EtherOrcs is a 100% onchain game, based around NFTs representing Orcs and other monsters pillaging, farming, and raiding to earn ingame rewards.

In this Vader Research interview, the Host Methi Gulticken, is joined by Poof, Co-Founder of EtherOrcs, to discuss how they built a loyal community, the game economy, the motivation of players, partnerships and its future roadmap.

Read our notes below to learn more.

EtherOrcs

• The idea started in an EtherOrc discord
• Was a free mint, all Orcs had the same rarity
• Could choose to acquire as many Orcs as possible or focus on leveling up your Orcs to compete for equipment.

Building a Core Loyal Community

• Started with a stealth mint to avoid gas wars, but moved to a whitelist based on discord’s activity and people felt good about the recognition of loyalty.
• Engagement wasn’t an issue with the hardcore alpha groups.
• 43% of the 750 original minters still hold their Orcs.
• Community success due to the selection of active community members to whitelist instead of just focusing on twitter influencers, exploiters, etc.
• New players have a 90% retention rate on a 3 month basis in the game.
• Devs were focused on just sharing game design processes in the early stages, which created feedback and a community experience.
• Community grew as they engaged in game theory and various strategies during the gameplay.

Game Economy

• Traditional DeFi based games were pretty linear (Staking, doing tasks for returns, etc)
• Did not want ZUG (in-game utility token) to be like WoW (World of Warcraft) gold, a currency that accrues in value.
• Wanted to gamify rarity which is under leveraged even today and then introduce complexity later.
• Gives players multiple decisions in their gaming process.
• Saw that GameFi was not sustainable in the long-term and the gamified mint was a way to extend the full ecosystem.
• Believes that people are not rational actors and will not necessarily make efficient decisions with in-game resources.

Segmentation of EtherOrc players

• Uses 9 Box grid (an assessment tool) to segment players and customized it into 12-16 boxes, eg investors, casual players, hardcore players, etc.
• Segmented players mainly based on activity and passive ownership.
• Average users had around 30+ Orcs, heavy users around 100+ while the light users had around 1 and were usually not playing or just trading.
• As more utilities were introduced, the medium to heavy users group grew.
• However, a lot of heavy users haven’t played but also have not sold their Orcs but the Orcs are still passively producing ZUG.
• This resulted in ZUG being locked up or price volatility as they sold accrued ZUG.
• Resulted in a new mechanic that requires checking in, in order to receive yield.

Motivation For Players

• 2 types of players, those that wanted yields and those that wanted to just have fun.
• Wanted to shift the focus to fun instead of just earning yields.
• Built a game engine that allowed quick and easy production of dungeon monsters with different abilities along with an interoperable crafting system.
• Social aspect and community building is important for engaging players.
• Some players just like collecting.

Partnerships

• The goal is to be at the cutting edge of Web3.
• Mobile games do collaboration and crossover events well.
• Partnership with CyberKongz (An NFT collection) was great, the average player did 20 runs in the dungeons while the top players did around 100 runs.
• Partnership should only be with teams they respect and have aligned goals.

Future Roadmap For EtherOrcs

• Focusing on expanding user base and making the game more accessible. 
• Very focused on infrastructure development.
• Will include a resource management land game, PvP along with interaction with a new game.

This content was originally posted on The Daily Bolt, which is a 100% free no-nonsense daily crypto newsletter by Revelo Intel.