[Dive #168] Dookey Dash - BAYC's Content Multiplier
PLUS: 🎙 I'm on another podcast!
I’m back from traveling last week and hope you enjoyed the great guest pieces from Web3 Academy and Jonathan Goodwin.
Where was I?
I was in Hawaii thanks to a ridiculously good flight deal. I could share with you pictures of beautiful sunsets, black sand beaches, or the tasty food I ate, but instead here’s a picture of me attempting the ‘old man thumbs up’ meme:
Anyway, let’s get to it.
Dookey Dash - BAYC's Content Multiplier
The Dookey Dash game has taken the space by storm since its launch last week. As a hypercasual game exclusively available to holders of the Sewer Pass NFT, one would think the content would be niche and the footprint would be small.
However, this is Yuga Labs, the web3 native consumer brand that sits at the top of the food chain when it comes to NFTs and making a splash.
What I find interesting here is not necessarily the game itself, the APE token sink mechanics (smart and great for collecting data for future token sink implementations), and not even the future phases of the activation (yet).
What interests me is that one piece of content (the Dookey Dash game) has led to a proliferation of Dookey Dash content in a way I did not expect. I’m not sure if the team expected it either, but wouldn’t be surprised if this was intricately planned.
Big caveat here is that this ‘one piece of content’ was not a tweet or video. It’s a game which is much richer. However, it’s clear to me that this investment has paid off with more in the coming weeks and months.
So what kind of content has come from Dookey Dash?
Players sharing their score and rank
As a natural human tendency, we like to showcase our skills. Being at the top of the leaderboard not only leads to bragging rights and more engagement, it also leads to a more valuable outcome when entering the next phase of the mint.
This is a skill-based mint, so players are rewarded for their efforts. All players get something, but only a select number of players get the best things.
Tips and Tricks
There were plenty of threads like the below providing tips for players to increase their score. The added motivation of higher scores leading to future benefits results in healthy engagement around this type of content.
Gameplay
You can break this down into 1) content of the gameplay itself and 2) content about others playing the game.
Theories about what’s next
Typical with any diehard community, there have been multiple threads speculating on what’s next after the Dookey Dash game concludes. No one outside the Yuga team knows for sure, but there are just enough Easter eggs to provide a rough idea of the metagame. Echoing AltApe’s theory, my hunch is that Dookey Dash is one minigame that is a part of a larger game.
One helpful comparison for this would be Mario Party.
Mario Party is a board game that consists of minigames after each round of turns is completed.
With Dookey Dash and the broader Trial of Jimmy the Monkey activation, the sequence of events is different.
What will be interesting to see is when the metagame is revealed. It could be in the next phase, it could be further down the line. Even more interesting could be how this activation might eventually become interoperable with Yuga’s metaverse, Otherside.
I digress, let’s get back to Dookey Dash content!
General commentary about the game
If you don’t have a high score, compelling theories about what’s next, or even a Sewer Pass, that’s ok. You could still participate in the conversation, as there have been plenty to go around on that front.
Other
On top of all that, there has been content that I wouldn’t put in the above categories, showcasing the creativity and diverse skillsets of the space.
From white hat hacking attempts:
To a potential Dookey Dash anthem(?!):
To creating tools for the BAYC ecosystem:
Putting it all together
I’m sure I missed a category or two and note that this analysis is focused on Twitter. However, we can see that there is a robust one-to-many proliferation of content happening.
The ability for a piece of content (announcement, game, activation, etc.) to proliferate and take many forms is underrated and the team will be winning the War on Attention for a while.
Other 💩 Thoughts
Though I focused on the content aspect of the Dookey Dash minigame, there are themes crossing my mind:
The content proliferation is not limited to Twitter
In the framework above, I focused on content categories instead of channels. When you add a channel layer on top of each category, the one-to-many framework gets even richer (and more confusing).
On the written front, note the first article that pops up. Instead of an overview of the game, it’s focused on the ‘tips/tricks’ category. Don’t forget about every web3 focused newsletter likely mentioned Dookey Dash as well, including mine (but focusing on a different aspect 😉).
Though the numbers aren’t high, we also see Dookey Dash Twitch streams pop up too.
Last and definitely not least, if anyone has been in Discord, there is chatter everywhere about the game and how Sewer Pass prices have skyrocketed since the claim period opened up, with the cheapest entry point sitting at ~$4,100 as of this writing.
Is this replicable?
I think so, but there are several factors that limit the ceiling when comparing to what Dookey Dash has done:
What is the ‘source’ piece of content?
How established is the community and what are their tendencies with proliferating a source piece of content?
What channels does the source piece of content complement with?
Analytics and metrics
When looking at the Dookey Dash leaderboard, the number of Dashes (times the game has been played) stuck out to me like a sore thumb.
3,339,300 plays. There are so many plays that Yuga rounds to the nearest 100 plays, sheesh!
Why is this significant?
There are 22,995 Sewer Passes that have been minted so far. That means each Sewer Pass has played an average of 145 times.
That number is likely much higher because I’m assuming every pass has played at least once. I would be curious to know how many plays there are per active pass.
Taking it one step further, I’d want to know how many plays per wallet (some wallets hold multiple passes), which would be a proxy for how many plays per person.
The screenshot above was taken 2 hours ago. How many dashes are there now?
49,100 incremental plays happened over the past two hours. Keep in mind, there are 2 weeks left before the game concludes and we aren’t even a week in.
From an analytics perspective, Yuga would be able to gather valuable datapoints:
Time elapsed per game
Plays per wallet (average, median, top quartile, etc.)
Play volume by time of day, day of week
Total/average/median/etc. play volume by Sewer Pass tier (there are 4 with varying score bonuses)
Which players used APE token sink and how many times. Which players used the token sink and when
Spikes in scores by pass and wallet (suggesting a change in gameplay strategy, or someone else playing the game on the player’s behalf)
Which Sewer Pass holders accumulated more passes and which sold, which holders played then sold, which holders sold without playing
If the wallets can be tied to a known social media profile through ENS addresses, analyzing their social behavior tied with their gameplay activity
The insights could expand their lead in the ecosystem as they build out the rest of their roadmap.
What’s helpful here is that there are existing comps for these numbers.
Pretty sure Yuga’s new CEO, Daniel Alegre (previously Activision Blizzard’s COO) has some contacts that can help the team understand how healthy these metrics are compared to other hypercasual games like Flappy Bird, Temple Run, and Subway Surfers.
Additionally, Yuga already has first-party datapoints from the Apes vs. Mutants mobile game from almost exactly a year ago. The key difference here is that everyone could play the mobile game while Dookey Dash is token-gated.
Depending on how these numbers stack up, there may be a new gold standard for what gaming engagement could look like, courtesy of web3 mechanics.
I’m on another podcast
If you’re tired of reading, I had a great conversation with Bo Smol yesterday.
We talk about a variety of topics, and more specifically the Announcement Experience framework and Community Performance Marketing.
I even share a personal anecdote that shaped the way I think about things today 😉
See you Thursday!