFT NYC: Based on the Discord screenshot above, the announcement seems to suggest that ApeFest will be after NFT NYC in April. It’s unclear if Yuga will do anything at NFT NYC, but if they do they could channel the energy and excitement of that conference into ApeFest 2023.

Expansion for Yuga + BAYC: I doubt ApeFest will just be a multi-day music festival. The brand and network effects are too strong.

My prediction is that ApeFest will become an event under ApeCon. ApeCon will be a multi-track activation that will involve business, media, and entertainment (ApeFest).

Expansion for a community-led NFT Conference: Whether its this year or in the future, it’s possible that ApeFest/ApeCon could be much larger than Yuga itself. NFT specific conferences have been largely haphazard (see my review of NFT NYC 2022). One of the ways to improve them would be to have NFT communities themselves organize and lead them. They know their communities the best.

Huge undertaking, but if someone could pull it off, it’d be Yuga.

Where would it be? Could be a world tour, could be the same location every year. My hunch is Miami.

Why? The Bored Ape story is set in the swamps of Florida, and Yuga as a company is based out of Miami.

It feels like they’re laying down their roots there in other ways as well…

GordonGoner.eth (Wylie Aronow) @GordonGoner

Psyched to share that @yugalabs has pledged $1M to support education & arts initiatives in Miami, starting with a $300k donation to @VentureMiami. The talent and creativity in this city is unrivaled - time to give the next gen their shot

yuga.comINVESTING IN THE FUTURE OF OUR HOMETOWN, MIAMIWe love Miami. From 24-hour Cuban cafes on 8th street, to fishing under the Rickenbacker Causeway, sandwich spots hidden in coin laundries, and the city’s incredible music and nightlife scene.

Source

See you next week!