Can guilds help Web3 gaming to move to a more sustainable space?
SURA GAMING participating in a Blockchain Game Alliance panel with MonkeyLeague and Play It Forward DAO
Why do guilds represent the best partnership for blockchain games in terms of player retention ?
Mariano Rubinstein — Co Founder of SURA GAMING: Gaming guilds have existed for a long time and have always been interpreted as communities, teams of people who play a game together. With the advent of #blockchain and NFT gaming, the new “Blockchain guilds” were branded as financiers for players who could not access in-game NFTs. For sure that was true for a while, but today the value of in-game NFTs are very low and almost anyone can afford them, so that is an old true.
We see ourselves as an organization capable to interact between supply (games) and demand (players). Part of our job is to find as many games as possible and make them available to our community, so each member can play the game they like and of course on the top of that they can earn. On the other hand, we also have the job to find players for each game, provide them with hassle free onboarding, continuous training and help them acquire specific skills to make them improve and grow every day within the game.
The Sura Gaming community is very active, and the motivation of team play is still intact, no matter what they earn, we have been able to keep our player base. In this bear market, the Guilds that create and maintain communities, that create loyalty among their members, provide them with education and work as a team, both in the most competitive sector of eSports and in the rest, are the ones who will be able to onboard players into games.
We are very proud to be able to create an environment of play and fun, a sense of belonging that goes far beyond profits. In fact, we have many cases of players who own their NFTs and anyway want to play for Sura, they want to be part of the team. That shows us that we are on the right path.
Partnerships between games and guilds should not be about financial transactions for governance tokens, partnerships must be about a Guild motivating and onboarding players into games, creating game communities online and IRL. That´s the role of guilds in player retention.
How guilds can level up the competitiveness of a blockchain game ?
Mariano Rubinstein — Co Founder of SURA GAMING. Guilds are precisely the ones that can create the necessary environment to increase competitiveness in blockchain gaming. Today we are seeing a kind of fusion between blockchain games and traditional eSports. Axie Infinity, for example, has strongly developed the eSports area by bringing Zyori at first and now a whole team of people for each region. But it is the Guild the one that can hire and pay full time professional players. At Sura Gaming we have more than 20 professional players to whom we provide training, coaching, sports psychologists, support in choosing assets on the Marketplace, among other things.
But there are always people who enter Sura as scholar and have competitive skills, but maybe they didn’t have the opportunity to show them. That is why our eSports team, now led by @iNJU_GG (former eSports Manager of 9Z), is constantly looking at the performance of all players, giving them the opportunity to participate in internal tournaments, competitions and in many cases become professional players.
Only in this way, with the support of a Guild and the sense of team play, we can level up and make blockchain games more competitive.
How Guilds can help the sustainability of the game economics ?
Mariano Rubinstein — Co Founder of SURA GAMING. This is a complex issue because it doesn’t depend on the Guilds, it depends on the game developer, tokenomics, burning mechanisms, breeding control, crypto market among many other variables. In any case, we do not evade our responsibilities in this regard. A very recent case worth highlighting is our partnership with #Minecraft for the MineCrypto project. In this case, the onboarding of players is agreed between Sura and MineCrypto so as not to generate any imbalance due to too many or too few players on a discretionary basis.
We have also made all our technology available to MineCrypto team, our internal management system in which they can monitor online a lot of metrics such as game time, what hours they play, total and average earnings, but the most important thing is that through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning we have created a series of algorithms that, for example, can predict player desertion.
It is a new type of partnership between game and guild in which we both care about balance and sustainability.
Guilds can be seen as an ecosystem of players trying to maximize their revenues by playing the game. The fun and the competitiveness part of the gameplay coming after. How do you fight these prejudices & biases ?
Mariano Rubinstein — Co Founder of SURA GAMING. To deny that we are all here at some point looking for profit is foolish. The players massively entered blockchain gaming following Axie Infinity and dragged by the pandemic, looking for a way of make a living. Of course after that the Guilds entered as a business, financing those who could not afford to buy their NFTs, in exchange for a percentage of their earnings. That´s a fact.
As time went by, the profits were less and less, the entry cost of the games were also reduced and the profits today are practically null or negative. We believe that this statement is from a previous period, where we talked about play-to-earn and there was only focus on profits coming from players. Today the entire ecosystem has mutated, we no longer talk about play-to-earn but rather we talk about play & earn, that is, we play a fun game that we like and we also generate profits.
The same happens with the competitive part, the prizes are important in any competition, but we see today in Sura players a hunger to win much more voracious than the hunger for the economic prize. Let’s agree that today the prizes in tokens are not enough to motivate, however we saw a few days ago at the end of season 21 of Axie Infinity our teams playing many hours in a row, players helping each other, we saw those who did not well crying and and those who achieved positions at the top of the ranking celebrating. That is not maximizing revenues, that is pure and simple eSport.
Social media helps a lot, you just need to see the interaction of professional players, scholars and members of a Guild, take a look at the IRL events -in which we also invited people from other Guilds- as was the last Axie Football Cup a few weeks ago.
The only way to fight prejudice is by doing, creating and being able to show it. I invite you to follow us on all our social media and see first-hand what I am talking about.
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